One more down -

We have crossed again the life of the toothless. We went to the Ukraine with 2 loose teeth, which none fell out while we were gone, and came back with 4 wiggle-ly teeth. One of these fine teeth decided it was time to leave its safe home and venture into the world of the tooth fairly land. Caleb was very excited about the thought of loosing another tooth, but he got a little frightened when it came down to it. He was very brave and decided Mama should pull it before he lost it on the school playground, which is what happened to loose tooth #2. The tooth fairy made it to our house right on time and brought him Lighting McQueen (Cactus version). Ashlyn, of couse, was very curious, and even tried to get us to pull one of her teeth.

Here is Caleb checking out the hole where the recent tooth once lived.

Getting into the groove

Well we are getting into the groove of life with 2 children. Monty has gone back to work, Caleb has gone back to school, and my mom has gone back home. We were so blessed to have my mom come and stay with us for a week after we returned home with Ashlyn. With all of our sickness and time changes, we needed her here to keep our lives going. She also helped so much for a family get-together this past weekend.



We had a great time showing Ashlyn off to our family this past Saturday. Grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all got to come to our house this weekend to celebrate the blessing of family. We really enjoyed getting to spend time with our extended family.


On Sunday, our church had a trunk or treat celebration during the afternoon. I know Ashlyn thinks we have all lost minds. First of all we get in this huge "car" that we have to stay on for over 10 hours, when we finally get off the airplane, we then have to sleep when we should be awake and stay awake when we want to sleep, and now we all wear weird and strange clothes walking around with pumpkins in our hands saying "Trick or Treat." After she figured out that candy was involved, she really liked the afternoon.


After our evening services, the church had a baby shower for Ashlyn, and boy were they so generous. Everyone at the church was so kind to think of us and our new little one. This is a picture of Ashlyn at the shower.

USA here we are...

Well we are back in America and we love every minute of it. Just to catch up on a few things, we left Khmel'Nyts'Kyy on Friday, October 5th, with Ashlyn and that day went straight to Kiev. It was a crazy day with leaving the baby home, packing up everything we had in our little cabin, and then the 4 hour car ride (mostly on very bumpy roads) back to Kiev. We arrived to Kiev just in time to get out little ones to bed. The following Saturday and Sunday was extremely nice because it was the weekend and we didn’t have to do anything. No baby home visits, no hurrying to get somewhere, no walking 6 miles, etc. We just got to do whatever we wanted and be a family. We even had a chance to eat at a McDonalds in Kiev. It was the best McDonalds I think I have ever eaten. Sunday we did go to church with a guy I knew as a kid (he grew up in the church where my grandparents attend). It was very fun actually going to church and participating with Christians (even though the whole service was spoken in Russian) from another part of the world.

The rest of the week in Kiev was spent either sight seeing or doing work with the American Embassy. We actually were done with absolutely everything on Wednesday, which was a full day early. I know that a day early doesn’t seem like much of a big deal, but with everything we learned while we were there regarding adoptions, we should still be there even today, a whole week later.

We flew out of Kiev to London on Friday, October 12th and there spent the night. The times coming in and out of the Ukraine and then on to Houston didn’t really match up, so we enjoyed a short evening in London. Saturday morning we left London and went straight on to America. Both Caleb and Ashlyn did so good on our flights. There were others around us commenting to us on how well they did. They played, watched movies, ate, and even slept on the flights. Once we got into the airport, Ashlyn went through immigration and received her U.S. citizenship. Yeah!!

This week has been really good. We have been to church twice, shopped for clothes for Ashlyn, unpacked our suitcases, did laundry, and Caleb has started back to school. Monty and I both have been sick at one point or another this week, but all in all, it has been wonderful being home. We love having English spoken on the television, going to Wal-Mart and buying whatever we need, having soft toilet paper, and having the water that comes out of the faucet ready to drink. (With our time in the Ukraine and climbing a mountain in Colorado, Monty and I have brushed our teeth with bottled water for almost 2 full months.) We are excited to see what God has in store for our family here in the USA.



Thanks for all of your prayers concerning us and our adoption.

