We made it to........UKRAINE! (updated with pictures)

Now that our blog is private and we are here we are allowed to tell you where we are! We are in Kiev, Ukraine right now. We will be here until Monday or Tuesday and then we will take a train to Zoya’s region (which will be an 8 or 9 hour train ride). Our referral appointment is Monday at 11:00 our time, which would be 5am at home (so if you’re awake please say some prayers). This time thing is going to be very confusing because you guys will have daylight savings time change this weekend and Ukraine doesn’t do their daylight savings time until the last weekend in March. So typically Ukraine is 7 hours ahead, but after the US does daylight savings time this weekend Ukraine will only be 6 hours ahead until they too do daylight savings time (at which point Ukraine will be 7 hours ahead again) but not for a few more weeks….confuse you yet? My body has no idea what time it is or if I should eat or sleep or what.


Our flights were good and uneventful, which is how we like it. I can’t believe how much they fed us on the trip from Philly to Germany. The flight was about 8 hours and we ate dinner, then they gave us wine, then a snack and another beverage, then breakfast. It was hard to sleep much because they kept turning on the lights to feed us. We did have to go through a security check in Germany and of course I got pulled aside and searched. Let me tell you a “German search” is much different than an American search! I felt a little violated! HaHa! After that we met up with another Reece’s Rainbow family who is adopting 4 siblings, 2 of whom are blind! They were on our same flight to Ukraine. Getting through customs was easy and we didn’t have any problems.

When we arrived our driver, who speaks a little English, insisted we call him, “Uncle Nico.” He picked us up and drove us to downtown Kiev. He helped us buy some minutes for our Ukrainian cell phone (still not sure if we can call the U.S. with this one or not?), helped us exchange some money (we exchanged $300 U.S. dollars which he told us is the equivalent to an average one month salary here!), and took us to a Market to buy some groceries. We got the basics, some bread, water, coke “light,” and a couple of beers . We brought some soup packets and things from home that we will eat tonight. He showed us a few restaurants. He also thought we should go to the Ukranian circus tomorrow so we bought some tickets…hey what else do we have to do? LOL. Then he brought us to our apartment. The apartment buildings here from the outside don’t look so great. When he opened the door to our apartment building, I got a little worried. Once we got into our apartment, I couldn’t believe how nice it was! Here are some pics of our apartment:

This is our kitchen:

Our bathroom (shower is to the left out of the picture)

Our bedroom (love the wallpaper):

The view from our balcony...beautiful! At night it is all lit up!

This part of the city kinda crept up on us...we were in the middle of nowhere, then we turned the corner and saw this! All the other areas we drove through looked nothing like this! The buildings on the outside are all very run down.  Most people live in apartments here not houses.  There are TONS of apartment buildings.

We got settled here and I called another traveling adoptive moma, Nancy, who has been here about a week now. We chatted and are planning to meet up when we go to Zoya’s region. We were given a USB for internet access but we have no idea how many minutes are on it. We were told it has some minutes but we will need to buy more and probably won’t be able to do that until Monday, so I’m typing this in a word document and then I’ll dump it into the blog as not to waste internet minutes.

We need prayers for sure. It is exciting, but also a little unnerving to be in a place where nothing is familiar. We heard that our region might take a long time to get things done here and that our judge is a tough one. Please say some prayers that the process would go smoothly and Shawn and I will be able to adjust well to all the changes and have peace through it all. I need to go make some dinner and sleep!

I have a bunch of pictures but it is taking too long to upload them and I don't want to use all our minutes. Will post some pics of our apartment and trip soon hopefully.