Day 6, Friday April 20

It is almost noon. It was nice to get a good night's sleep after our train ride and busy day yesterday. Our Internet connection was established today, so we will be able to post more details tonight. We will be heading over to the boarding school to visit with Natasha around 2:00 pm. Our facilitator is working this morning on getting the conclusions from the regional juvenile authority. We need to get this sent to Kiev as soon as possible, so we can get our official consent to adopt for our court date. If we don't get our court date scheduled before the upcoming May holidays, it would add about a week to our trip. Once we have our initial court date, there is a required ten day waiting period before we can pick up the new birth certificate and travel back to Kiev for the final paperwork with the US Embassy. The ten days is ten calendar days and would include the holidays and weekends. Also, there is a good chance Natasha will be able to stay with us after our initial court date. We also found out that Natasha's birth city is a small town outside of Donetsk. We will have to travel there, once we have received our official adoption decree following the ten day period, to get the new birth certificate. This could be an adventure in itself because our facilitator did not recognize the name of the town. She mentioned it must be a small town and she would have to look it up on the map to find out how far we will need to travel.

We did not get many pictures of Natasha yesterday. We were too busy hugging her or running around. We will get more today. However, here is a picture of Gail and Natasha right when we first met.