January 31, 2005
Here we go!
Today is the day we leave. I dropped off our dog at the Pet Resort. The lady said to her, "Ooooh, we'll give you a nice warm bath and take you to your room to relax." I was thinking, wow, that sounds kind of nice...
We're doing some last minute running around and getting those final items packed away. I think we're taking more gadgets than clothes. We leave for Amsterdam at 4 pm. I guess they have a huge mall at the airport there, though who feels like shopping in the middle of the night? (our time) Unless, of course, they have a shoe store. They also have Internet cafes, so we hope to be able to log on.
More later!
January 30, 2005
Almost ready...
Less than 24 hours to go until we're on our way. We are mostly packed. But it seems like there is always more to do.
Has anyone else noticed that Friday and Saturday just fell off the calendar on the left? Hmmm. Not sure what's up with that. But that's about how fast it feels like they went by.
January 28, 2005
Just a few days til we leave
We have everything we need --- tickets, passports, visas, international cell phone, adapters. Now we have to think about actually packing. So much still to do!
My wonderful sister Karen (she made me say that) is getting ready to take our amazing son Austin in for a few weeks. She always treats him like a little prince. Austin's friends are clamoring for sleepover dates at their houses. The neighbors will watch our crazy cat Winston. Awesome people are covering for me at work (Sorry! No I'm not.) We leave Monday afternoon and arrive in Amsterdam 7 1/2 hours later. They tell me we'll have two movies and two meals. They should also say two Tylenol PMs because that's what I'm going to be taking!
We arrive in Ukraine Tuesday afternoon, their time, our appointment at the adoption center is Wednesday. Ukraine is 7 hours ahead of us.
Leave a comment here if you'd like, there will probably be a lot of hurry up and wait time...
January 22, 2005
Documents and details
What a week!
We have our plane tickets, we sent away for our visas and we updated four sets of documents to be sent to Ukraine this coming week--in time time for our appointment in just 9 days...! We've ordered adapters for the laptop, the phone, and hopefully anything else we will need to use. We are trying to get an international cell phone to take with us.
Our facilitator Natasha said it would be better to learn Russian (not Ukrainian) because more people can speak Russian. So after about 7 or 8 months of listening to Russian language CDs in my car, I think I'm pretty confident that I can order a glass of wine or beer and tell someone that I'm hungry. But seriously, it feels very similar to Polish, so I'm somewhat familiar with pronouncations. At least we won't have to panic if we wander off. I can ask for directions and even count to 10 in Russian. (10 beers?)
This next week is going to be even crazier as we scramble to finish up all the details (who will watch our hamsters?) Thanks so much for all of the wonderful support from family and friends who have recently learned about our plans.
January 16, 2005
We have our appointment!
Yes, it's true. We have received our invitation letter from the NAC; it took three weeks to arrive in regular snail mail. Our appointment is Wednesday, Feb. 2. We can't believe we have a little more than 2 weeks to get everything ready. We have to update some documents that expired in January, get them notarized and then apostilled. We need plane tickets and visas. We will probably leave on Jan. 31.
A little background and some reasons why there is a big gap in our blog entry dates here...
We submitted our translated dossier of 19 official international documents to the NAC on May 27. Whew!
They decided right about that time that they were not scheduling appointments until 2005. So there goes one of the reasons we chose Ukraine (speedy?) We received a letter telling us this in August and asking us for a requested date in 2005. We received another letter in November telling us they weren't confirming any dates yet and would send a note to us in December. That note arrived Jan. 13, with the Feb. 2 date.
So we have a wild 2 weeks ahead of us and we really appreciate all of the support we are getting from family and friends.
We have an awesome facilitator/translator in Ukraine who has been helping us for more than a year.
I will try to update this blog as often as I can. We will have our laptop with us in Ukraine and we're told that there are Internet cafes in the big cities, and we can use a phone line (with pre-paid phone cards) in the small towns. We'll also be taking our camera so hopefully we'll be able to show pictures of this journey! Strap on your seat belts and stay tuned!
--Laura