Blogging in Pictures Again

Another one with a kitten at Julia's.


Alina supposedly naps in the afternoon (all the kids at the orphanage do) but she has yet to nap for me. Instead we do something relaxing after we eat lunch in our apartment. Yesterday we made these butterflies to hang above the bed. There are about twice as many there now. I am not sure what the cape is about. Maybe she was trying to look like a butterfly herself?

This is from last weekend at the arcade. She loves the trampoline. We both love this picture because of her crazy hair!

This is the kind of playground equipment that the U.S. no longer allows since it is "dangerous." It is really fun!

Alina with her Caesar salad and juice last night at Silver. Every night she asks, "Cafe? Andree?" Andree is her favorite server there and he speaks English very well. By the way Kev, Andree says hello. :)



Can you tell how close these two are? They posed this one and a bunch of other really cute ones themselves.


They have lots of fun together.



It is hard to show personality in pictures but these two give you an idea of what a silly little guy he is.

And this one is for dad. I think you have 4 soccer lovers, Kev! Do you like the way his tongue is out, Jordan style?

Okay, more tomorrow.
Love from Lugansk,
Krista

Happy Anniversary to Us!

Happy Anniversary, Kev! Today is our 8th anniversary and although we are as far away as we have ever been it is for a great reason. :)I love you sweet boy!

This is my first attempt at posting pictures from the internet cafe so hopefully I do this right! I won't have time to post and add pictures so it is just pictures today since it has been a while.


Alina loves all cats. All animals really. There are tons of strays around here. She carries a ziplock of kibble in her purse to feed any of them she finds while we are out walking. This kitten lives in Julia's apartment stairwell.


Alina at the internet cafe yesterday. She was watching a Hannah Montana music video. She loves music and so I put her on YouTube while I type on the computer next to her. Today she is watching videos of kitties.


Alina picked this outfit for out for herself at the Children's World store in the mall. She and mama don't really have the same taste but this one was pretty cute so I let her get it. New tennis shoes too! She was so proud of herself in her own clothes. At the orphanage most everything is shared and probably never new.





The little ones watch some of the movies we have made. When they see "Poppy" they start waving and smiling and talking to him. How cute is that?


Igor did a song and dance show yesterday afternoon for Ilona and I. He was using my brush the whole time. I wonder what he was singing.



Sweet Alina. The blanket she is sleeping with was mine when I was little. She loves it. She talks in her sleep and of course it is in Russian.


Alina and her friend Vladik. They were taken out to a cafe to celebrate his birthday last week and asked me to take a picture before they left. Alina is one of the oldest at the orphanage and most of her friends are boys.


Ilona pretends to sleep after she makes a bed with blocks.


Alina on the swings. She loves to walk around and find swings. Most every apartment building has a playground and there are apartment buildings everywhere. "Cochilla" means swings.


Watching "Enchanted" last weekend. She loves it!

Good Job, Kev

Nice work, Kev. You shopped and blogged? I am impressed!

Alina has been keeping me too busy to post. She is still staying with me and will be the whole time. There is a teacher at the detsky dom (children's home) that is really negative toward her leaving because she is has taken care of her for years. She doesn't like that she is leaving. She puts negative thoughts into Alina's head about the whole thing and so Julia and the director have helped to keep her away from Alina for the most part. The director says that the teacher has the old soviet mindset and that it is "dangerous" to have Alina there with her visiting. So Julia helps by watching her while I visit the other kids and the rest of the time she is with me.

Things have been going well for the most part but I know Alina is really frustrated with the language barrier. We get by though. We have been doing lots of fun things together and she like to help cook and clean up. We did our laundry in the bath tub today and hung it to dry. I told her about the washing machine and dryer at home and she could not believe it about a machine that dries clothes. Washers are common here, but not dryers. She also just found out about ice when we were at Silver the other neight (thank God for a few English speakers there) and she loves it. She can't believe we have an ice machine at our house!

Day of Shopping

I hope Krista doesn't read this part since she is still in Ukraine, but it was sooooo nice to sleep in my own bed last night. There is nothing better in the world than sleeping in your own bed after being away for so long. It was also nice to shower in my own shower. The showers over there are bath tub/showers, but they don't have shower curtains. I spend half the time in the shower just trying to not make huge puddles on the bathroom floor.

