The new SDA

The Ukrainian Government is supposed to be holding a Press Conference on July 3rd, 2006. We are hopeful that they are going to announce their plans to reopen the new adoption center. We will be watching with our fingers crossed.

Some Good News

We have been reading some postings that the information coming out of Ukraine is that they expect to reopen either July 1st or July 7th. Yeah!! Progress. We are hopeful that this means they will accept new dossiers. Our dossier. We are keeping our fingers crossed. We will keep you posted. Brian and Sandee

Waiting !

Hello All,

We are hopeful that the Ukrainian Government will start processing Dossiers in July. We want to have our daughter home with us again. We do have an opportunity to Host her again in August 2006. It will run about $2500. We are hoping to run another Bottle and Can Drive over the 4th of July weekend to help defray the cost of hosting her. The days grow longer and longer. We would love to have home for good but if she can come for 3 weeks in August, we will be grateful for the chance to have more bonding time with her.

If any of you are interesting in helping us fund her August trip or Help defray the adoption costs.

It was suggested that perhaps we should do a PayPal Fund-Raiser!

(Suggested donation $10.00)

If you wish to donate our Paypal account is: SandeeEH@aol.com
New Paypal users - Click on the Link below to Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/ema/index-outside then use our email address: SandeeEH@aol.com


We are glad to have so many good friends and family to support our adoption journey. We will keep everyone posted as to our progress.

Brian and Sandee

The piles of Paperwork

Since January 2006 we have been obtaining paperwork and more paperwork for our Dossier. Also we have been trying many different fundraisers to help offset some of the adoption costs. We were finally able to get our Dossier in the hands of the Ukrainian adoption coordinator (May 12th, 2006) just in time for the NAC (National Adoption Center) to close and for the new agency handling adoption to reopen and start accepting new Dossiers. So now we wait. Today we heard from an Ukrainian friend that the rumor floating around is that the Youth and Sports Ministry is not planning on reopening until at least July 1st, 2006. And there is no mention as to when they will be accepting new dossiers again. This comes to be very bad news for us and Anastasiya. Time goes by so slowly for children, we just hope she doesn't give up hoping.

From the Beginning

Hi everyone,

I wanted to let you know what we have been up to over Christmas. Our original plan was for a fairly quiet holiday week. About 2 weeks before Christmas, however, we found out that there were some Ukrainian orphans coming over for the holidays. The group arranging the trip had more children coming than host families to receive them. We volunteered to take one of the older children, an 11 year old girl named Anastasiya. About the only information we had other than her picture, was that she did not speak English.

The children arrived at Metro Airport at around 10 pm on December 20th with a translator. The trip takes something like 20 hours and requires a long train ride, a flight from Kiev to New York, and another flight from New York to Detroit. When she got off the plane she looked sad, tired, and scared. The translator introduced each of the children to the correct family and everyone headed home. Anastasiya cried for a little while before falling asleep in the van on the way to our house. We had set up Madison’s room for her and she went straight to bed when we got home.

She was still asleep when I left for work the following morning. A good nights sleep helped somewhat but she was still quite shy. She really started to warm up to Sandee during the day though. Sandee took her shopping and bought her some new clothes since she only owned a few things. Communication was a bit difficult since she speaks Russian and Ukrainian and we do not speak either language. With a few words of Russian and lots of pointing and gesturing we were able accomplish basic communication. For other things we enlisted the help of a translation book and an occasional call to the translator.

Within a couple of days Anastasiya fit right into the family. She enjoys watching movies on the big TV. She really took a liking to the digital camera once she found out that she could look at the picture as soon as it was taken. She loves to have her picture taken and then looks to see how it came out. She also loves taking pictures.

Anastasiya loves Monopoly and is quite good at math. She already knew how to play Monopoly when she arrived. She did not know the English words for the numbers but we could show her the numbers on the cards and she could pay the correct amount, make change, etc. She had apparently never played the game using houses and hotels and was quite excited once we showed her that.

On Thursday we met up with the other families and children at the Somerset Collection mall in Troy so the kids could see Santa Claus. Channel 2 news was there to do a story about the children. They followed us around the mall for a while shooting video while we did some shopping, visited Santa, and got ice cream. The reporter interviewed Sandee for the story. All of the kids got a kick out of seeing themselves on the television news that night.

After we left the mall we met a couple of the other families over at McDonalds so the kids could play. While we were there we found out that there were additional children who were supposed to come over from the Ukraine but had missed the flight due to a problem with their passports. The 2 children were 6 years old. They could fly unescorted on the Russian airline as far as New York City but could not fly from there on the USA airlines because they spoke no English. One of the children was supposed to go to a family in Oklahoma and one was supposed to go to a family in Michigan. The family from Oklahoma was unable to arrange a flight to anywhere near New York City so close to Christmas. The family from Michigan had left for their vacation when they were told the girl had not been able to come.

Sandee and I decided that these girls needed a place to spend Christmas so I left a message at work that I was taking Friday off. Sandee and I went home, got a few supplies, dropped off the kids except for Heather and one of her friends, and headed for New York that same night. We drove straight through the night taking turns since neither of us had a chance to sleep before we left. Since it was nighttime, traffic was light through Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. It took us a little over 10 hours to travel through those 4 states. We managed to hit New York City towards the end of the rush hour though. Rush hour traffic in New York City was quite an experience especially since they had just ended a bus and train strike. It took us nearly two hours to travel the last 20 miles to JFK airport. If anyone thinks Michigan roads are bad they have not been to New York. The roads were terrible but we made it through.