Welcome Ashlyn...

Well it has been a crazy few days. We are already in Kiev with Ashlyn waiting to get our paperwork done with the US Embassy. We hope to be home soon. Thanks for keeping us in your prayers.

Blinko...

Day 23 – October 2 – Monty left at 8am with a driver named Rostov and Marina to Kiev. They had a few stops here in town and along the way, but made it to Kiev by 12:30pm. They waited and signed papers, received Veeka’s birth certificate, and started their way back home around 1:15pm. (Because they needed to make it back here before some offices closed in our town, they didn’t even have time for lunch. Monty had taken some snacks with him “just in case” but the driver and Marina had a half of a chocolate bar between them.) They made it back to town around 4:30pm just in time to file the papers that they had picked up from Kiev. We didn’t see him until around 6pm. It was a whirlwind trip for him. He didn’t get to read, sleep, rest or anything for all the BUMPY roads between here and there, as well as the very loud Ukrainian disco music that Rostov, and all of the other Ukrainians, like to play. Around noon I did hear that they had made it to Kiev, so I felt better. Marina says that hopefully with all of the running around that they did, we will may have Veeka’s passport by Saturday or possibly Monday. With any of those days, we are still scheduled to come back to America on October 13, leaving Kiev on the 12^th.

Caleb and I pretty much stayed and did our normal days events. We went the baby home and had our 37^th and 38^th visits with Veeka. We were desperate for some new things to play with, so we took our new chalk and the new Little People airplane for her to play with. We are all so ready for a change of pace from the baby home visit. She did really well with just Caleb and me. I thought she might be mad at us for not bringing Papa, but she did really good.

Day 24 – October 3 – Today we found the most amazing place; it is probably a good thing that we found it more towards the end of our trip than at the beginning. If we had found it during the first part of our trip we would be a lot poorer and fatter. When we were in Yekaterinburg, one thing that we loved that the lady cooked for us was something Russians call blenni. Blenni is similar to a very flat pancake - almost like a crepe. Any time Natasha wants to make us something, we ask for blenni. In our Ukraine book it talks about a vendor, Blinko is the name, that just sells blenni and today we found it!!! Yeah, we were so excited! We had it twice just today. It was so amazing!! We are definitely going back there. We had two with cheese inside and one with chocolate. YUMMY! Caleb called the one with cheese inside a quesadilla, and we
really couldn’t argue with him…he kind of had a good point.

Today was a little different because we chose to only go to the baby home once. It has really been wearing on us with the craziness of our daily visits. We have been doing this for so many days and have pretty much seen her twice everyday. It was almost like a morale booster day. We went to the baby home and had our 39^th visit with Veeka this morning. She was so excited to see Papa! We played with a little ball that we had bought and she loved it. We played “soccer” for most of our time with her. She had a melt down at one point. It is always over something silly, but nevertheless, she still cried. We kept telling and consoling her by telling her “no crying” so we could play and eat our snack, etc. During this lovely event, she started saying something that we couldn’t quite understand; after a time she started saying it more clearly “no crying…no crying…no crying.” Who knows what she thought she was saying or if she really even knew what it meant, but it was pretty sweet to hear her saying “no crying” through the tears.

After our trip to the baby home, we came back to the hotel, refreshed a little, got a taxi and went to the “big” grocery store named Fox Mart. It was fun just to see other things that are not at the little grocery store we go to everyday. We bought a few food items, a blank DVD (to burn pictures to), Pull-Ups for the airplane ride, and a coloring book. It is just fun to look at something different. We then found our way back to a pedestrian street (about a 10 minute walk from Fox Mart) and then to Lebed Plaza, the main city square. While we were there it started to rain so we found a taxi and came back home. It continued to rain so we laid around and watched “Meet Me in St. Louis” and ate soup. All in all, it was a good day.

It's Greek to me!

