Thank you!

I wanted to say thanks to everyone for their votes on Sergey's name.   I think Chris has decided on Brayden.  I have decided to let the decision be up to him since I picked out Abigail "Abby".  I have changed the name below from Lucas to Brayden on the post with their pictures.  Again, this in NOT concrete, as we have yet to talk to the kids about it.  If they do not want new names, we will be OK with that. 

Another anniversary

Today is exactly 2 years from the day that we met Olesya Mazilina (now Alyssa) for the first time.   The day before, we saw her picture at the adoption center in Kyiv.  In her picture, she was just a little 3 month old.  She was so cute!!  (picture to the left)

We left to go to Simferopol at 12:30 am, so we would get there by 10am.  We rode with our WONDERFUL driver, Leo, who we consider to still be one of our dear friends.  Leo is a great guy, but he likes to drive like he is in a video game...........Chris LOVED it though!!!!  We made it to Simferopol in one piece, thank goodness, but we didn't get any sleep the whole ride. 

To make a VERY long story short, we met Alyssa for the first time that afternoon, and she was just the sweetest thing we ever saw! (picture above-very 1st pic we ever took of her) She was so shy and would smile at us a lot.  I fell in love right away!  Her haircut was so bad that we kept it in pigtails pretty much the whole time (picture above) :) 

These past 2 years have been the best years of my life!  Alyssa is the sweetest, most loving child!  She has the kindest heart of any child I have ever known.  She adjusted to life in America and into our family so well that you would never know that she lived any other way.  She has my whole heart and I love her more than I could ever imagine loving someone! (recent picture above)  Alyssa has changed so much!  She has comletely transformed into a beautiful little girl! 

Her "gotcha" day is coming up on September 8th.  That is the day that we went to court and the judge officially declared her "ours".  What a wonderful day that was! 

As for our current adoption...........

I feel so bad for Dina & Sergey.  The lady who I mentioned previously who is our "angel" who took the pictures of the kids that we posted a couple of weeks ago, she checks up on Dina & Sergey for us evey now & then.  Some of the other orphan children have asked her if she was Dina & Sergey's Mama, and she told them no, but I guess some of them still assumed that she was.  She hadn't been to the orphanage in a few weeks because she was away at camp.  When she came back last week to check on them, some of the other children saw her.  They ran inside and told Dina & Sergey that their "Mama" was here.  Dina and Sergey ran outside excited, but when they saw that is wasn't me they started to cry.  That just broke my heart to hear that.  :(  Poor things.  I can't wait to get there to hold them in my arms!!  Atleast now, they know when we are coming for them.  Before now, they thought we would be there anyday.  I know the waiting is MUCH harder on them than it is for us.  It won't be long my sweeties because...........

the chain is getting shorter!!!!  WoooHooooooo!! :) Alyssa tore another ring off of it this morning.   31 more days!!!!!!!!!!!!  Exactly one month from today we will be boarding a plane to go to Ukraine!!!!!  I can't wait to ge to the airport in Atlanta.  Just getting there will be the first big step into our journey to our children.  I am so excited!!!!!!  :) :) :)

 

As you can see to the left, I have added several family's journals who are waiting to travel to Ukraine.  If you have a journal and you are waiting to travel and you would like it posted here, e-mail me jebnolte@aol.com  Also, if you see your journal listed but do NOT want it to be, e-mail me and let me know.  I have them listed so it will be easier to keep up with everyone's stories while we are in Ukraine. 

Thanks!

We booked our flight!!!

Well, we finally booked our flight today!  We used Lonnie Rowland Enterprises.  I would highly recommend anyone who is adopting to use his services.  www.rowlandent.com  Our tickets were only $2,496 for all three of us.  We are leaving Atlanta at 2:10pm on Delta and arrive in NY at 4:30.  We then fly out of JFK on Aerosvit Airlines at 6:55pm and arrive in Kyiv, Ukraine at 11:10am their time (4:10am our time).   I am hearing conflicting stories about taking lipstic/chapstick on board.  Anyone know??  It is bad enough that I cannot take hand sanitizer on board, but my chapstick?????  I don't know how I would make it with no chapstick!!!!  YIKES!!!!!!

Only 35 days to go!!!! 

