Winter is heaving-to. It has clearly decided that it’s not going anywhere, and in the meantime, it’s going to have a bit of fun with us. In typical Midwest fashion, we’ve experienced the battle between Canada and the Gulf of Mexico, throwing their separate weather patterns at us and laughing as they wreak havoc on our lives and plans. After a couple of 55-degree days a couple weeks ago, accompanied by flooding worthy of a live remote on Good Morning America, we are again looking at a blanket of fresh snow and sub-zero wind-chills. God has thumbed his nose at […]

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After a lengthy hiatus to attend to life, the Niles Blog has returned!! As many of you are aware, we have begun the process to adopt again! Over the next few weeks, I’ll fill in the gaps over the past year, and share where we are in the process and what we expect to happen over the next few months. But for those of you clamoring for an update…. The Cliffs Notes Version: While we were in Ukraine to adopt Masha in June 2007, we met her best friend, Lena. She was a very sweet and soft-hearted girl, always there […]

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No beating around the bush…We have finally been invited to travel to Ukraine for our second adoption!! As I mentioned in my last post, we were hoping to travel to Ukraine in late fall to begin the local process to adopt Lena. Well, ever the literalist, God has organized the timing so that we travel in the final week of fall—we leave on 13 December, just a week before the first day of Winter. As with Masha’s adoption, the first step of the process is a meeting on Wednesday, the 16th in Kyiv with the State Department of Adoptions (SDA). […]

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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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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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