Dec 2: Last Day as "Just the Two of Us"

12/2/07: Day 11 of our 10 day wait. Of course this technically should be the day to pick up the court decree, but it was a Sunday so we were forced to wait one more day...

We finished the sermon series this morning and then walked around Mariupol to take more pictures and video.

We were worried that the underwear we'd brought for our boy were too small. We found a children's clothing store on Lenina, but now we had to find underwear... a word I didn't know in Russian! We'd just about given up hope when I spotted a counter in the back. There was a lady standing behind it, and after some pantomiming and broken Russian, we secured 2 pair that looked to be the right size. Another successful shopping trip on our own!

We decided to try a new pizza place, Oscar Pizza. It was really good (for Ukrainian pizza). Zack went to the bathroom and came back and told me he'd finally seen the kind that everyone told us about, a Turkish toilet or "squat pot". We were fortunate in that we didn't encounter these more than 2 or 3 times on our entire trip.

Later that afternoon Leonid and Luda arrived. We decided to go to Abzhora and buy some things for William's last day. We bought bananas and juice for all the children at the orphanage (about 125), a HUGE box of cookies for William's groupa (the group of children he lived with), and boxes of chocolates for the director, doctor, secretary, and 8 of his caregivers. The grocery cart was full, and we worried we didn't have enough grivna to cover this amount of food. Yet the total came to only about $60!

We went back to the apartment and finished packing. Then I finished putting together some gift bags for the caregivers. Each bag included some candies, travel size toiletries, and lip gloss.

We got a bag ready with William's gotcha day clothes. It included an under-shirt, tights, underwear, socks, long sleeve shirt, fleece pull-over, jeans, shoes, coat, gloves, scarf, and hat. It seemed like overkill. But we were told all of this was required, and I'd heard stories of orphanage workers making parents go and buy more clothes before they could take their children. We didn't want that to happen to us!

We also prepared a backpack for our boy. We'd picked it out weeks before leaving for Ukraine. We filled it with cars, legos, a small magna-doodle, some candies, and a couple of travel-size flashlights. We also added a fleece blanket and a little stuffed lamb. We wanted him to have some things to pass the time in the car once we left the orphanage, because we knew it'd be a long day and we weren't sure how he'd react to riding.

We were set. We went to bed and watched some DVD's, and anxiously awaited the next morning!