Hannah found missing second part! Yay, Hannah, thank you. Apparently, I added it as a page, not a post, but I also did schedule it to add, which added my confusion. Guys, you need to realize, I work on my computer and websites all day, so I’m generally pretty computer saavy. But, 4 letter words that start with the same letter stump me every time. Anyways, here you go…

So, back to a knock on the door. The door opened and Lena walked in. Tiny and real. There she was. She knew that we were there for her, and after orienting herself and being handed a doll, she stood at my knees. I gently picked her up. She was light, soft and real. She seemed comfortable, almost right away.

If you’ve never experienced this, you might not know the strangeness of it, having a child you only know in pictures now on your lap. You know a child by their photos or maybe by a brief description. And suddenly, they are 3 dimensional. You can smell their scent, feel their skin, and hear their little giggles. So strange.

This little person finally in front of me was, formally, Olena. As they called her at the orphanage, Lenushka. Or, as we came to know her, Lena.

Before we could get too caught up in that moment, the door opened again and there he was. He looked like a startled deer. Staring, eyes scanning the room, then running to the social worker. Everyone gestured for Aaron to take him, and with some encouragement, Ilya let him. We knew him as Ilya, but they called him Ilyusha.

He was warm, sweaty and obviously tired. I have a feeling that they had just woken him up from his nap to come meet us. He was understandably stiff, and while we talked sweetly to him, he kept his head tucked down in great apprehension.

While these few moments were exciting, the nerves rose again. What if we didn’t seem comfortable enough? Were the doctor and social worker judging these first moments to see how we behaved as instant parents? Ilya’s head stayed down, but Lena was relaxed and quiet. Our facilitator snapped a few pictures of us, which truly excited Lena, to see herself on the tiny screen and she gestured around the room.

More of this is recounted in my original blog post.

It was only a few minutes, of this nervous playing, before they told us the children needed to go. Back to the their groupas. We could come again tomorrow. Although the excitement was over, I released tension walking out of that room. No longer did we have the social worker and Ludmila observing our amateur parenting.

Down the hallway, then the stairs, and back to squishing in the car. Sasha began to tell us how happy the children seemed. “Ilya, I was so worried. He had a woman visit him before. She came many days, but he always cried. She wanted to adopt him, but he cried so much that she did not think he would be comfortable. He did not cry with you. That is very good.” Huh. So already things went much better than we thought.

“Do you want to adopt them? We can start the paperwork or if you want to spend a couple more days with them first, you can do that.” Aaron and I exchanged some edgy, excited glances and some short, awkward phrases like, “what do you think?” Yes, we are ready. We don’t see why not and we don’t want to wait.

Off we went. We dropped off the social worker, back at her university-like building. Sasha explained, “I need to prepare papers. Shall I take you where you can get some lunch?” To the mall, we went. Sasha dropped us on the curb. She explained that we could gesture in the food court to point out what food we wanted and she would call us when she was done. We choose pizza. Easy enough to know what we were getting. We sat down at a little table and breathed deep sighs of relief.

Again, we were alone. Alone together. In a mall, yes, but we knew the likelihood of someone around us fully understanding our conversation were slim. We could process all that had just happened. Beside us, was a children’s play area. It was strange. The contrast of the baby house and this wealthy mall play area was just bizarre. Adjacent cities, two different worlds.

Eventually, Sasha called. I’m not sure what else happened that day, but the next thing I remember was the notary. Eastern European notaries are independent little offices all over. You can just walk in and pay to have something notarized.  A quick flash of our passports, many signatures and we were out the door.

Then, Sasha offered to take us to the grocery store. I believe we needed to exchange some money first, so we did that. Then, to the store. We had been to little markets in Kiev, but this grocery store was large, bright. Shopping carts and a parking lot. It seemed so… normal. To the left and right, as you walked in, were little shops. almost like a mall. You could grab freshly pressed juice. Or get some home goods. Just a bit further and you entered the store through a turn-style. Check your bag if needed or just go past the security guard.

(Again, not my photo– click for source. But this is the same chain that we sometimes shopped at in Ukraine.)

And, we shopped. Gallons of water. Juice and crackers for the kids. Boring, ordinary grocery shopping, while we still held the slight nervousness of such a monumental day.

Back to the car, and then back to our apartment. Sasha stayed with us that night and read through our children’s files again. She went over details again and expounded on certain things. Breaking down nuances which we might not have understood the first time around.

The day ended mildly, nerves slowly being taken over by exhaust. In retrospect, it’s one of the most life-changing days we’ve ever had. Meeting our children for the first time, the first steps to becoming parents, really saying yes to adopt. Wild and pretty much amazing.

