After the court hearing tomorow at 4:00 pm, our ten business day wait begins on Friday to allow for any family member to contest our request. We think this is the process after the wait is completed: we will travel to the children's birthplace, Bachtmach (sp?), to pick up their birth certificates, return to Gorodnya to take possession of the kids, apply for tax id's (like social security numbers) and wait for them a few days, apply for passports and wait for them for up to ten days, and then head to Kyiv to finish up with the medical exam and application for the U.S. Visa in their Ukrainian passports. We have not seen the sun since we have been here - over 12 days. We long for some sunshine! I talked to Mom today and she said Denver will be around 90' tomorrow - we are so jealous! It was wonderful talking to her, although Duncan was in school and we couldn't hear his chipper little voice. He did ask Mom a few days ago if we would be home tomorrow. He has no sense of how long we are going to be gone! We have several pictures of him up in the room, but we miss him so much!
After the hearing today, we "ran" to Kyiv (3 hours down and 3 hours back) to pick up permission from the SDA for the court hearing to be held tomorrow and several other errands. There was a lovely older man with grey hair and grey handle-bar moustache, dressed in the twisted wool grey tall hat and overcoat, playing a stringed instrument in front of the SDA. I listened for a while and enjoyed his beautiful music. It was not a triangular balalaika, but oval shaped with a large number of strings. I will not be able to look this up until we get home, so if someone could look it up and write to us that would be great! John tends to hog the internet time as he has to do something as frivoulous as work! John now has me blogging on his offline computer, then copying everything on to the High School's Computer Lab's computer via a memory stick. (did I mention that John is a geek?) We have to do it this way as his computer does not have the special software required to interchange with the DSL Modem.
We visited a huge grocery store, inside a mall, on the outskirts of Kyiv (on the way back northeast to Chernihiv) called Mega Market. It was about the 1/2 the size of one of our grocery stores (huge for here) and also had clothing and some housewares. We picked up new toothbrushes for the "Baby House" - where Misha eats, sleeps, plays, and bathes - and toothpaste (the kids did not have any). We bought bath sponges for the kids, shampoo (again, no shampoo - only bar soap), laundry detergent (none in sight, we already picked up dishwashing liquid), coloring books, construction paper, M&Ms, and Pringles for Mari. I forgot to pick up carrots as a snack - in Gorodnya we have fruits, cookies, cereal, milk, chocolate mix (reminds me of ovaltine) to make hot chocolate with their microwave (stove/oven doesn't work in the Baby House and there is no fridge), and juice. The carrots, in our small town grocery stores (called magazeens or gastronomes), are huge softball-sized monsters that look very old and tough!
The kids love potato chips, but the "drill sergeant caregiver who also plays the piano and has the kids dance" (we have named them) balled us out last night for bringing two small packages for them. She said no more chips and cookies! Is life worth living without a few pieces of contraband every now and then over the next 15 days? Last night was the first night we met her. She wouldn't let us in at 4:00 (4:00-6:00 is our night visit time, but the kids don't wake from nap until 4:30 so she didn't want us in until 5:00, so we sat outside in the cold and made friends with the little white cat (not named, so we are going to give her one). She loved eating the bread that I brought from the hotel with our leftover butter smeared on it and afterward climbed up into John's lap! I told him he had made a friend, he probably more correctly noted that as it was 50' outside she was sitting on him for his heat! When Misha saw John today he cried "Poppi" in a really happy voice! He is smiling more and the Krebs family say he is a different child now that we are here and he has someone who cares for him and him alone. He has to be reminded to share the new toys that we have brought as he thinks they should only be for him (we told the caregiver about the scene in Finding Nemo where the seagulls are all fighting over the fish and saying "Mine, mine, mine"! They remind me of Misha and his pals! The thermometer inside read 14' C, around 56'-57' F, a degree colder than yesterday! The kids wear two shirts and a sweater, long underwear and pants. Some keep their hats on. We are asked to remove our shoes at the door, a common practice here, so my feet are frozen by the time we get back to the hotel!
We also picked up a few necessities for us at the store today - Barilla Pasta Sauce (apparently the Ukrainian pasta sauce tastes like canned Campbell's tomato soup) to have the Cafe downstairs heat and top pelmeni with (they are little meatballs covered in pasta shells). After eating pelmeni topped with butter, we decided this would be a huge improvement. We also picked up tea (Ahmad Brand - we bought some years ago in the UK and it is ithe same kind they brew for us downstairs). We have yet to find the great Ukrainian pastries/baked goods in this small town. If you love Italian, they have tons of pasta products on the shelves, but no decent spaghetti sauce, I would bring some tomato paste (we can't find) and some packets of dried spaghetti sauce mix. We were longing for pizza, but ran out of time today so we went to McDonald's instead in Kyiv.
Sidenote: McDonald's is the only business in Ukraine from the US, and it is not a franchise, rather a corporate owned stores. Have counted three in Kyiv.
Our Facilitator showed us a pizza place tonight when we returned. We walk right past it, but we had missed as it is closed during the day and doesn't say "pizza" anywhere on it. We don't go out at night (unless John has an internet slot and the driver takes him) as they are crazy drivers enough during the day! Maybe we will celebrate with pizza tomorrow night!
We have been watching BBC World News when we can. What a mess back home - $700B to shore up the mortgage banks - what a huge amount of debt to saddle our children with. Hopefully heads will roll! John spent part of last night scrolling through 1400 channels on our Satellite TV - he found 3-4 channels in English (BBC, Bloomberg, a kids channel, and a Christian music channel). We are going to go nuts when the Krebs family leaves in the next few days and we only have each other to talk to, watching the few DVDs we brought (the HBO miniseries on John Adams was excellent), and reading.
We hope everyone at home is happy and healthy!
1 comment:
Twyla and John, I too was scolded for bringing candy and pop to Kolya. Being the good little girl I am (Ha!) I brought it anyway and told Kolya to hide it in his pockets! Unfortunately, this was a hard habit to break once we got home. "What, no pop anymore?" Good luck not going insane during the 10day waiting period. Maybe a trip to another town for some site-seeing for a day or two? This ia a good tome to work on that Novel you have always wanted to write. You know the one that will make you rich and famous and you will never have to worry about working again and can adopt the entire orphanage next time you visit the Ukraine!! Hang in there!
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