We are making progress with the adoption, however slowly, and hope to be home in the next week. Unfortunately, we will not be able to bring Kristina home with us, as there is a new Ukrainian passport procedure, effective August 21, 2007, that will add a minimum of two weeks to the adoption process (and this doesn't include the 10 day waiting period after our court date next week). We have met several families who been in the Ukraine for 7-9 weeks! And while we are heartbroken at the prospect of having to leave her here for several additional weeks, we are also missing Jack and Noah, very much, and family, friends, and work, etc. Our plan is to return to the States after our court date (hopefully next week). I will return to the Ukraine to bring Kristina home in about a month after the adoption is finalized and Kristina has her Ukrainian passport. is and obtain a Ukrainian passport.

In the meantime, we are getting to know Kristina each day and enjoying every minute together. She continues to delight us with her great energy, curiosity, and delight in small pleasures (e.g., picking unripe plums from a tree and eating the sour fruit with aplomb, brushing the hair of her favorite doll, and climbing on the orphanage play structures).

We've established an afternoon routine, involving a snack, games and exploration around the orphanage camp grounds. Perhaps it is easy to imagine that snack time is the highlight for Mama and Papa, who take great pleasure in watching Kristina eat eggs, fruit, cheese, nuts, and drink fruit juices, although not all at once mind you. It turns out that Kristina is an exacting eater, and one who doesn't wish to miss a crumb. One day she ate a whole apple, seeds, core and all. And while she has learned many words of English, "wipe" was among her first!

We were surprised at how much she seems to enjoy dolls, having picked one up as an afterthought at the toy store last week. In fact, the doll was so poorly made that her hair is in the style of a mohawk, i.e., a shock of hair down the midline of her head, with one row of bangs and another around each ear, and no hair in between. Kristina quickly found the brush and comb, and proceeded to remove whole shocks of the blond mohawk, while attempting repeatedly to put a rubberband in the doll's hair to make a ponytail. At the end of our visit, Doug exhibited a great deal of slight of hand getting the doll back into his backpack, in order to avoid to having it disappear into the orphanage's communal abyss.

The next day when Kristina spotted the doll, she immediately wished to play with it and was happily doing so when her particular group of preschoolers joined us on the playground. To our great surprise, she suddenly struck out at a couple of the kids with the doll as they approached us. We weren't quite sure if she was protecting the doll or us from the kids, although we prefer the latter!

At any rate, we are utterly smitten, enjoying every minute, and cannot wait to bring Kristina home.

We traveled to the big kid's orphanage (ages 3-10) on Monday and waited for the OK to meet Kristina. We learned after the fact that the children have been at "camp" since June 10th, so we traveled about 20 minutes out of town to the orphanage camp to finally meet Kristina. Upon arriving we were greeted by a bunch of kids dressed in summer garb, wearing only swim trunks, hats and flip flops while awaiting lunch in the cafeteria.

We knew Kristina right away because she was the child with clothes on, having been quickly decked out by the orphanage staff for our first visit. Although shy at first, she warmed up to us quickly, treating us to sidelong glances and then bursting into smiles. Oddly enough we arrived in Odessa with only one children's book (Clifford Makes a Friend) and not a single toy, having accidentally left our bag of goodies on the airplane weeks before. We quickly improvised with a paper airplane and some digging in the sand. Kristina was quite taken with the airplane, which she and Doug flew a number of times to her great delight.

Throughout our visit, we were learning some of the details about Kristina from her caregivers. One thing we noticed right away is that she appeared small in comparison to the other kids. This is part of the legacy of her early childhood, having crawled out of her apartment and into the street at 18 months to seek respite from the neglect and poor nutrition of her birth home. (My first thought upon hearing this was, 'the girl who lived'.)

The orphanage psychologist had nothing but positive things to report about Kristina, in terms of her development, interactions with children and caregivers, appetite, etc. Meanwhile Kristina was playing happily, all the while appearing to listen to what the psychologist was saying about her.

We had to wait until Tuesday to talk with the orphanage doctor. In the meantime Yana, our facilitator/interpretor, assisted us in contacting a doctor who could conduct an independent health evaluation of Kristina. Dr. Yuri agreed to meet us at the orphanage the next day for a physical and cognitive evaluation. He used a number of games and activities to evaluate Kristina's cognitive skills and then discussed her physical health with the orphanage doctor and performed a physical exam.