Anyway, the court went pretty well, although there was the usual curveball that happened. Everything always seems to get done, but never as smoothly as we think. Just as the court was supposed to start, the judge was reading through all of the paperwork. He found that there was a typo in the spelling of the father's last name in some paperwork that had been done a few years in the past. The judge would not hear the case until this was fixed, as he could be giving away the rights of the children to the wrong father, which is understandable. It was just a little crazy that this was happening right when we were supposed to start and we thought all of the paperwork was in good order. To make a long story shorter, a judge in the city where the kids are from said that it was a typo and he would redo the paperwork, so we sent a taxi driver 45 minutes away to pick it up and bring it back to the court. So court was supposed to start at 3, didn't start until 5:45. Luckily, this wasn't in the US, as they probably would have adjourned court right at 5. It didn't get over until about 7:20, which was only an hour before my flight was supposed to leave, which was at least a 1.5 hour taxi ride away. I was able to rebook my flights home without too much additional cost. So I made it home a day late, which is really no big deal. As long as the judge approved everything, I didn't really care when I got home.

I went shopping today, and I will be returning to Target to return the stuff I bought that was the wrong stuff. Krista given me a list of the kind of socks and underwear that she wanted me to buy, but of course I forgot it. I tried to remember, and got most of it right, but not all of it. My mom and I then went to the outlets, we particularly did our damage at Gap and Old Navy. We bought a couple outfits for each kid, it was more fun than I thought it would be. I even got my own Gap card, Krista has one but is still in Ukraine, so I got 15% off. I did really good at getting the boys stuff, but kind of struggled to find girls clothes that I thought the kids and Krista would like. We will see.

I made it home

Hey everyone. this is Kevin making my first post on the blog. I usually just help Krista do everything. I made it home safe, although I have now been up for 24 hours straight and it is getting dark here now, so I am really tired. I will post more tomorrow with an update on everything in a little bit more detail than Krista just gave. (Krista thinks that if I was running the blog, each post of ours would be about 2 or 3 sentences long, so I am going to prove her wrong tomorrow.)

Everything is Fine

I haveAlina with me at an internet cafe right now so no time to type. Just wanted everyone to know that court went fine, but long. We waited several hours before and Kevin missed his flight home so he left today instead. I get to have Alina for the weekend. I will type more later. Barring any appeals in the next 10 days, the kids will be ours! :) So many answered prayers yesterday. I will write a more detailed post back at the apartment and post it next time I come. (If I can get Alina to stop watching Enchanted for 5 minutes!)

More on Court

(Written Tuesday Night)

We had our preliminary hearing today. It lasted maybe 15 minutes and seemed pretty pointless to be honest. It was Kostya, Kevin, and I, the judge, a couple women who were doing clerical type work for the hearing, a few orphanage workers, some social workers, and I think three (maybe four?) women were the public jury. I don’t think they actually do anything but witness the proceedings. We were both a little nervous because we didn’t know what to expect. Julia was there. I kept looking at her and because the bench where we were sitting was facing them from a 90 degree angle. She looked like she was about to crack up laughing at any moment. It made me want to laugh so I had to look away. The judge asked us a few questions each. (Who we were, when and where we were born, where we lived, and what we did.) We were out of there pretty quickly. He hardly went over anything. When we got outside Kostya and Julia told us that the judge was a Russian speaker but had to conduct court in Ukrainian (I think this is a new requirement) and he could barely speak it. That is why Julia and the other ladies were on the verge of cracking up the whole time and it may also be why court was so short. Fine with us. We go back on Thursday for the hearing.

Russian is the predominant first language here in Ukraine, though some regions do speak Ukrainian. The government is trying to switch things over to have Ukrainian be more widely used and I think this may have been one of the steps they are taking. Kostya told us that many movies here in Ukraine are American movies dubbed in Russian. Now the government has decided that movies will be dubbed in Ukrainian.

