Friday--Day 28

Constant, constant, constant tackling, wrestling, poking, sitting on each other, etc.
Tough morning for goodbyes yesterday.

This bottom picture is common in Kyiv. The outsides of these buildings and their balconies are deteriorating, so they put up these fences to catch the debris from the balconies. People own individual flats, but no one owns the building, so the outside and hallways just go to pot. For example, ours has the lovely smell of boiled cabbage, garbage, and cat pee. How do builidngs like this get maintained in NYC, or do they?

You can probably tell that my posts are losing some of their zest.

The kids are living in our little 2-room apartment now. It’s tight, but it’s nice to have them around. Lots of loud music that I really hate and lots of running after each other shrieking, pushing, tackling, poking, wrestling etc. Anybody got a tranquilizer dart handy? They are bouncing off the walls at times, but I’m glad they get along well and are friends. I think it made it a lot easier to leave the orphanage, although as you can see in the pictures, it’s still really hard to say goodbye, especially to Igor and Lorscht, a volunteer.

We missed our chance to say goodbye to the other kiddies at the orphanage. Many are leaving to spend the holiday in Italy. Who knew? I wanted to get in a few last hugs, but I’m glad many of them get to have a change of scenery and hopefully a family to love on them over Christmas and New Year. We sent along some gifts.

There’s this dog at the orphanage that hangs around the cafeteria, and the kids feed him occasionally. I didn’t like it b/c it looks a little wild and scraggy. Of course, I thought I was being overly neurotic about it. Especially earlier this week when I went through a door and screamed to almost run into it. But today, Ilona showed us her ankle where the stupid thing “Blini” bit her ankles. It was a bad bite--bloody holes on her ankles, and Ilona had to go the hospital for shots! We asked if it ever bothered the kids, and she said, “sometimes it bites them, but usually they give it food, so it leaves them alone.” Can you imagine?

We spent a tense day riding around in a freezing van trying to get things done really quickly after the court paperwork is ready in time to fly home. We were ready for pick up at 8:30 a.m., left at 9:30, drove around until around 4:00. Beth and I signed our name twice. The kids got their picture taken. We waited in the freezing van for hours. An interesting thing happened, when an adminstrator wrote our information in a very official looking book/register thing, but wrote the birthdays in the wrong slot. She proceded to scrape them off with a rusty razor blade before writing in the new ones over top and then applying a dozen or so stamps. So many documents here. Everyone you see on the street is carrying documents, and there are notary offices on every corner for the millions of documents needed for everything.

There is a glaze over Kyiv today. We watched a number of people slip around and slide and almost fall down. The kids were really patient. Until 4pm, Beth ate one piece of toast, M&M’s, and a few chips. I didn’t do much better. Vadim and Zhenya had king-sized Snickers for lunch. Now, that’s parenting at its best. For about 45 minutes we thought we weren’t going to get the passports today. Ilona made calls with increasingly higher up people and smoked. Finally, were heard the beautiful “korocho, korocho” and we knew it was good, and she took the kids in for their photo. Phew. One hold up like that, and there goes the flight on the 23rd, a huge change fee, and Christmas.

We were warned that there would be days like these.

I‘ll meet Vadim‘s two sisters and their babies to say goodbye on Monday evening. I think it will be emotional for him.

We had dinner at our favorite restaurant called Momentos and had delicious potato pancake things and salad. Vadim had pizza. I was too tired to make conversation and just spaced out during dinner.

Three days left, I hope and pray!!!