September 27th

Day 18- September 27th - Today was our 29^th and 30^th visits with Veeka and our 18^th night here in the good ol’ Ukraine. Amazing, huh? It is so incredibly hard to believe. I think if everything goes according to plan, we are on the downhill stretch.

Today was a little bit cooler temperature wise, but we still got to play outside. We have to get a little more creative with our time. We can’t just go play on the playground. Today was fun because there are tons of leaves on the ground just waiting to be gathered up and thrown up in the air. Caleb and Veeka did this for a long time. They loved having the leaves fall in their faces. In Texas, we don’t have trees that will allow us to have that much fun. We also loved the bubbles today. Veeka wasn’t scared of them at all.

We had to tell our new friends Felix and Javier, the father and son from Spain, goodbye today. Their family has their court hearing tomorrow and then they leave to go back to Spain for their 10-day wait. (The mom, Sylvia, will be staying here with their new daughter, Sophia, during the wait.) It has been really enjoyable getting to know their family. Caleb and Javier love playing together. It is really interesting how God brings families together in a most unexpected way. To me it is crazy how God brings three very different families (us, the family from Georgia, and the family from Spain) to a not so exciting little town in the Ukraine all around the same time, all adopting their 2^nd children and their first children were all adopted from Eastern Europe. We may not have Dennis and Natasha, or people like them, here, but we have had a great opportunity to get to know new friends that otherwise we would have never met. We have attached the picture we took of Felix, Sylvia, Javier, and Sophia.

Between our visits to the baby home, we went back to the market to pick up a few last things that we couldn’t find last time we were there. When we went on Monday, there were probably only a third of the vendors there selling their goods. Our trip today was very successful. (I even bought a pair of cute shoes…for $12.) We bought some more panties (we figured a 3 year old needed more than 3 pair), a pair of pajamas, 2 more shirts, and 2 more pair of long underwear. While we were there, we also ate at a very fun pizza place. It was called Maks Mak. All three of us enjoyed our pizza greatly. I could definitely go back there, no chicken skin and knuckles for us.