More about our appointment

I'm going to finish this post I started a couple of days ago, but wanted to update a couple of things. Our court date is next Tuesday, Dec 18 at 10:30am. Please pray for a favorable ruling. Also, a grandmother is not happy with the adoption, so please pray for that situation. Lastly, the US Embassy is requiring us to do a HS addendum because Alexander is outside of the age range listed on our HS. Please pray that our SW would be able to do the addendum and submit it to BCIS in the next couple of days.


Our appointment was at 2pm on Tuesday. We arrived at the SDA gate a few minutes before 2 but the gate was locked so we waited about 10 or 15 minutes in the cold before someone came and unlocked the gate. When we were let in, we got into the stairwell and met our SDA interpreter, Julia. Apparently the rules have changed (yet again) and as of two weeks ago facilitators are not allowed to go into the appointment with their clients. So it was us, our SDA translator, and the SDA psychologist. We were offered several older children which we refused, and one set of 5 yo twin boys, one of whom had Hep C which we also turned down. The first file we actually looked at was of our boys, but they were older than we really wanted and had a lot of medical issues so we weren't sure. The only other file we were even given to look at had a 6 yo and a 2 yo. We continued to ask for more files and were repeatedly told there are no others. So we started asking questions about the boys...their medical information, their history, etc. Then I asked what region are they in? When the psychologist said "Donetsk", we both started laughing and were pretty sure we were supposed to go visit these kids. Our facilitator is from Donetsk and we had joked that it would be a great Christmas present to get a referral close to his family, so when the boys ended up being in Donetsk we knew it was from God.

I will do my best to post more later, but it's not easy right now. We have high speed internet in the apartment we are in but my laptop will not connect. A few too many security features, I suspect...