Veeka

Wednesday (September 12, 2007) – Wednesday was quite a crazy day. We woke up at 3:00am to finish packing and be ready for Gene (one of our translators) to pick us up at 4:00 to leave for Khmel’Nyts’Kyy. (We are still learning how to say it properly.) It is around 175 miles southeast from Kiev (as the crow flies.) We’ve heard there are around 200,000 people who live here. Anyway, we got here around 8:00am and met our two translators for this town – Serge and Marina. They took us to the orphanage where we met Veronica (or Veeka for short) and we met with the orphanage director and some of her caretakers. We enjoyed getting to spend some time with this sweet little girl, and Caleb even spent some time by himself with her while we were talking to the orphanage director. They hit it off pretty well.

That afternoon we let Serge and Marina know that we wanted to accept the referral for Veeka and they stated the paperwork. We only got to visit with Veeka once, which we were sad about, but after the 3am start and not much sleep, we were ready to go to bed early.

A little bit about Veeka: The new little McCulley (Assuming that everything with the court goes accordingly.)

This is Veeka. She is a little over 3 years old. Weighing in at a whopping 16 kg (which is around 35 pounds) and 96 cm tall, (that’s nearly 3 ft. 2 inches) she has light brown hair and dark brown eyes. She enjoys coloring (in circles), looking at books, throwing a ball, playing outside at a playground (especially swings and slides), playing with cars, getting tickled and pointing to pictures of people she knows. She was pretty shy at first, but is getting less shy everytime we see her. Her future plans include getting a big brother (who is not that much bigger in terms of size), vacationing in the capital city of Ukraine, and becoming a US citizen. Her future plans also include taking down the baby bed in her room and putting up a big girl bed.

According to our doctor in Cincinnati, Veeka is in the 90^th percentile in weight for her age and the 70^th percentile for height. We’ve been used to being in the 10 and under percentile with Caleb, so this is a new change for our family. She was born at nearly 10 pounds, but I was right about the same so we can’t fault her for that. From everything we can see, they seem to eat pretty well at this orphanage.  Needless to say, none of the clothes we brought for her will fit her so we’ll be shopping for some new clothes in the next few days.

Our court date is scheduled for Tuesday, September 18. After that we have a waiting period before we can apply for her passport and then on to Kiev to visit the US Embassy and come home.

Thursday (September 13, 2007) – We got up and went to a notary’s office and signed some papers. We then went to the orphanage for a little while and played. Our play time went really well. Veeka was willing to come to us and even sat in our laps while she looked at books.

After we left the orphanage we went walking to find a grocery store. We found it pretty easily and bought stuff for lunch as well as some things like juice and fruit. We headed back to our hotel and ate lunch. By the time we finished eating, it was nearly 2:45, and it was time to go again. (We are walking pretty much everywhere we go here, even to the baby home twice a day. Poor little Caleb has had it pretty easy all of these years with only having to walk to and from the car whenever we go anywhere.) When we opened the door to the room where Veeka’s group was playing (there are around 12-14 in her group) one of the little girls started yelling, “Veeka, Veeka” and ran over to her and touched her arm so that she could see we were there. She dropped her toys in mid-play and ran over to us. When she got to us, you could see that she started thinking, “What do I do next?” because she just kind of stood in front of us. So we all gave her a hug and then went to the room where we play. We spent lots of time looking at some books, playing with cars (which Caleb enjoyed) and playing with a ball. We also pulled out the picture book that we left with Caleb on our first visit that has pictures of our whole family and showed it to her. We bought another book almost just like it before we left home and put updated pictures in it. She really enjoys looking at both of those books. This afternoon she learned that we would say a name whenever she would point at a specific person in the picture…and spent lots and lots of time pointing at people. She would also point to a picture of me, Monty or Caleb and then point to us. It was really good to see that she had figured out how to correlate the two in such short amount of time.

Sorry that it has taken us a while to be able to share lots of info with all of you all. Hopefully we will now be able to e-mail and blog more consistently. Our schedule has been very crazy as well as we have had a hard time finding places to have internet access. (We were desperate yesterday and finally found the foreign language department of a university that internet access.) Today we finally found a place that we think will work well. Sorry this is so long, but we wanted to catch everyone up on some of the things that are going on. We’ll try to keep it shorter from now on.