Eve of SDA Appointment!

It’s been another long day, but one full of rest and catching up on our jet lag. We slept in till about 11 A.M. which was very refreshing! Before I get into today, I will share a little bit more about our first day on Tuesday. It really was a crazy and tiring day. When we finally got into the airport in Kiev and made it through customs, we were looking around everywhere for a sign with our name on it, but did not find it. So we just stood around for a few minutes and waited for our driver to come. Many taxi drivers came up and asked us if we needed a ride, which we replied “Nyet, spaseeba” (No, thank you). Finally though, we found three men standing together with a sign held that said “Howwell”. Yes two, W’s. So we walked up to the men, and said we were the Howell’s and the three strangers quickly took our luggage and motioned us to follow. At this point we were just praying that we were with the right people and hoped for the best! As we got to a parking lot, we noticed two other American families standing there as well, and it turned out that they were two family’s adopting as well, but kids with special needs from Reece’s Rainbow. What’ s funny is that the families were two blogs that we actually follow, so we knew who they were adopting!

We finally got to our apartment, at least we thought, and we just sat there in the car with this guy, who only spoke Russian, for like 30 minutes and he didn’t say a word to us, but kept getting on his cell phone yelling at someone. Finally, a man literately appeared out of no where and walked up to the car, and they both got our luggage out and walked us into our apartment. Then we were stuck in there with another guy who knew no English, and we had no way of communicating with anyone. Eventually he got someone on the phone who told us that a man named Niko would stop by and show us where to exchange money and show us the grocery store. Which he did, and we realized the grocery store was right under our apartment. So in that regard, very convenient! After having dinner we quickly went to bed and slept off all remaining jet lag.

On to today – (Wednesday). After waking up, we made some breakfast and cleaned our dishes, and that was really the extent of most of the afternoon. We stayed in our apartment for most of the day because we were waiting a call from our case worker. After hearing nothing for most of the day, we decided to give her a call, as we were trying to leave for dinner at TGI Friday’s. We finally got a hold of her about a half hour before we needed to leave to make the walk. As for the call itself, it went well and we are comfortable going into our appointment tomorrow morning. The appointment is tomorrow morning at 11, and Serge our facilitator will be picking us about 9 A.M. Please pray everything goes smoothly as this can be the hardest part of any adoption journey. But, we have good feelings going in.

So, once the call was over, we were late for going to TGI Friday’s, but decided to walk there anyway. After about a two mile walk in the beautiful city of Kiev, we couldn’t seem to find the restaurant, but found a McDonalds instead! It was funny, because everything was in Ukrainian besides “Big Macs” and “McFlurrys”. When we got to the counter we just held up two fingers and said “Big Mac” and we ended up with two combos with fries and a Coke. We decided not to drink the Coke though, because it might be using tap water, which is a no no for us Americans. The last thing we want is to be sick during our appointment tomorrow.

Anyway, it’s getting late again, but here are some more pictures for your enjoyment. We do not know if we will be in this apartment after tomorrow, so our internet scenario could change. Hopefully wherever we end  up has internet again. It’s been very helpful! We should have a lot more news in the next day.