Merry Christmas!

We had a pretty laid back Christmas here– church on Christmas Eve, gifts, cinnamon rolls and big meal on Christmas day.

I haven’t asked them all what their favorite gifts are. Reed seems to be loving his snap circuits. Lena has been playing with her new tamagotchi quite a bit. Gus is enjoying his new cars and box to organize them. I’m not sure what Luda is enjoying most– she’s not one who eagerly accepts gifts.

The kids are one week into Christmas break, and I think for Reed and Lena, cabin fever is in full swing. Fortunately, they’re out playing frisbee golf with Aaron right now.

Gus is thrilled to have Luda here.

His world is pretty awesome right now.

Luda is glad to be here and an eager helper, around the house, with Gus, and cooking dinner. She can act like a typical teenager at times, wanting to be talking to her friends online. I can’t blame her, as it’s undoubtably a challenge to be immersed in a totally different setting with people who don’t speak your language and also are more geared towards younger kids.

Language– this has been a big topic here lately. I’ve been working hard on my Ukrainian. I was studying it a lot before N came– then I stopped for awhile, as other priorities took over. A mother adopting from the same region said how the judge had her demonstrate her Russian in court and all she could say was “sandwich”. That spurred me to start practicing again.

I’ve finished all of the lessons on Duolingo. I started Skype lessons with a teacher on italki a few weeks ago. She is helping me put my knowledge together in different ways and gain confidence with speaking. I highly recommend italki if you’re interested in learning a new language. For Ukrainian, there are many teachers available for $10/hour.

Luda is also doing Duolingo and has a teacher on italki. She seems to be enjoying the lessons– I scheduled her for an hour lesson today, and their lesson was closer to 90 minutes, plus the teacher sent a bunch of homework! I’m glad– she has a long way to go with English.

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas!

Luda (Big L) is here. She is here for hosting with P143 until the middle of January. I am posting this from my phone, as we’re off to Tallgrass Prairie for the day. 

  
I went to Chicago by myself to pick her up. We hung out in Chicago for a few hours with a good friend, and then we went home.

I have a little video of the kids seeing her at the airport, but my phone won’t upload it from the middle of nowhere Kansas.

 
She is still warming up a bit, but everyone is so glad to have her here. She wrote me a very sweet note yesterday, which said how much she loves us and thanks for everything. 

In my last post, I mentioned that we had a matching grant for $5500, needing to raise $2750.

Well, we have raised $2549 so far… just $201 left to match on our grant.

Can you help us raise this last $201? We have until Christmas, but Luda will be here in 5 days– I would LOVE to have it covered by then.

All donations are tax deductible.

Here’s the link to donate — please share.

Do you want to see exactly what you’re supporting? Check out our Meet Luda page.

Thank you!

I realized I hadn’t updated here recently about our adoption. If you follow me on Instagram, you already know.

Our dossier is DONE. We shipped it to Ukraine a couple of weeks ago. However, we did need to redo a few pages. We have all of these changes taken care of as well and now we are just waiting for our dossier to be submitted.

This process didn’t happen quite as quickly as we’d hoped. We were hoping to make our first trip before the end of the year, but that will not happen now.

However, some friends reached out as they were planning their year-end giving and asked about helping with our adoption. I told them that our bigger need was to bring Luda here for Christmas via hosting. They said they’d take care of the whole entire hosting fee. WHOA.

So, Luda is coming for Christmas. We’re all SO excited. Even though it’s only temporary, we are looking forward to be all together. In just a few weeks, she’ll be here!

We also currently have a matching grant. If we raise $2750, it will be matched, for a total of $5500. We have about $1500 left to go. Can you help? Donations can be made here.

(Christmas Day last year)

Don’t forget to check out our Etsy store for your Christmas shopping…

One of our most requested fundraisers was t-shirts. I completely blanked on sharing them here! I was going to close the pre-order today, but decided to keep it open until Wednesday (11/18).

We picked this song, as it is one of Luda’s favorites. I wrote about it here.

These are unisex shirts, available in sizes S-XXXL. I have a couple of different shirts by this company and I love them. I can’t wait to wear this shirt!

Click here to purchase one