I made a yellow and blue chain out of construction paper (like the ones you do at Christmas time) and wrote the days on each ring.  Alyssa tears one off each morning.  That way she gets a better idea of how long it will be before we travel.  It sure is nice to see that chain getting shorter!!! :)

Where we are going

Just thought I'd let you all know where we will be traveling to.  If you look at the map you can see where Ukraine is............and no, it is not part of Russia like a lot of people think :)  It borders Russia, Romania, Moldova, Czech Rebublic, Poland, and Belarus.  Our first few nights in Ukraine will be in Ukraine's capital, Kyiv (Kiev).  That is where we will have our appointment at the adoption center on September 25.  After they give us permission to go visit with the children, we will then take an overnight train (hopefully the same night) to Simferopol (where Alyssa is from).  Dina and Sergey live in Kerch which is right on the Russian border.  Since the train doesn't go there, we will have to take a 3 hr. car ride from Simferopol to Kerch. 

Oh, and we added a few more pictures of the children and of us below (scroll down to the 1st and 2nd entry). 

Sergey's name

OK, I know I said Sergey's name was going to be Lucas Sergey.  Well, it still might be..........but, Chris isn't so sure about the name anymore.  ARGH!!!!  We like the name Brayden/Braden also.  That is the name we were going to use if we adopted a boy for our first adoption.  Now Chris is thinking he likes that name better.  Oh, and William is also a name we are considering.  So..............now we are deciding between

Lucas , Brayden (or Braden) and William (Will)

To save ourselves an argument, we may just let Sergey choose one of the three.  Or he just might want to be called Sergey...............and that is fine too :)

WE GOT OUR DATE!!!!!!!!

WOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!  The day I have been waiting for is finally here!!!!!  We got our date :)  It is September 25!!!!!  The day before my b-day!!  I was really not expecting it to arrive today.  I know that some letters were arriving to families UPS so when the doorbell rang, my heart started to race......when I looked out the window and saw the "big brown truck", I almost fainted!  I opened the door and saw a box......not a document....a BOX that said NASCAR on it.  My heart sank.  I told the man thank you and as I was closing the door he said "Oh, Mam, there is a letter under the box too".  He must have thought I was crazy, I almost dropped the box as I looked to see who the letter was from.  When I read that it said "State Dept. for Adoption" I stared jumping up and down and pretty much shut the door in his face...poor guy :)  When I got inside, I ripped the letter open and saw the date!  I just started to cry, laugh, and told the Lord thank you atleast a hundred times.  So, thank you all for your prayers!!!! 

So, now the crazyness begins........time to start going through our "Ukraine pile" that I have had in the corner of our bedroom since our March trip.  I never fully unpacked it except for clothes, but it turned into a mess since I would go through it every now and then to find certian things that I needed.   I also have a list of about 50 things that need to be taken care of before our trip.  Oh, and airline tickets, time to book those.  I am really scared now because of what is going on in London.  So, what we have decided is to fly either Delta or Aerosvit (Ukrainian Airlines) straight from New York to Ukraine.  We were going to layover in another country for a few days, but now we just feel safer going straight there. 

Gotta go,  got lots to do!!!!!!  YIPEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

Things are moving along in Ukraine

Finally, things are moving in the Ukraine adoption world again!  Today, I have heard of atleast 4 people receiving thier appointment letters!  Yahooooooooo!!!!!  This is VERY exciting!  So far they have been families who have been registered for a while (a lot longer than us) and are adopting "already known" children.  These families have been scheduled for the 4th and 6th of September.   The letters appear to be arriving UPS, so I'll be looking for the "big brown truck" this week :)  Hope to post our good news soon! 

Anniversary

I just realized this morning that today, 2 years ago, we left for Ukraine for our first adoption!  Boy were we a nervous wreck that day!  Our flight left Atlanta around 5 or so, flew to Miami where we thought we were going to miss our flight.  Turns out they cancelled the flight and we had to wait until the middle of the night to leave for Paris.  We stayed in Paris 2 nights for a mini vacation, and then off to Ukraine! 

I can't believe it has been almost 2 years since we have had Alyssa!  But at the same time, I can't remember not having her in my life :) 

American names

We are planning on changing Dina and Sergey's names to "American" names.  Here are the names we have for them:

Abigail Dina & Brayden Sergey

As you can see, we are keeping their given names as thier middle names.  We will of course talk to them about this before we make a definate decision.  But for now, we are still referring to them as Dina and Sergey.  We may still call them their given names for a little while, until they get used to their new names.  We'll see when we get there. :)

We're coming soon Dina and Sergey.......