Based on the Denver II and other indices, Kristina appears to be doing well in terms of her cognitive development with delays in speech, which is very common for children in orphanages. Otherwise her cognitive skills were generally very good, so this confirmed our initial impressions. Physically she is healthy, according to the doctors, but is very small for her age, no doubt the result of her early development. Based on her growth over the last 18 months, she appears to be catching up having grown 10 cm (4 inches) and gained 7 pounds.

We met with her again later that afternoon, played together and then went home to discuss our thoughts and impressions. Needless to say, this has been a difficult process. We are very taken with Kristina, and have decided to move forward with the adoption. One of our favorite orphanage staff walked with us today as we were leaving and prompted Kristina to wave goodbye to mama and papa!

One last vignette about Kristina: At the end of our play date yesterday afternoon she rejoined her group in the orphanage. As on Monday, she was dressed in a darling outfit for our visit, as opposed to the usual swimsuit, hat and flipflops. We watched her from the distance as she rejoined her group, at which time she realized that one of her buddies was wearing her hat. Immediately Kristina, the smallest child in her group, made it clear that she wanted her hat back. We left prior to the resolution of the skirmish, but peeked over the hedge a few minutes later to see how things had turned out, at which time Kristina was happily playing WITH her hat in its usual position, placed backwards upon her head.

This is our girl . . .

We met with the SDA today to discuss our plans for returning to the Ukraine in September. They were very accommodating, having indicated that the adoption agency will work with us on the timing of our return, given the long distance and travel time between the US and Ukraine. We learned that there ~20 families that have had first appointments, and who are also waiting for second appointments.

Then Valentina, the Psychologist, asked us if we had interesting dreams last night, because they had unexpectedly received a file for a "healthy", 3-1/2 year old girl. We were not expecting this at all, as the meeting was strictly to discuss our return to the Ukraine for a second appointment in September. We had even booked our return for Saturday, so this was the farthest thing from our minds. After spending a few minutes learning a bit more about Kristina and her history, we left the office and talked over this unexpected situation. Masha was very surprised that Kristina's dossier indicated no delays, and actually provided "healthy" as a diagnosis, which is unusual from what we can understand.

The long and short of it is that we have decided to travel to the Odessa region on Monday to meet Kristina. SOOO we are nervous and excited, now that our adoption story has taken an unexpected turn . . . More soon!

Judy and Doug

We have not made any progress since our last posting, so there is not much to report. It looks as though Doug and I will be returning to the US for a couple of weeks to wait for our second appointment with the SDA. Evidently, there was a period last summer for a couple of months when registration of children in orphanages was suspended. And since according to Ukrainian law, all children must be registered with the SDA for one year prior to becoming available for international adoption, there are currently very few healthy children ages 18 months to three years old in the registry. We understand that there are 10 families ahead of us who are also waiting for children. Our facilitator told us that one family from Canada who has been waiting in the Ukraine for six weeks, finally received a placement for a healthy child. It also appears that placements for families wishing to adopt boys are moving more quickly as there are more boys available in the Ukraine than girls.

We had hoped to have a much more positive news report after two weeks of waiting, but this is our situation as it stands now! We hope to have much better news in September.

Our transition to Kyiv has worked out very well. Our apartment is centrally located in the historic district so we can walk to most destinations. Masha, our Ukrainian host, has been very helpful in getting us acclimated to the city, as well.

We met with the federal adoption agency yesterday. Things did not go as well as we had hoped. We saw the dossiers for three children all girls under the age of four, but none of them met our criteria for adoption.

As it turns out, the adoption system in the Ukraine has changed a great deal in the last year and this appears to be having an effect on the number of available children. The Ukrainian government has instituted a foster care system, similar to the US in which Ukrainian orphans are given to families who are paid to take care of the kids. While this provides a handsome income for many foster care families, it also means that children who are in foster care are not available for adoption. These problems are new, the result of recent changes in the federal orphanage/foster care system, according to Masha.

We we are now waiting for a second appointment, which we hope will be scheduled this week. Evidently, the agency will not grant us an immediate appointment until more files of elligible children arrive from the orphanages. We are hopeful that a second meeting will result in a better outcome. More soon!