Wednesday, 16 May Wednesday at 11:00 AM was our scheduled appointment with the SDA; the State Department of Adoption and Protective Rights of Children. This is the first official step in our adoption activities, and without their approval, we would be headed back home without Masha…so it’s a very important step. We got up early on Wednesday, made a cup of tea, checked email and uploaded the Tuesday blog entry. We showered and dressed for our SDA appointment (skirt and blouse for me, slacks and a shirt (no tie) for Mark. Our driver Sergei picked us up promptly at 9:30, […]

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Tuesday, 15 May Mark to Christine: “Hey, honey, what time is it?”Christine: “It’s 3:15”Pause…Mark to Christine “Hey, honey, what did I just ask you?”Christine: “You asked what time it was.”Mark: “Uh, what did you say?”Christine: “3:15.”Mark: “Oh, OK, Thanks.” We’re a little zoned out, but I think we’ve made the transition to Ukraine about as well as can be expected. we spent Tuesday in Kiev, getting a feel for the city. We went to bed around 9:30 on Monday, dead tired. We both woke up about midnight, and decided it was time to put the sleeping pills we brought to […]

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Monday, 14 May Sunday and Monday pretty much ran together….It’s Monday evening in Kiev as I draft this, and Mark and I are both running on about an hour and a half of sleep since yesterday morning. Around 11:00 on Sunday morning, the Maxwell clan stopped by to see us off, and Mark’s parents came about 11:15 to take us to the airport. After many pictures, the guys piled all the luggage into the car, and we were off! We arrived at the Fort Wayne airport a little more than an hour before our flight, checked our bags, and breezed […]

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WE HAVE TICKETS TO UKRAINE!!!!!!!!!!!!! We have booked our flights, and we even found rates for summer travel directly from Fort Wayne that were less than I paid for my last business trip to New Jersey! So…..we leave Fort Wayne on Sunday, 13 May (Mothers’ Day) at 1:23 in the afternoon. We have a 2 hour layover in Detroit, and then board a flight to Amsterdam. An overnight flight schedules us into Amsterdam just before 6:00 AM, and then after a very quick connection, we leave for Kiev at 7:10 AM. If all goes well, we should arrive in Kiev […]

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