..."Follow Me!": SDA Appointment

We're approved and it's a girl! For those that we don't see often and may not be aware of all that has transpired since our first appointment date back in March, we had to regroup. The news we kept getting on Vova's case was we were not going to be adopting him. It's complicated and I don't want to disclose it all here, but we started to ask around about other children needing a home. One name kept coming to the top. Her name is Sophia and she is 12 years old and she has been in the orphanage for 5 years. We think that's 5 years too many.

Now for the details about the meeting. We left around 1:15 and the first question out of our facilitator's mouth was, do you mind if I drive fast? Heck no, just turn on the air and let's go. So off we went, bobbing through traffic. We get to the SDA and there is nobody there. We are the only family waiting. It must have been lunch time, don't know. Anyway, we sit down and introduce ourselves to the SDA lady, hand over our passports, and then she pulls out this inch and half thick file...ON US! She asks why we are interested in adopting Sophia, which there are a million reasons, but we keep it simple. She asks if Sophia knows we are coming, we say yes. She then grabs the big red binder with 1999 on the spine and flips through to Sophia's file. Attached to the handful of pages, which is probably the case information from the trial where she was declared an orphan, is a picture of her. I won't describe the picture, nor will I describe the conditions of her life, that's her story to tell. Her father is still alive, though her mother passed away about 7 years ago. She was born in Simferopol. 15 minutes later we are walking out with their approval. Woohoo! We are so excited to finally hear our daughter speak. We have been trying to come up with things to tell her, to ask her, to do with her...the planners that we are, or rather Lisa is. But how cool is this. We will be adding a girl to our mix of three boys. And Sophia will go from being an only child to instantly having three brothers...and a dog! This is gonna be fun, I hope we capture it all here, or in pictures, or our journals.

We'll go back tomorrow to get the actual document that says we're approved and then we catch the "midnight" train to Crimea! Actually it's at 8:10pm and the ride will apparently take about 12 hours. Yay! Planes, trains, and automobiles. Then on Wednesday hopefully we will meet our daughter.

We spent the next couple hours wondering around the area looking at various street vendor wares and grabbed a bite to eat. At one in particular, the guy was selling chess sets and these medieval looking mallets, I can't remember their name. I figured the combination of the two might make chess a TV sport.

We also toured St. Andrews Church, which is adjacent to the SDA building.