Kevin will be headed home after court for the 10 day wait. He will return when it is over to finish up the paperwork (birth certificates and passports, etc.) and we will all travel home together. It is nice that he is going home so that he can take care of preparing some things that we will need for when we all arrive. We left thinking we would probably come home with two kids, ages 6 and under. We bought next to nothing beforehand and did little preparation around the house. Now we are making a list of things that he should bring back with him, things he wants to get done while he is there, things to buy, etc. Since the kids are old enough to have an opinion (and they have plenty ;) ) we want them to have a say in how their bedrooms look and that sort of thing. We don’t want to overwhelm them with too much too soon though. They alternate between a few outfits here and share pretty much everything. Too many choices may be difficult for them. We also love the way they play with pretty much anything and their wonderful imaginations. So we want toys that are geared toward creative play and educational games and toys since they will be starting school shortly after coming home. (Well the three oldest will.)

To anyone who is adopting in the future I would highly recommend making a picture book. I know I have said this before but we made ours through Shutterfly and it came out beautifully! Everyone loves it. The kids love to look at it. Alina likes to keep it at night. Ilona looks at each page and chatters away about what is on each page. We have a picture of our neighborhood pool in there and Alina asked me today if she could swim there. ☺ It is far better than any toy we have played with. The adults love it too.

The Ukrainian people have all kinds of nicknames that they use with each other. There are common endings added to names as terms of endearment. For instance Alina is often called Aleen, Alinka, or Alla. Kostya and Olya call their son Nikita Nikitushka. Ilona is often called Ilonka. The kids call us Mama and Papa (like Mom and Dad in English). Today Ilona started calling me “Momitchka” and Kevin “Poppy.” How sweet is that? They call all of their caregivers “Mama” or Mama Tatiana, Mama Olga, etc. So this was her way of making a special name for us.

After court on Thursday I will write about the names that we have chosen for each of our children. We will give them the option of being called their given name (which is going to be part of their name anyway) or the name that we chose for them. I am not sure which Alina will pick. Alina is such a beautiful name and it suits her. I am not sure I will want to call her anything else. We have been using a combination of the names to talk to them and the kids are responding to both now. We didn’t know how they would react, but they seem to like them (or at least think that they are another nickname). Well today I realized that we had left the sticky note with the names on it from the day that we picked them (after we had only just met the children) and the Russian translations in the front cover of the picture book. (We stuck it there so it wouldn’t get creased in my purse and we could save it for the scrapbook.) Well Alina (who has had the book in her possession for the last week) opened the book and read me all the names. I guess she figured that one out herself. Here we were wondering how she would receive that news and she has probably known it for a week. ☺

There are very few men around the orphanage. The director of the orphanage where the three kids are is a man, there is a groundskeeper who is male, and there have been a few men doing some construction work around the orphanage lately. But for the most part the children who live at the Lugansk Orphanage #1 see and interact with mostly females. The other day we were out on the playground and a little boy came up to Kevin and started rubbing the hair on his legs and looked really surprised. I guess the men at the orphanage are probably always in pants. It was so funny. Our kids get so upset when other kids try to talk to us or touch us. I guess they want the other kids to know that we are their mama and papa and they don’t want to share.

Michelle, that is interesting about the other couple that had two court sessions. We are in Lugansk with the three kids but their home town is Stakhanov which is (I think) the same city you are referring to. Edward's orphanage is in Shastia(?) about 40 minutes away from here. I can't remember if I had mentioned this in any other posts.

Stephanie, I hope to see you two and meet Leira once we are home. I hope that everything else goes very smoothly and that Leira does well on the plane. :) We are praying for you guys. It was so nice to meet you. I actually have a couple outfits that I should give you for her. We brought a few things with us and I have a really cute dress that will be a little two small for our little girl.


Kevin taught Ilona to give fives and a pound. (That's "respect" for the B's!)


Berry pickin'.



Ilona teaches her "Poppy" some Ukrainian dances moves. Both girls love to sing and dance.


No hands!


Comparing snacks. Don't you just love the 80's denim pullover that Igor has on? It had a Hello Kitty looking cat on the front. Can't wait to get him home and dress him like a boy. :)

Hanging out with Alina on Monday night. This garden area is in front of a hotel we like to walk to at night. We always play hide and seek here. (That is how Alina has learned to count in English.)