Rainy Sunday

1. Ana's group surrounding one of their caregivers, Lydia Alexandrovna.

2. Ana's group heading back to the building after morning's recess.

3. Ana in the orphanage, eating perhaps the worst chips I have ever tasted. (They are "kholodets" and horseradish flavored -- kholodets being a dish consisting of meat parts in aspic).

[Phil]

Hi, everyone. It's just me tonight. Robin is up in the hotel room watching a DVD on the laptop. There's not much news to tell. I woke up feeling even sicker than yesterday, so Robin agreed to make the morning visit to the orphanage by herself (but only after I promised to do the same for her sometime!). She got there shortly after 11AM, and they started gathering the kids to go back inside around 11;45, so it wasn't too bad of a shift for Robin. She came back to the room and did crossword puzzles while I dozed. I finally roused myself around 2:00, and we went to a kind of off-the-beaten path restaurant called The Brooklyn Cafe for a late brunch. We were the only people there (sound familiar?). I swear, I have no idea how some of these places stay in business. I guess the overhead is low.

On our way back to the hotel, we saw a lot of black clouds to the east. Sure enough, right around 5:00 it started raining. We headed off to the orphanage, since we knew Ana was expecting us. All the kids were inside their individual group areas, so we went upstairs and retrieved Ana. Mama Oksana, tonight's caregiver, told us we could just take Ana down to the main hall (kind of a ballroom, actually) and play with her there. She was very verbal this evening, but I had no idea what she was trying to say most of the time. After about 10 minutes, Dasha showed up, fresh from a car trip to visit her adoptive parents' hometown. She was in a really good mood, even by Dasha standards. I later found out from Mama Oksana that Dasha will be adopted on October 16th. I don't know if that's the actual adoption day or the court date, but I'm glad she'll be out of the orphanage and going to school.

During our playtime with Ana, our facilitator in Kyiv called to just go over a few things in anticipation of Tuesday's hearing. He feels very confident and so do we, but we're not making plane reservations just yet. Tomorrow we'll meet with Kostya and try to tie up any loose ends. Also, our friend Colleen is still in Kiev. She's actually traveling back late Monday night (in a Deluxe this time) and is bringing us our approval letter from the Federal adoption body. Meanwhile, please keep her in your thoughts. She's trying to adopt a severely disabled girl from an orphanage near Kiev (in addition to the healthy girl she's adopting from here), and tomorrow morning she will find out whether the court will allow it. Burn some candles for her!