Day 28 - Crossing our fingers

Thanks to alot of brainstorming, we hope that our documents will be arriving in Astana on Friday or Saturday. We'll then hire someone to fly them over to Petro. It might seem like quite the ordeal but Fed Ex was asking $1800 for the privilege of PERHAPS receiving them Friday. Ouch! It was only going to take 4 days to Astana with DHL...so that's the plan. Cross your fingers everyone...we need a court date before 2010 for one of our documents to be valid.

Svetlana and Irina are requesting a court date for Tuesday, Dec. 29th...in a week from today!!

We had a nice visit with Mlle O. today. She discovered crayons...not necessarily drawing! She also figured out that the apple sauce we had brought was ALOT more delicious that the crayons ;0)) Lesson learned..lesson learned! She hung on to that spoon (first time we have seen her with a utensil) during all of our visit - almost to ensure that she could have access to more food. I think we need to reassure her that there will always be food....seems like a pretty typical result of orphanage living. We had read about it. I want her to realize that we are more than the providers of food...but it is a start.


She is really getting attached to Sven now...She is really enjoying teasing him. Today we were practicing the alphabet sounds with the letter A - Ba Ca Da Fa Ga... she really got into that...we were happy to see that she understands...now she just has to learn it!

I wouldn't be honest if I didn't say that I wasn't nervous about having her full time after having only 2 hour visits. (Kaz has got it right though...having lived through the bonding process... we really appreciate this getting to know each other phase!) We are now thinking long term and just hoping that she will get used to us being there all the time. She will def. have to mourn the only home that she has known for the last 20 months. Guess you could say that we are swichting gears in our heads now and are preparing for a new part of the journey... Let's just hope that we can get there in a week's time!!