Tues, Wed, Thurs, December 8, 9, and 10

Michael and I are here without our facilitator. She has gone back to Kiev. We figured out how to take the bus to town and are sitting in McDonald's because they have WiFi here. We have been here so long, I'm surprised they haven't kicked us out.

Here is a recap of the last few days.

Tuesday. What did we do? The days all run together now. Each day we go to visit Rita at 3:00 p.m. until about 4:45, when she goes to a "homework" class. It's hard to think of things to do with her because of the language barrier, and we're not allowed to leave the premises the way we did at Dnipro. We play games with her and her friends. She has darling friends: Marina, Lena, Iryna, Tania, and Natasha are probably her best friends. The weather here is so cold. No snow, but I wear three layers on my legs, and it's still cold. Well, we are almost in Russia. In the movies, Russia always seems so cold. Now I know why. Our new apartment is fine. It's a long ways from everything, but the taxi isn't too expensive. No washer or dryer (of course). We hand wash a few things every day and hang them all over the place. It takes two or three days for jeans to dry. Our facilitator is still trying to consolidate our two adoptions into one case. We personally don't think it will work. My ankle gets a little better every day. We actually took a pretty lengthy walk today. We haven't seen the sun since November 25th. Every day is gray and cold. Black at 4:00 p.m. We had to decide on Sasha's name today. His first name is Oleksandr, so we Americanized it into Alex. We gave him three choices for a middle name. He chose Jeffrey. So his name is: Alex Jeffrey Lawrence. Cute, huh? He's so cute on the phone. He has a sort of husky, deep voice. It makes me laugh.

Wednesday. We got really good news and really bad news today. Inna literally begged the judge in Rivne (where Alex is) to schedule a court date, which is set for December 18, a week from Friday. The judge agreed to waive our ten-day waiting period after court!!!!! It will be a huge rush to do the birth certificate, passport, etc., before everything closes on the 22nd. We are not trying to get our hopes too high. A million things can go wrong. Now for the bad news. The ornery judge here in Sumy was so irritated by another case, that he almost refused to speak to Inna. She asked him, "Why are you taking it out on me? I have nothing to do with that case?" He finally said, "Come back next Wednesday, and we'll talk about a future court date." So it appears to us there is no possible way to get to court before everything closes down. The ultimate disaster is that in January, we'll be back home with Alex. There is no way we can leave him there in SLC to come back to Sumy for Rita's court and 10-day wait etc. unless we can do a one-parent adoption. Also we cannot afford to have Michael miss any more work. By the time we get home, his practice will have been closed for thirty days. We simply don't know what's going to happen. Please keep us in your prayers. We are stuck here until next Wednesday before anything more can happen.