Day 22 – October 1 – October has been a good month so far. Not much to complain about yet. We did have an interesting day though (don’t get your hopes up). We started our day like any of our last days here in the Ukraine. We get up, eat breakfast, walk to the baby home, play with Veeka, come back to the hotel, eat lunch, and then…we got a phone call from Marina. She told us that one of us needed to get ready to go get Veeka and take her to the passport office. We were not expecting to do this until Wednesday, so we were happy to get it done a few days early. Veeka and Mama went with Marina, Gene, Todd (the husband from Georgia) and his son Thomas to the passport office and sat for around 1 and a half hours (the passport offices here are not any more exciting than the passport offices in America). We were all glad that we brought toys and a snack. Both Veeka and Thomas were very good. We got started on all of our paperwork for her passport and now all we are waiting for is her birth certificate to arrive from Kiev; Monty leaves in the morning to get that taken care of. The sad news is we did find out that we cannot take her from the baby home until we have ALL, including the passport, of her paperwork, which means Friday at the earliest. So here is the special request time, we need to say a special prayer for her passport to get here by this Friday before the close of business.

Because we had to run to the passport office, we only got to go to the baby home once. We played and played this morning and she had a great visit. We ate some yogurt, played chalk and dug through my bag. She pretty much found anything that was in there. We played with Papa’s jump drive (on and off her neck), she put glasses wipes in her pocket, and enjoyed adding some powder to her nose. She is a girl when it comes to makeup.

Caleb is still doing good. He loves doing his homework, which makes it easy for us to get it done. He talks about all of the things he is going to do when he gets home. He hasn’t complained at all about being here, but I know he will love getting to be home for a while. On British Airways everyone receives a few items for the trip including a sleeping mask. We have all used these masks at different times. Caleb really thinks they are great and he goes to sleep quickly when wearing them. I think it is pretty cute that our little guy likes to wear it. I did forget to tell you about Caleb and his sermon on Sunday for church. He was going to preach but needed a bible. The first bible he found was Monty’s Greek bible. He very quickly decided that it was NOT what he needed to be reading from…”This isn’t in English!”

Happy last day of September!

Day 21 – September 30 – Happy last day of September! (It is also the Ukrainian parliament elections.) We may have only one Sunday left before we leave to come back to America. Isn’t that really crazy? We have just finished our third full week here in the good ol’ Ukraine. It really has felt like a short time.

Today it was supposed to be rainy…and there hasn’t been a cloud in the sky all day. It’s good to know that the weather men get it wrong in other places other than the US. Our 34^th and 35^th visits were really good. Monty had bought some chalk yesterday, just to give us something new, and we all loved it. I hope we don’t get into trouble because we have pretty much marked up all around the place. The chalk breaks pretty easily and we made Caleb and her use the smaller pieces before getting new ones causing a little melt down. Other than that, all was good with Veeka and our visits. It was about the same sort of visits as it had been the last week or so, walnuts, bubbles, and the playground. It is more and more difficult to take her back without much of a fight. She is ready to come with us and we are ready for her to as well. Hopefully in the next day or two, we can celebrate her Gotcha Day.

Veeka is learning so much. She holds the ball and counts, 1, 2, 3 and then throws it. She gives kisses (although some might be slobbery and you might want to anti-bacterial your face afterwards) and when we first got here, she didn’t know how to do that – she still gave the baby open mouth kisses. She knows when asked, how old she is, where most of her body parts are, and who her Mama, Papa, and “Calem” is. (She really likes “Calem” and thinks he is really cool.)

During our break between visits, we spent some time with Sylvia (the mama from Spain). She is by herself right now and she invited us to go to downtown with her for our break. She was planning to stay the whole break downtown, but we could only stay for a few hours. It was really nice to visit with her and get to know her better. We talked adoption, church, kids, families, jobs, etc. We played at a park, ate at a buffet style restaurant, and then Caleb played on some motorized cars. The restaurant was pretty good – we could definitely go back there. Don’t be fooled by the sound of buffet style restaurant…it was no Golden Corral...it had about 5 vegetable type items, 10 main dish items, and a few desserts, but all in all, it was really good. We probably stayed downtown with her about 2 Ѕ hours and really enjoyed ourselves. (And I know she enjoyed the company.) We will miss getting to see her and her family when we leave in a few days.