We Made It!!

We made it safe and sound to Kiev!

The 8.5 hour flight from Charlotte to Munich was rough. We were stuck in the middle aisle of three seats, with a super tall guy in the third seat, which left us little room to move! Cavin did amazing, especially considering that he was on one of our laps almost the entire time! We were hoping he would sleep most of the flight, but he only slept the last two hours of the flight, meaning we didn't get much sleep either! 

Our layover in Munich was long. Much too long. We did finally get Cavin to go back to sleep in his stroller so w were able to stretch out on the benches and get an hour or so nap as well. I loved hearing German everywhere, it made me miss Vienna all the more! It was fun to try and understand what they were saying and remember the little we had learned while living in Vienna. To top it off, we got some yummy German food for dinner! It totally made our day, well at least mine! Did I mention Munich had almost a foot of snow on the ground?

The flight from Munich to Kiev was pretty uneventful. We did have an extra seat which made it nice for Cavin to be able to move around more. I think both Matt and I dozed off and on throughout the flight. In typical Cavin fashion, he fell asleep as we were descending to land. A highlight of this flight was the views we had of the Alps, they were snow capped and beautiful!

We made it through customs just fine, no one even stopped us and it was really nice not to have to deal with that hassle and just be able to walk on through. Thankful for God's blessing there for sure! Yuri, our facilitator here in Ukraine met us and drove us to the apartment he had found for us. The apartment is fully furnished and is nice enough. We dropped our stuff off and ventured to exchange some money and get some groceries.

Once we got back we sat down with Yuri to discuss what we are wanting in our referral. We began talking about some of the medical conditions kids have, and how hard it is to find a healthy child without a serious medical condition under the age of 6. I loved how Yuri said, "I'm not trying to scare you..." when that is just what he did!

We know God is going to provide the perfect child for us, but the idea of sorting through THOUSANDS of files Monday afternoon, trying to sort through and decipher medical conditions, is most definitely scary. We are nervous for sure, but are so thankful God provided Yuri, a Christian man with over 10 years of experience in Ukrainian adoptions, to be our facilitator! We are totally going to be relying on him to help us sort through the files and find us a referral that meets our needs.

Yuri said most times a family will not find their child with their first SDA appointment, but that it takes most families two appointments (we are allowed 3 total) with the SDA to receive the referral to their child. To get a second appointment is easy, it would just add up to another week onto our stay here.

HUGE PRAYER REQUEST: Please pray that there will be a healthy little boy (3ish) for us to be referred to on Monday!! We really don't want the time delay of a second SDA appointment and all that would entail.

Our appointment with the SDA is on Monday, December 6 at Noon, which would be 4am Saint Louis time..

In the meantime, please pray that we can adjust well to the  8 hour time change and get a good nights rest tonight!!