One Week And Counting!!

That is Ira and Deanna after a nice long hot shower here at the apartment - 2 happy girls!!!

Hooray hooray!!!! One week from today – if all holds – we will be on a plane headed home!!! It can’t come fast enough at this point. I am so so ready to leave. Dima will be here in the morning and we will have the going away party at the orphanage for Ira’s class. Then we will get her checked out for good, come back to the apartment, spend the night then Monday morning we are out of here! We will pick up the court decree first thing then head, by car, to Reni where we have to go to pick up Ira’s birth certificate. It is about an 8 hr. drive from here so we will get there, spend the night. Then Tues. morning at 9 we have an appointment to get the birth certificate. That should not take long, then we will be back in the car driving to Odessa. We have to go there to pick up her passport. Her passport photos were taken this past Tuesday and delivered to Odessa to begin processing it. If we make it back to Odessa before 5pm on Tuesday, then we can pick up the passport and will be either on plane or train that night back to Kiev!!! If we miss 5pm deadline then we will sleep in Odessa, pick up passport Wed. morning and still head straight to Kiev. We should have one day processing in Kiev with Embassy and then we are done!!! I will at least have Friday as a day to do some sightseeing with her and hopefully Thursday as well. Either way it will be the end and will be exciting!!! We will hopefully be on our plane out of here Saturday morning at 6:45a.m. – landing in Greensboro at 6:15pm Saturday night!!!

These last few days have been hard. I would take nothing for all of this time spent here in Balta – in her town, in her environment, at the orphanage because I know it will give me great insight in helping her to adjust to her new life. But it is a very hard place to be for so long for many reasons. I think the hardest is being with all the children in the orphanage every day. You just can’t help but fall in love with so many of them and wish you could bring them home with you or find great families for them. I know that I will now forever be an advocate for these children to the best of my ability. There are several that have touched me deeply and for the rest of my life they will never leave my heart. I will always wonder about them and I truly hope that they find families and somehow my path will cross with theirs again.

Ira seems to be doing well about leaving. I think it will probably be harder on some of her friends than on her. She is with me today and will be with me here on out. We are getting ready to put together the gift bags for the party and we went to the market and bought 2 cakes and some bags of chips and boxes of juice.
So – tomorrow is the last day in Balta!!!! And then next week will be busy, busy, busy and just fly by and then we will be HOME to start our lives with a teenage girl – heaven knows I never thought I’d be saying those words at this stage in life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Life is certainly full of surprises!!!