We have made it home!  We are so glad to be here with our new family!!  This has been an amazing journey.  I haven't been able to update like I had hoped, too due to time and availability of the internet, but it has been great.  I was suprised when I saw how few posts I had done.  It seemed like I was always doing them!!  Anyway, thank you for following with us!! 

 

Last time I wrote, we had just gotten the children from the orphanage.  It was a little scary, to be honest, to take them home and know that they would be ours forever and ever!! What if they don't like us?  We had had several 2-3 hour meetings, but what would happen when they were with us ALL the time? We couldn't believe how good it would be.  Luckily, God had chosen the children for us.  Chelsea and Cody really settled in well with our family and the family we lived with.  They very easily would come and sit on our laps and give hugs and kisses.  They would just smile and play like they had been there for years.  Cody is very shy!  He will engage well, but usually gives his beautiful shy smile and lowers his head giggling.  It is so endearing!!  They five kids spent the last few days in Lugansk swimming in the pool.  We also had our wonderful friend Denis take us to the park.  We took the kids on several carnival type rides.  Cody loved ALL the rides.  I hope that I can download the pictures because they are unbelivable!  He would scream in fear and then scream with delight just seconds later.  He couldn't get enough of the adrenaline it seems. He was very excited and ran from place to place.  Chelsea wanted NOTHING to do with the rides!!  She wanted to watch Mikey ride the power wheels.  She spent the time hugging on Thom and I and walking hand in hand with us.  She is quite the young lady!! She laughs so easy and is readily pleased.  We only had a couple of days in Lugansk before we headed back to Kiev.

THE TRAIN:  If you have never been on a train in Ukraine, it is deffinately something worth doing.  We decided to take the children back to Kiev by over night train.  We had a wonderful send off from Iina, Denis and Sasha. Lianna, Marina and Anna said good bye at the house.  We were all in tears as we said good bye. It was so hard to say good bye to our new family.  We will surely miss them!!  I have very much fallen in love with Lugansk and hate to leave it, but know that we will be headed home soon, and this is a huge step forward.  Tommy, Jessica and Mikey were amazed!  We played games and ate the dinner that our wonderful Lianna packed for us. 

Sorry, I have to cut this short, but I will write more later!