Moving ahead...

Well, today was definitely different than the previous days...it was very busy.  We left at 8:15am to meet with our translator and our lawyer who is acting as our local facilitator for the adoption.  Both very beautiful, very smart women...very professional.  Our lawyer submitted our referral paperwork to the local SDA office for approval to meet with K.  We left & went to the orphanage, where K was already filling out her letter stating that she wants to be adopted by us.  Also, the orphanage had to submit some paperwork regarding K.  We all left the orphanage & went back to the SDA office where they read K's letter of approval & other pertinent information, asked her if she wrote it willingly : ) and then off to eat lunch after that.

We ate at a local cafe, which was very interesting. It had maybe 8 pre-made side-item-type meals, and since we didn't know what any of it was, we ordered a pizza.  We thought we were ordering a 1/2 pepperoni, 1/2 cheese & what we got was 1 full cheese pizza & another full cheese pizza with peppers on it (banana peppers, at that).  But, it was pretty good!

Then, back to the orphanage for about 30 minutes, and we got a call saying we needed to come to the notary's office to complete our paperwork for the SDA application for adoption, passport requests, and power of attorney forms.  It was pretty cool to see all of our names & address in Russian.  Of course, our translator had to read every document, word for word, before we could sign & then had to translate our signatures back to Russian.

Then, back to the orphanage.  We spent the rest of the evening there, laughing & talking with the children. The director and one of the caretakers, along with 2 of the children went to the grocery store & when they returned, it was amazing to watch everyone file out of the house & help bring in all the bags.  We even pitched in as well.  Of course, they make dinner for us every night.  Tonight was a tomato & cucumber salad with a tomato-y based rice dish with some kind of beef (I didn't eat that part, but the rice was ok once you salted it down).  We also had "fried" bread.  They slice a loaf of something like french bread, dip it in eggs, and fry it in oil (similar to french toast, but without the cinnamon).  It was good, but tasted more like an omelet than bread.

So now we are back at the apartment, without K tonight.  She must go to the doctor tomorrow for some medical exams, which will save us an extra day at the end of our process & we will be appearing before a panel of 7-10 people who work for the local government.  We will make our appeal for approval to adopt K, they will ask us many questions regarding why we want to adopt & then, if they agree to allow us to adopt her, they will give our lawyer all the paperwork which will be sent to Kiev tomorrow afternoon to be filed with the SDA office there.  They will then review everything & sign off & send it back to Kg. for our court hearing, which should be next Tuesday (keep your fingers crossed & pray for us).

We'll let you all know how it goes tomorrow.