For those of you who don't know already, we are now going back to Ukraine to adopt Alyssa's biological brother and sister, Dina and Sergey (picture above) ........hopefully next month. Dina will be 6 on September 9th. She is such a little cutie pie :) She has beautiful blue eyes and big sweet smile. When we met her for a very brief time in March, she couldn't stop smiling at us. She was in her classroom and her teacher let her get up and recite a poem for us. She spoke such beautiful Russian and smiled the whole time she was speaking. We only got to "observe" her for about 30 minutes. When we had to leave her classroom, my heart just sank. I miss her so much!!!!! Sortof strange for a child you only got to see for 30 minutes, huh? Not when it is your child, because then.......they become a part of your soul. I loved Alyssa, Dina and Sergey before we ever met them.

Sergey (who is 8)........I just want to cry everytime I think about him. When we met him, it was a different story. While Dina didn't really know why we were there, Sergey did. He ran up to Chris calling him "Papa" and hugged him so tight. He told me, "Mama", to sit down in his chair while he stood at his desk.......such a sweet gentlemen :) (of course I didn't let him stand , I got another chair). One of the caregivers told us all about Dina and Sergey while we were in Sergey's class. She told us Dina likes to be the center of attention, she is a very sweet girl, but is very energetic :) Chris should have fun with all the energy he has :) She told us Sergey is more laid back. He is very smart, loves to read and draw. He was so cute while we were there......He would write something and then show it too us. He did this several times. His handwriting was beautiful!! A lot better than mine and he is 8! It was so cute when the caregiver asked him how old he was (he had just had a birthday a few days before) He smiled from ear to ear and said "Voysim" which means "eight" in Russian. He was so proud! He too recited a poem and although I couldn't understand a word he was saying, I felt like a proud mother listening to him :) When our translator told us it was time to go, Sergey came up to me and hugged me so tightly with his cheeks pressed against mine. I never wanted to let him go. He then said to me something over and over again that I could not understand. But at the end of the words he said "America", "America" I was assuming he was asking if he was going to come with us to America. So I told him "Da" (yes) But then I said "Ya Ne Pene-My-You PaRuski" (I don't understand Russian). At that point he had to join the other children. They were putting on their coats and hats to go outside. Sergey gave Chris and I hugs goodbye and we walked outside. I couldn't help myself, so I ran back in and through the crowd of the children told him "Dasvidanya" (goodbye) an he said "Dasvidanya". I walked outside and just cried.

We went back to the director to see if we could possibly spend more time with the children, but he wouldn't budge. He was just worried about hurting the children. He once had a family who spent a lot of time with a little boy there and they ended up deciding not to adopt him. The boy was crushed. Atleast I know this director has good intentions and truly cares for the children. We got onto the overnight train back to Kiev that evening. I cried the whole way home. I left a part of me at that orphanage and I can't wait until we can go back to hold our children in our arms for good!

Fast forward to today.......It has been 4 months, 2 weeks, and 5 days since I have seen them. In that time, I have gotten pictures of them (we weren't allowed to take any while there). A lovely lady who I have met through a friend sent them to me. One of them is above. Their pictures, and my precious daughter, Alyssa, is what keeps me strong. Not to mention my faith in God. If it weren't for him, none of this would be possible. God is so good isn't he? Thank you Lord!

We should know when our travel date is soon. We have to have an appointment at the Adoption Center (SDA) first before we can travel to adopt Dina and Sergey. The SDA has been shut down since April, but reopened last month. They will start seeing families again starting September 1st. From what I have heard, families who are adopting already known children will have first priority for appointments. If that is the case, we will be traveling in September probably. If that is not the case, we could travel anytime between September to January. The SDA is mailing out letters to all families who have a date in September to inform them of their appointment date. They are sending these letters out on August 10th. They are also supposed to post a list of these families along with the dates for our translators to see on August 10th. So, we may know by the end of next week when we are traveling :)

Please keep Dina and Sergey in your prayers and please pray that we will get an appointment ASAP. Also, please keep all of the other families who are waiting to adopt from Ukraine in you prayers also. This wait has been difficult for all the families adopting. And lastly, please pray for the New Adoption Center (SDA). Pray that they will treat families fair and that they will be able to run things without corruption.  I have faith in them, I know they can do it :)

We will let you know as soon as we hear something.