We're here and have someone to meet tomorrow...

First things first, we have had our appointment this morning and were presented with one child: a little blond-haired, dark-eyed, chubby-cheeked, healthy 21 month-old girl. We are still in joyful shock. When asked if we wanted to meet her, it was really one of the easiest choices we've made. We expect to meet her tomorrow after we pick Jonathan up. Yes, she lives close to Kyiv. So, we'll be staying put for a while. It seems that many prayers have been answered.

Now, let's jump back a bit...
Travelling this far is a little bit of a challenge to the system. Generally the travel went well. We had a brief stop in Winnipeg and a slightly longer one in Toronto - which both went fine. Mostly, Darren wandered around and Shona read her book! The overnight flight was also fine. I (shona) slept a little for a few hours, Darren only slept for a few minutes. Arriving in Frankfurt we were greeted by thousands of people crammed into a relatively small ''connection center'' surrounded by the lovely scent of cigarette smoke. We are very thankful for the smoking laws in Canada! Frankfurt had very few places to sit and rest and seemed poorly organized. We managed to find our gate and a place to sit at a table. I grabbed a few more winks of sleep (getting a nice wrinkle on my face from my jacket) and Darren read the paper. Our plane arrived late and thus left late - so we had many more lovely minutes waiting there. On arrival in Kyiv, we managed to get through passport control (no smiles from the officer there!), gather our luggage (it all made it fine) and get through customs with relative ease. Lesya and Irina (our facilitators) met us there. They took us directly to our appartment which is in a very nice area, with this Internet Cafe, grocery, bakery (very important!) and money exchangers close by. The drive here was an adventure. With lots of traffic, our driver was 'creative'. We thought sidewalks were for pedestrians and lane markers were to divide cars going different directions. We are learning new things.
Our appartment is nice - it has 2 main rooms (1 bedroom and living room + kitchen and bathroom) and has recently been updated. We will be very comfortable there. On arrival we settled in and Shona crashed for a few hours. Darren watched BBC newsworld and somehow managed to stay awake. Unfortunately we missed the opportunity to email and blog as the Cafe closed at 7 - just before Darren got there. (We appologize to those of you who were anxious to hear from us. We'll try not to do that again!) On returning home, we had a minor crisis as the door lock wouldn't open and Darren was locked out and I was locked in for several minutes. How to get the adrenaline rush in 1 easy step. Eventually I did something right and the door opened. We crashed early and slept poorly - with both of us awake for several hours in the middle of the night. The rest of today (our appointment was at 10AM), we'll spend doing some food shopping and relaxing at the apartment.