Day 18 – Wednesday, 30 December First class train pillows resemble bricks a bit less than their second-class counterparts. I will say, also, that the bathrooms in the first-class car are infinitely better than the second-class. Almost worth the increased price! As a result of the improved environment, my sleep was slightly less bad than the first train trip. Mark is starting to get a bit of a cold, so he barely slept at all. I was up before the sun, and as the light came up, I packed our things away. Mark needed to sign some documents at the […]

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Day 19 – Thursday, 31 December It doesn’t matter where in the world you are, 3:20 AM is really freaking early. Our driver arrived at 3:45 and helped pile all our luggage into the van…and we were off to the airport for a 6:45 flight. It took just under an hour to get to the airport. Our translator met us there, and told us that our flight had been delayed by an hour, so we had plenty of time to check in. He and our driver piled all our luggage on a cart, found our check-in area, and bid us […]

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Day 20 – Friday, 1 January, 2010 Back home, back to regular life and home responsibilities, along with getting ready for Trip #2…I will be taking a brief hiatus from the blog this week while I try to enjoy the last couple days of Christmas Break, and scramble to do eight loads of laundry and repack. I fly out next Sunday morning, returning to Ukraine to take custody of Lena on Tuesday the 12th. We’ll have about 3 hard days of solid travel, and then end up back in Kiev on Wednesday. We are due to fly into New York […]

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Day “I don’t know” through Day “I’ve lost count” – Sunday, 10 January, 2010 through Saturday 16 January, 2010 If I’m being honest, I have to say that the second trip was rough. Seriously hard. After a week of “regular life” which included blowing nearly half of my working hours fighting with payroll over the paycheck they failed to issue while I was on leave, I boarded a 7:30 AM flight to JFK, with a 10-hour layover and then a 10-hour direct flight to Kyiv on Aerosvit Ukrainian Airlines. I truly believe I was the only person on that airplane […]

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I have heard a rule of thumb that you should expect about a month per year of age for a young person to adjust to a new adoptive family/country. Four years old = four months of adjustment. Fourteen years old = a year and a little more. We are almost to the 14-month mark, and I’d say our experience is pretty close to the average. So much has happened, and we have all changed in the past year…it’s hard to even know where to start. Since Lena and I returned in the middle of January, we only took about a […]

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