The Passport, The Volcano, and The Zoya Girl!

We were told today that our passport will arrive here Monday at noon.  This is better than the 90% sure answer we got yesterday! Although nothing here is EVER guaranteed, it is looking good for Monday.  Our facilitator already booked train tickets for us to return to Kiev Monday evening.  Monday we will go to the passport place at noon and finalize that and then we will head over to spring Zoya from her life as an orphan FOREVER! I have her outfit all picked out and even picked out the outfit she will wear on the train (it has butterflies...symbolic of her new life!).  We were suprised to hear that on Tuesday we will have her medical exam and be able to receive her VISA! We thought we'd need 2 days in Kiev and not be able to leave until Thursday...but our facilitator is dropping off our documents to the US embassy on Monday so they can start processing it! The US embassy says it SHOULD be ready Tuesday, of course she couldn't guarantee and says very rarely would it take another day.  We are trying to work on our flight back.  We want to book it for Wednesday but are only 99% sure her Visa will be done.  We don't want to book for Thursday and have to stay another day if we don't need to, but if we book for Wednesday and then it's not ready we will have to hope we can change our ticket to Thursday and risk coming home even later....hmmmm....decisions!

This is complicated by the VOLCANO that has stopped ALL air travel over most of Europe.  We fly through Frankfurt and right now that airport is closed.  By the time we come home it SHOULD be cleared up, but it may be more difficult to book a flight home since all of these stranded travelers will have to push their tickets out and there will be more travelers than there will be seats.  This is why we want to book our ticket TODAY and not wait.  This is also why it makes it difficult because we have to decide TODAY if we want to book for Wednesday or Thursday.  We are still waiting to hear back from our travel agent. I can see it now....we've been here 5 weeks and finally are allowed to come home with our baby and a stupid volcano stops us! I mean how many more mountains will we meet!?  Hoping this is not a hurdle for us...God knows our legs are getting tired from jumping hudles!  Prayers about our trip home would be greatly appreciated.

We visited Zoya this morning and she has a little cold.  She seemed a little stuffy the past few days and then today she was wheezy and snotty (her nose not her attitude hehe).  Hoping it clears up before we get on the plane with her.  We forgot to put the camera card back in the camera so we couldn't take any pictures.  We will take some more tonight.  We took her on a walk outside...it was a little breezy and chilly but the sun came out and warmed things up a little.  We weren't going to take her out but there was a grandfather there visiting his grandson and it was pretty crowded in our tiny room so we really had no other choice.  We brought her inside and tried out her headphones.  We bought some fisher price headphones for the plane ride since she liked the DVD player so much we thought we'd give it a try.  You're not allowed to listen to a DVD player without headphones....so we tried them out.  They are very durable and tune down the volume to an acceptable level for little ears.  We will have to get pictures tonight because she looked so darn cute! Once she learned the music was coming out of them she had no problem at all and just kept them on her sweet little head!  One of the nurses saw her and started laughing and speaking in Russian to the other nurses.  A couple more came out and were admiring how cute she looked watching her "computer" as they called it, with her headphones on!  We are finding that people have been so pleasantly surprised with how much Zoya is learning and doing in her little bit of time with us.  When we took her to get her passport photo taken, she was waving to EVERYONE.  Nobody here waves Hello, only Goodbye...but we taught her to wave Hello.  When we see the other kids outside we always wave since we can't speak with them.  She picked up on this quickly and now waves to EVERYONE she sees...so cute!  Our facilitator was so amazed that she was doing this.  Today at the orphanage when we said goodbye I blew Zoya a kiss and she blew a kiss back...we've been working on this each time we leave, but she hasn't done it until today! The caretaker was so impressed and went in and told all the other caretakers that Zoya was blowing kisses! She showed them how Zoya blows kisses...so cute.  We were proud mama and papa when she did that!  People here think that these children can't learn, so they don't give them any opportunities to learn.  They don't teach them.  They do everything for them and expect nothing of them.  Of course they don't learn then!  The other obvious factor is LOVE.  It is amazing to see how much a child blossoms with some LOVE!! Oh we are so lucky to call this sweet little angel ours!