3 years ago, we met Reed and Lena for the first time. I realized that I never took the time to blog about our early days in Ukraine, before we met them. I blogged a bit about our time in Kiev, but I never went into great detail about the day we met them, because I was so eager to share about our actual first meeting. So, I am choosing now, before I forget to share this with you and even more so, to put it down to share with Reed and Lena some day.

I am going to start with the day before we met them, Tuesday, November 23, 2010. I am going to break these 2 days up into 3 blog posts, and this is going to be the most boring– my apologies. The photos in this blog post are not my own. I will use photos from Flickr and if you would like to see the source of the photos, you can click on them.

We realized shortly after arriving in Ukraine that Aaron had forgotten his gloves. In late November, the weather was still pretty mild, a lot like it usually is here. Jacket weather, but hat and gloves not quite necessary yet. But, we knew it would get much colder over the duration of our trip, so we knew we had to find a pair.

We asked the advice of our new friends who were on their second Ukrainian adoption. They were very familiar with Kiev and offered to take us out the next day to a cheap, warehouse-type store to find gloves. So, that’s how we spent our Tuesday, waiting to pick up our referrals and taking the subway in Kiev with Meredith and Mike. It was a totally rainy, gross day. We took the subway to a huge store, sort of resembling a Costco, right next to Hillsong Kiev.

(a Kiev subway station.)

After finding gloves and picking up a few other items, we had lunch at McDonalds. Mike and Meredith took us back on the subway and walked us back to our apartment, where we hastily packed things up so that we could go get our referrals and hop on the train. Our friends wished us well and left us to prepare.

4pm. We hauled all of our stuff down the several flights of stairs from our apartment– I think we were on the 4th floor. No elevator. We drug it all outside, into the now-cold, dusk fall air. And waited. Time ticked by. Another set of new friends, Patty and Tom, who would also be going to pick up their referral called us to see if we knew where our driver was. Nope. So, we waited some more and it grew colder as the evening turned to total darkness. We eventually piled our suitcases in the tiny alcove just inside the door of the apartment building and took turns standing outside. It was around 5, an hour after our designated pick-up time, when our driver pulled up. Patty and Tom were already in the car, so we to squish to all fit in the little SUV.

The race was on. We were supposed to be there by 5:30 and Kiev is a big city with horrible traffic. It’s really quite beautiful by night, old buildings all lit up, but the traffic is awful. Stop, go, jerk one direction, jerk the other, stop, go some more. We finally pulled into the SDA, what the building where you received referrals, closer to 6 now. Our driver banged on the door. No answer. He banged on another door. No answer. Tom, Patty, Aaron and I stood around nervously, wondering if we would get the needed paperwork. Our driver banged some more and finally someone came to the door. They argued in Russian for a minute, then he said they would let us get our referrals. Phew.

All we had to do was show our passports and sign our names. We were handed a bulky packet of papers. Perfect! We tucked them in a safe place, waited for our friends to do the same, and we were off once more. We made another stop for our driver– I’m not sure where, before heading to the train station. We were going to take a train leaving just after 7.

Our driver picked up our tickets while we consumed more McDonalds with Patty and Tom. A fully packed McDonalds on a Tuesday night. I remember having a conversation with a stranger, perhaps in the military and something about family in New Jersey, but it’s very possible that I made that part up, mixed in with all of the craziness of that week.

After we were done at McDonalds, we were off to the train. I love train stations. Something about all of adventure and the history. But, I was glad we had our driver to guide us to our train and help us find our room. They were sold out of second class, so our driver had to buy us (at our expense, of couse) first class tickets instead.

Saying goodbye to the driver, sitting down on the little train beds, was such a relief. Here we were, able to just sit, in privacy, for the next several hours. We took off our shoes and extra layers and pulled out a deck of cars, to play on the tiny table. The first class train car was really quite nice.

We enjoyed the quiet for awhile, to play cards and just talk, before we decided to go to sleep. 9:30, I still remember that detail, oddly enough.

In theory, sleeping on the train isn’t bad. If I had my pick of long-distance travel methods, that would be it. You can stretch out and relax, in privacy. Two little beds, all to ourselves. The usually-gentle sway of the train is lovely.

However, we did not sleep well.  No one had told us how long the train ride would be, what time we would arrive, or how we would know to get off. Mike and Meredith told us they thought it was about 12 or 13 hours to our destination. But, what if it was less?

As the night passed, the train regularly slowed and light poured in from outside. There would be an announcement in Russian about where we were and the train would come to a complete stop. Occasionally, it would get noisy, with the sounds of suitcases and voices as people got on and off the train.

To be continued tomorrow, with the next day’s adventures.