Day 5 – Thursday, 17 December I have discovered the key to our formerly successful anti-jetlag strategy: prescription drugs. In the past, we have employed tactics that included deliberately not sleeping on the plane and pushing hard through the first day to ensure exhaustion and a solid first night’s sleep. In the past, our first morning in the new place, we have awoken pretty much refreshed and ready to rock. In the past, we’ve supplemented sleep for the first few nights with Ambien. Please note the correlation. This time, we didn’t get around to calling the doctor for a new […]

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Day 4 – Wednesday, 16 December Still a bit jet-lagged, the screaming alarm at 6:30 AM came as a shock to both of us. We realized that we actually had to get up when the backup alarm on our phone shrieked at us from the other room. We launched into gear, quickly making breakfast and dressing up for our appointment with the Ukrainian State Department of Adoption (SDA). Unlike many countries, Ukraine does not allow pre-identification of children, so obtaining a referral to “meet” Lena and begin the adoption process is the first step in every adoption in Ukraine. While […]

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Day 3 – Tuesday, 15 December The sun shone brightly through the window as we awoke and glanced at a clock…11:30! Clearly, Tuesday dawned very late for us. But knowing that we had no obligations for the day, we tried to relax and use the time to recover from the trip. Neither of us had slept too well; we had forgotten that we are soft Americans used to our soft beds and squishy pillows…Add to that the stress of losing our luggage, Mark’s phone and iPod, and not being able to plug in any of our other electronics and charge […]

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Day 1 and 2 – Sunday, 13 December and Monday, 14 December All packed and out the door on time…we arrived at the Fort Wayne airport in time to discover that our originating flight was delayed, but only by 30 minutes. With 4 hours in Detroit, we had plenty of slack. No worries! We checked our luggage, hung out with Masha for a few extra minutes, then cleared security and the trip was on…. Our first flight carried us to Detroit in a whopping 26 minutes…by far the shortest leg of our journey. The next flight, Detroit to Amsterdam, was […]

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No, unfortunately, we were not able to bring her for the adoption trip. We will be gone for at least three weeks, and she can’t miss school. Also, more importantly, this trip is not a vacation. The business and the logistics of the trip make it very difficult to accommodate extra people. Most of the cars are barely large enough to carry Mark and I, our driver, our facilitator, and Lena. Bringing even one extra person (and that person’s luggage) would push us to need two cars and also would require special lodgings as well…most of the apartments are not […]

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