Nov 12: Progress!

Thanks again for joining us as we remember what we were doing this time last year. As I’ve mentioned, November is Adoption Awareness Month - how special that we just adopted our son in November! I remind you to please continue to pray about and consider how you can help the orphans of this world...

11/12/07:

Once again, Leonid drove us to the internat. He & Luda dropped us off and went to do paperwork, hoping to secure a court date for us. Luda also took William’s shoes to exchange.
We had fun with our boy. He was beginning to talk a little. We started teaching him to say “Please” and “Thank you”. He was also counting things like his cars (in Russian). We had a great time sharing snacks, playing ball, and coloring. Luda brought the new pair of shoes, and it was obvious that he was very proud of them.

We said our good-byes and then did some running around to secure more paperwork Luda needed to take back to Kyiv to get our official SDA approval paperwork. We headed back to the apartment and Zack and I took a nap.

Leonid and Luda headed back to Kyiv shortly after lunch. We were honestly a little disappointed that she had not been able to get the date for court yet. We enjoyed a lunch of what would become our favorites: ham, Russian cheese (yummy!), and fresh bread. After an hour or two, the phone rang. Luda had great news – we were scheduled for court on November 21st (Zack’s dad’s birthday)!

We were relieved to have a date to focus on. Since we’d now have the apartment to ourselves for more than a week, we decided to unpack a little more and really settle in.

We cooked dinner for the first time on this night, our first night alone in Mariupol. We’d bought what we thought was spaghetti sauce. It turned out to be a very spicy tomato sauce, but still good. We had it with some vareniky and pasta.

Another story I forgot to share from our 11/11 visit... when we went to the groupa to share the snacks, Luda was talking to his caregivers. She mentioned something about Slavik and was quickly corrected: that's not his name. While his first name was Stanislav like we'd been told, he actually went by Stasik or Stas. Poor little guy - we'd been calling him the wrong nickname for 3 days straight, but he was so bashful that he wasn't about to correct us! To this day, he still likes to joke about how Daddy & Mommy called him Slavik at first.