Logistics and Language

Logistics are a bit of a wrinkle. We have arranged for the kids to come with us to Ukraine for the entire time. Essentially, we will home-school them for a month, but will follow the chapters they would be covering in school. We can keep up with homework by using email. I'm sure it won't work out as easily as we hope, but the school is being very flexible. That's another advantage of a small Christian school.

We have yet to nail down when Claire (and perhaps Colin) will return to Charlotte. They might come home early, or may stay the whole time. I guess that means we will need to get them tickets with adoption fares (so their return date can be flexible).

We need to nail these dates down soon though, as tomorrow is 30 days from our departure date....

I really have to get going on my Russian. I waffled for several months as to whether to try to learn some Russian or Ukrainian. Ukrainian is the national language but from what I understand Russian is more predominate, especially in the eastern portion of the country.

I finally decided to try to learn some Russian as it might be more useful. I have volumes I, II, and III of the Pimsleur Russian program. We'll see how that goes.

Weather Widget

Well, I'm kind of psyched. I got the weather widget working (after several hours of trying). Just a tip. If you click on the links in the widget, it will try to open the link in that tiny window. Instead, you should right-click on it and select "Open Link in New Tab" (Firefox) or "Open in New Tab" (Internet Explorer).

Another odd thing is that sometimes the weather map shows up (bottom half of the widget) and sometimes it does not.

I still would prefer to widen the panel so the entire widget would be visible.

Oh well. In time.

Kicking it off...

Nancy and Nick are in our mid-40s and have two children, Colin (14) and Claire (13, as of tomorrow). We are a Christian family living in Charlotte, NC.

This past spring, we decided to begin the process to adopt a child from Ukraine. We are looking for a child between 4-10 years old (more on that later....).

We completed our dossier in September and were expecting to travel to Ukraine around February, 2009.

Well, big surprise to us. We heard last week that we are now schedule to meet with the SDA in Kiev (henceforeth "Kyiv", the preferred spelling) on December 17th. So we are in catch up mode.

In this blog, we will describe the process of adopting as a future record for our family as well as a guideline for other families considering adoption.

Like many other families, we are just beginning our blog shortly before our travel. But I know from our experience that info on the process so far would be helpful. In some of the future posts, we will fill in some of the detail on the process to date.