This might be it...

What a crazy day we had yesterday. We got a call from our facilitator late on Monday night letting us know that SDA is inviting us for another appointment on Tuesday. They did not say what the appointment would be about - giving us another referral or sending us home.

For those who are following our blog - you know that this was our 4th appointment at the SDA which is rare. On our 1st appointment we were not given a referral due to lack of anything good to offer by the SDA. Our 2nd appointment resulted in a referral to visit a boy in Torez which we rejected upon learning the true health condition of the child. On our 3rd appointment, we were sent to Kharkov to meet a brother and a sister, which to our disbelief the director would not let us see because a foster family had already made a contact with them. So technically, we only saw a child once and we think that is why we were given one last chance.

We were hoping SDA would decide on our case on Monday and we got our answer. But it was very close that we almost did not make it... At 7pm on the day you have to leave - it is almost impossible to get an overnight train ticket, so our only option was by an overnight bus. We rushed to the bus station to make sure we can get a ticket to get to Kiev. We were able to purchase our tickets just in time! Around 6 am we were in Kiev, but we did not sleep all night... Anyways, we wanted to save money so we did not rent any place to stay for the day - we just toured the city and waited for our 4 pm appointment.

We had a couple of talks with other facilitators while waiting for our facilitator and our appt and I will share some interesting discussions we had for those who are submitting or waiting for an appt at a later time. At the appointment - we were shown 3 files. A 2 yr old boy and two other files with boys 9 and 11 years. It seemed that they pretty much decided that we should accept a 2 yr old because they did not show anything else. The older boys are way too old for us - we've only been married for 9 years... and I would have been way too young of a mom at 26 with a 9 or 11 year old.

The 2 yr old boy is located in Odessa, only 10-15 miles from where we currently live. He does have some medical issues which are not severe but he is not totally healthy. We believe he is in the orphanage called Sun - "Solnishko". We traveled back to Odessa once again on the bus and got home around midnight. We originally were going to depart at 10 pm since we didn't know how long the appointment would take, but we were able to re-book to a 6 pm departure with minutes to spare. Ruslan had to run to the bus driver and tell him that I am changing our tickets and for them not to leave without us.

We now had a well rested night and are gearing up to meet the boy tomorrow. Our facilitator will be picking up our referral document and traveling to Odessa today on an overnight train or bus. We're hoping this time SDA prints the correct information on the referral - the last two had wrong orphanage and wrong location... which caused more delays along the way.

Going to this appointment, we really did not hope for anything. We talked to another couple that was sent home without a 3rd appointment and we were not optimistic. But I know that God does have a plan for us and maybe this boy is meant to be ours. So if everything works out, we will be in Odessa for another 3-4 weeks. We were originally coming home on the 14th and will have to guess a new date if we decide to accept this referral. If it does not work out - we will be home on the 14th.

We thank you all that are praying and thinking about our family. May God bless you!

We will update on Thursday once we get to see the boy.