Take a seat before reading this...

Greetings from Kiev,

Monday was an uneventful day as we had hoped it would be. We wanted to take it easy in preparation for our big day at the State Department of Adoptions (SDA). We walked to downtown Kiev and watched some peaceful political rallies, I bought some handsome sunglasses (Andrea calls them women's sunglasses - I call them Unisex) and we grabbed a meal. We hit the underground mall downtown as well - had a good time.

Last night we decided to stay up until 10 or so and then go to bed in preparation for our big meeting @ 10AM on Tuesday. The problem was neither of us could sleep - probably a combination of nerves and the fact that our internal clocks are still screwed up by the travel.

Now onto the interesting stuff...We had our appointment at 10am this morning. Sasha & Valentina picked us up and drove us to the SDA (Olga met us there). We were greeted by a nice young woman named Tatianna who would be our translator for the meeting. She brought us up to an office where we met Alana- who was the psychologist that would take us through the process of selecting a child. She was very nice as well. We were comforted by warm smiles and handshakes on arrival. Alana gave us information and pictures of four different children ranging in age from 2-4 years of age. Each child had some type of issues and as she took us through each child the issues seemed to be getting progressively worse. Almost all of the children here have developmental challenges some ranging from mild to severe.

It was at this point that I (Chris) spoke up and asked if they had any siblings that might meet our criteria. Alana pulled a folder with twin boys - YUP - TWIN BOYS. Yevgen and Daniel Kremin will be three years old on August 30th. These boys were by far the healthiest children that were presented to us so...they have some developmental delays and some other minor problems due to a lack of nutrition. So sit down now - WE ARE GOING FOR IT!! As of early this AM we were sold on one boy but you know us - we can't do anything the easy way!!

The process from here on out goes like this:

* Tomorrow we pick up our formal referral from the SDA for these two children
* Thursday morning we will leave Kiev from Dnipro...region to go meet the boys. The town where the orphanage is located is about 250 miles from Kiev. We will take a high-speed train there early Thday morning and will either see the boys on Thursday afternoon or Friday morning. We should know shortly soonafter if these are the boys for us - wish us well and keep us in your prayers.

The only other thing we know about Dnipro... is that it is one of the most expensive regions to adopt from and things tend to take longer than other regions. Hopefully this does not turn out to be the case but we will see.

All in all we are bit overwhelmed with things but we are going to take the rest of the day today to absorb and decompress!! The SDA experience was far better than we anticipated which is a load off of our minds. Now comes the next step of the process - which we hope goes as well.

This is it for now - we'll update after we meet the boys assuming we have internet access which may not be a good assumption. We'll do our best.

Take care,

C&A