Plane tickets: check!

So we purchased our airplane tickets last Thursday. $650 USD each for one way to Frankfurt from Atlanta, through Detroit. Not bad! :)

We arrive in Frankfurt at 6 am, and since our wonderful hosts, Diter and Carola, live a few hours away from Frankfurt airport, we will busy ourselves with coffee, food, baggage and shopping until they can comfortably come to the airport to pick us up.

They have also offered to put us up in the best hotel in Loxstedt! Hotel Boerger! Their home :) It will be so wonderful to get to know them, as Cinderella considers them family, and to leanr more about Cinderella herself. See where she spent so many summers, where she played and had happy memories.

Then of course it will be fun to drive with them through Germany, through Poland, and into Ukraine. Maybe we can stop for lunch in Berlin as it is near our path, and get a photo of what remains of the Berlin wall! Or maybe, more importantly, get a glimpse of baby polar bear Knut! I hear he is a big celebrity in Germany.

It sounds morbid, but I am also interested in seeing one of the remaining concenrtration camps from the Holocaust. My family fled Germany and Poland, just before Hitler took power, so this was something pivotal in their lifes and I think I should have photos and the experience to document that for my children to explain why we left Europe for America. We are not Jewish, but I have Jewish friends who are Holocaust survivors - they recently went back to Poland and visited the camp where they were held and their old village where they lived. I have always been interested in Hitler since most of his most crazy ideas and plans were the effect of end stage untreated syphillis. As an infectious disease guru, this has always fascinated me how diseases have shaped history.

Dieter also checked with Cinderella's orphanage to ensure that she would NOT be sent for summer hosting (to Germany, to their home as usual) so that she would be in Ukraine when we came to adopt her. It appears, based on his discussion with the director of that orphanage, that the SDA notified her about our approved dossier and appointment, so she had already removed Cinderella's name from the list - I wonder if this means that Cinderella has been told about our appointment date? I wonder if they contacted Belle's orphanage?

This also bodes well in the fact that obviousely the SDA has approved our dossier for the specific kids we requested. We were worried about that - that Belle was not registered, even though her sister is (LOOOOONG story why they are in seperate orphanages and not registered together)

In SnowWhite news, I wrote the little princess a letter letting her know what is going on with the summer hosting, and that Mama and Papa are working on fixing it, but that we may not be able to. She is a smart cookie - way smarter than most institutionalized kids her age. Very mature, very well spoken, very witty. Usually I "baby talk" a bit to her and simplify things in my letters - I didn't this time. I explained about how, as Americans, Papa and I have little to no power or rights in Ukraine, and that it is her director who makes this decision about summer hosting. Its sad that the director would betray our verbal contract like this - in Ukraine, verbal agreements are as binding as written ones here in the US. Everything in Ukraine is done with verbal contracts- which is probably why they are so disorganized when it comes to paperwork and nothing is documented! LOL

At this point the director is arguing that the Italien hosting group "put in their paperwork first" so it is first come first served....but I am saying that we had a verbal agreement from September 2006 that pre-dates any Italien paperwork. That and I have mentioned the hosting and been working on the hosting paperwork since December in letters to the director and SnowWhite.

Need prayers!

Though we are overjoyed and grateful for our dossier being approved and our appointment date, we have just gotten some very bad news.

Our youngest - SnowWhite - was supposed to be coming to the US for hosting this summer. This was arranged back in September during our visit to Ukraine, with the director and deputy director themselves. There were witnesses to this conversation. I have mentioned it in letters to them since that time.

Now suddenly SnowWhite is on a list to go to Italy for summer hosting! WT?????

Please pray that we can convince the regional inspector and the orphanage that SnowWhite needs to come to the US for summer and not Italy. She will be devastated if she doesn't get to come here. She has done nothing but write about how much she is looking forward to seeing us again and staying at our home. She will think we let her down - we made the promise to bring her here, and we have been doing everything we thought we needed to to make that possible.

Again, all prayer warriors out there, please pray for this to be fixed!

We have our Appointment date!!!

I announced this on FRUA and I sent out an email to my friends and family the day we got this info, but with all the chaos of moving and shock of actually getting THE date, I havent been able to post it here.

So, our dossier was apparently approved and we were given a June 27th appointment date to be (hopefully) given a referral to our two oldest girls, Cinderella and Belle.

Right now our plan is to fly out on June 21, arrive in Germany June 22 and meet up with Carola and Dieter, hang out with them in Loxstedt Germany for a day or two, and then drive with them through Germany, Poland, and finally Ukraine. It is a two day drive, so I hope we will arrive in Kyiv June 26 so we have time to settle in to our apartment there. June 27th sometime (we don't know the exact time of the appointment, only the date) we will go to the SDA (Ukraine's State Department of Adoptions) near St. Andrew's cathedral and hopefully have a quick meeting with their english-speaking psychologist.

I re-sent our requests for info on all three girls (two seperate requests, one for the sisters, one for SnowWhite), and hopefully now that we are officially registered we will get a response. I really hope there is no problem with Belle's paperwork. The sisters are in two different orphanages, and Cinderella's "file" says she has no siblings when in fact she has two, so I hope that Belle is registered and "off" the database for us to adopt.