We got to JFK airport a few hours before their flight was scheduled to arrive. The flight was delayed an hour and it took additional time for the girls to clear immigration. After their long travels by themselves we thought they would be scared and crying when we got them. Instead they were happy, and smiling. They were holding hands, singing us songs, and telling us stories. We couldn’t understand a word they were saying however since it was all in Russian.

We managed to hit rush hour traffic again on our way out of New York so it took us nearly two hours to travel that same 20 miles on the way back out. The girls napped for a few hours. When they woke up we stopped at a McDonalds in Pennsylvania and let them play in the tubes at the play land. The people at McDonalds were very nice. The play land had actually closed for the night but they let the girls in to play anyway while we ate. They had a great time. Heather and her friend chased them all over the place. Once we got back into the car the girls watched movies, played video games, talked on the cell phones, played with the dolls we had bought for them, and generally had a great time with the older girls. We stopped periodically to let them out to run around and burn off some energy.

The overall trip back took a bit over 12 hours just like the trip there. While this was going on the family in Oklahoma was able to arrange a flight from Oklahoma to Detroit Metro Airport. We got back to Michigan about 6 hours before their flight arrived. We were able to nap for a few hours before delivering one of the girls to the airport to meet the family from Oklahoma. They were very grateful since they otherwise had no way to get the girl. Apparently Sandee and I made the television news in Oklahoma as well with our trip to New York. It had taken 30 hours in the car to pull it off but we were able to get the girl to the family that was going to host her.

Sandee and I had basically left in the evening, drove all night and all morning, picked up two little girls from JFK airport in New York City, jumped back into the car, drove all evening and all night, and arrived back home 30 hours after we left. All of this was to pick up 2 little girls we had never met and would likely never see again and get them to where they were supposed to spend Christmas. Needless to say we were very tired after this. It was definitely worth it however. One of the little girls spent Christmas with us until her host family could pick her up. We arranged for her to have presents to open when the other kids opened theirs.

On Christmas day we went to Mark and Cheryl’s house for dinner. We took our kids, Anastasiya (the girl we were hosting), and the second of the little girls we had picked up in New York with us. Everyone had a wonderful time. The kids all got along very well. The following day the other family picked up the little girl we had gotten in New York so we were back to just our family and Anastasiya.

We took Anastasiya a number of places and she had a great time. Many of the things were obviously new to her. We took her to a store where you can stuff your own teddy bear and she really liked that. We introduced her to video games and CD (music) players. We have a number of movies on DVD and we discovered that she had seen lots of Hollywood movies including most of the ones we have. She was able to pick out the movies she wanted to watch. She took lots of pictures with our digital camera. We took nearly 1,000 digital pictures while she was here.

On New Years Day, we went up to Great Wolf Lodge which is an indoor waterpark in Traverse City. We spent 3 days there. She had never seen anything like that before and did not know what to make of it at first but quickly discovered that it was a lot of fun. They have 4 story tall water slides where you ride down in inner tubes, swimming pools, hot tubs and a river that flows in a circle so you can drift along in inner tubes. They also have a large structure that is 3 stories tall with passageways throughout and water spraying everywhere. At the top are water slides and a giant bucket that periodically dumps 1,000 gallons of water down over the structure and the people below.

Our kids have been there before and had a great time as always. Anastasiya quickly decided that she really liked it too. She does not know how to swim but was very anxious to learn. I taught her the basics that I remembered from my swim lessons as a child and she made great strides in 3 days.

While she was here she learned a few words of English and we learned a few words of Russian. Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet which is completely different than our alphabet. I was able to set up our computers to be able to switch from one alphabet to the other. I also was able to find computer software that could do some basic translations between the two.

She is an absolutely wonderful, thoughtful, and caring child. She had wrapped up a piece of candy for each of the children for Christmas and had brought Sandee and I each a pine cone. We thought that was very nice coming from a girl with nothing who lived in an orphanage. She had to return to the Ukraine with the other children on Friday, January 6th, 2006 but while she was here we absolutely fell in love with her. We decided that she deserved better than to live in an orphanage. Before she left we started the process of adopting her.

Adopting a child from a foreign country is a fairly lengthy, complicated, and expensive process. We started by filing a request with the INS department of US government. We have had a home study done as required by both the US and Ukrainian governments. There is a lot of other paperwork to be done and all will have to be translated into Ukrainian. The last part of the process will be for us to travel to the Ukraine and go to court there. We will be there for a few weeks. After that, depending on the judge, we may be able to bring her back with us or she may have to stay in the Ukraine for an additional month. Once everything is finalized with the Ukrainian court then we take her to the US embassy in Kiev to register her. We can then bring her back to the USA. Once she is here we need to take her to the Ukrainian embassy in Chicago to register her there. The entire process takes an average of 4 to 9 months. We are doing everything we can to keep that time as short as possible. You will absolutely love her when you meet her later this year.

Brian, Sandee, Brandon, Heather, and Madison.