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.