We've got the kids!

Howdy all. Good news from Kiev - that's right, we are back in the city. Tuesday and Wednesday were a blur. Court and chasing paperwork, then a day of paperwork and driving 5 hours.

Court went extremely well. It was very short, few questions and no 30 day wait. All in all, it couldn't have went any better. The paper chase afterwards was long and frustrating, but it wasn't too bad with good news carrying it along.

Wednesday we went to the orphanage with treats and candy for the two groups of kids (the groups Riley and Jake were in) and then took off with them after giving the orphanage a modest donation. The kids are sent out the door with "nothing". They left everything they had at the orphanage for others to use, they didn't even get to keep the underwear they were wearing. Luckily we'd brought clothes for both kids. It was kind of rough riding around in the small car (Daewoo) with the two boys, the two of us, Alexi, Tatiana and our new Kharkiv translator Lera. Lera was nice by the way, but we only saw her for two days. About 5 pm, we finally left Kharkiv and drove back to Kiev.

The drive back started out okay with everyone having more room since Lera was still in Kharkiv, but they got very restless. We also hadn't eaten since our late lunch at 2pm and Tatiana decided to feed the boys candy and coca cola to get them really riled up. By the time we got to Kiev, they were literally bouncing on the roof. Needless to say, our first night alone with them made it kind of rough getting them into bed. Once they did get to sleep though, they slept like little angels.

Today we played paper chase some more and spent a couple hours in the U.S. Consular's grounds getting them set for U.S. Citizenship. The boys are very tired of paper chasing and frankly, so are we. We got just about everything taken care of today and also have the tickets for our flight back purchased too. We are leaving very early Sunday morning and will be getting into Cleveland about 6:30 that night. Total time from Kiev to Cleveland is actually going to be 18 hours, so we'll be very tired people by then.

That's about it for now. We are going to be taking it easy tomorrow and then joining Tatiana and her family for dinner in the evening. Hopefully we'll be posting again before leaving, but if not - you know we are on the way.