We are praying and hoping for a quick trip - Kirovograd is known for its speed, and since we are going for "known older kids", I hope it balances out the fact that they are in two orphanages. Our facilitator seems confident that we can get a single court hearing instead of two seperate ones (the two orphanages are technically in different "districts" within the region). So best case scenario, we are there for 3 weeks and we get back to US soil by mid July. Otherwise, the average stay is between 4-5 weeks, depending on holidays and weekends, for Ukraine adoptions as a whole. Kirovograd has an average of 3 weeks processing time. I looked at the list of official Ukrainian and American holidays for June and July, and there does not appear to be anything major to interfere with our timeline - we hope to be in court on July 4th, but since that is an American holiday it won't impact the Ukrainian judge's schedule. :)

Please pray for our safe journeys, the journeys of our fellow adoptive parents (and their kids-to-be) who will be there near the same time as us, and for my friend "G" who is trying to adopt one of Cinderella's best friends.

Hopefully this week....

Hopefully we will hear something this week about our adoption appointment - I just heard that a family who submitted their dossier one week before ours (in reality it was one American day before ours since they were only accepting American dossiers once a week) got an appointment for the last week in June. Hopefully ours will be near around there too. This family traveled to Ukraine to pick up their appointment letter IN PERSON! Wow, that's quite a trip for a piece of paper! But they got information, which is gold to the adoption community. They said that all the dossiers already submitted have been reviewed and registered and appointment dates set - they just needed the new director to sign them all, which he/she was doing as fast as possible. So it sounds like ours has been processed and a date assigned, but they just can't tell us yet. Maybe today -Tuesdays are the official days that facilitators can come and receive the appointment letters for their clients.

We still need to raise a bit of money - airfares for that time of year are alot higher than in spring, fall, or winter. Hopefully between my work adoption shower, savings, and the refunded deposit from the apartment we are moving out of, we can do it.

We are still packing for the move - thankfully a friend volunteered to help us this weekend, so that Andrew has some help lifting things (I can do it, but not as well as a guy could). We have a truck lined up for Sunday, and I'm going to transfer the utilities today. We will try to get 90% of everything moved this weekend - we don't have to be "out" of the current apartment until the end of the month, so we have sometime to move the little things and clean the place, so we aren't stressing too bad. I'm trying to sell some of our excess furniture on craigslist, but so far there is lots of interest, but no one commiting to buy.

Here are photos of our new place:

No go on the townhouse, and no news about appointment

So, day 20 has come and gone, and no news about our dossier. A friend who submitted their dossier around the same time got unofficial news that they will have a June 18th appointment, so that is promising. Our dossier is probably processed and an appointment scheduled, the SDA just can't make any official statements until a new director is appointed and can sign off on the approvals and appointments. The new director is supposed to be appointed on Monday, April 16th, so we hope to hear something shortly after that.

So it looks like we will be in Ukraine from late June through July. Airfares are extremely high that time of year, so that will impact our budget.

The townhouses both fell through, so we are going with plan B and moving into Post Braircliff apartments. We reserved a nice 2 bedroom 2 bathroom apartment there, all hard wood floors, on the first floor (so no stairs to lift furniture up!) and it is right next to the walking gate to Whole Foods grocery market. Its a nice gated community, nicely landscaped, and has two pools that the girls will enjoy. We will take photos of the empty apartment and community this weekend and post them here. We are scheduled to move in next weekend, so we are stressed! I hate packing and moving, but we have become experts at it! I don't think we've stayed in one home for more than 2 years at a time! The Post apartment is also temporary until the Emory Faculty housing is completed in early 2009. Then we will stay put for a long time hopefully :)

This weekend we are going to MedShare to help finish up the Neurology sorting and boxing, and to pick up some boxes of supplies for Dr. Andrey and Life2Orphans. Then Sunday we have the Ukrainian adoptive family picnic at Stone Mountain park. It will be nice to see the Nolte kids again (and their parents too!) and meet the family who recently got home with adorable toddler twins. So, I will have tons of photos to post of that too.

The hosting plans for SnowWhite are coming along, as is her registration for adoption. She and her friends will be in the US from June 25 through August 25. Since we will be in Ukraine for half that time, she will stay with her friends' host families in New York until we get back. I know Susan, Peggy, and Joanne will take good care of my baby and they will reinforce that we are her Mama and Papa and we love her. At least she will be out of that filthy orphanage for the summer. When we get back, we will arrange to pick her up for the remainder of the summer. Good grief, I will have 3 Ukie girls running around for a month! LOL

Ukraine in political turmoil....again

So, Ukraine's president dissolved their parliment last night. This is something many people have been waiting for him to do for many months now, and he finally did it. Of course the Russian-allied parliment refuses to follow this new order and have barricaded themselves in the parliment building. Here is the story on my favorite Kyiv news blog(written by an American expat living in Kyiv):
http://blog.kievukraine.info/

So, no one knows how or even if this will affect adoptions in any way. During the Orange Revolution back in 2004, adoptions were only disrupted for a month. Most people think there will no affect on adoptions this time though - the only thing slowing dossiers and appointments down right now is the new director of the SDA. Since the most recent one was removed from office, along with her deputies, no new director has officially been appointed (or they have, but havent taken office maybe?). The interim director is a man - a first time for the department of adoptions! Maybe that is good - men tend to be less emotional than women, so maybe things will be more predictable and less variable from day to day? Men also tend to delegate more - also something that may be good since the director's time is limited and under the women-directors, all adoptive parents met with the director, thus creating a bottleneck.

This political turmoil also means that the proposed bill to ban singles from adopting from Ukraine is also on hold since it never made it to its second reading and vote. When the new parliment is seated sometime in June(?), they may well have a completely different view of singles adopting. Lets all pray that they do! I have many single friends who want to adopt kids from Ukraine, and all of them would make great parents.