delays, frustrations, & disappointments...

Frustrated. That is what we are, what we feel. Our documents and paperwork are all in order and we went to the Judge today to find out our court date (after spending several hours – which is always fun – waiting in the car while Slava got documents from a couple of different places). Unfortunately, when we were at our last stop, the court, Slava came back to the car to tell us there is a problem. The Judge has left the court suddenly, today, due to her father passing away. He lived outside of Kyiv somewhere so we don’t know exactly when she’ll be back. Slava is hoping that she’ll be back at work on Friday so we can get a court date for Monday, but at this point we are expecting our court date won’t be before Tuesday (and maybe later). The worst part of all this is it’s no ones fault and there is absolutely nothing that can be done. She is the only judge that deals with adoptions in the Kyiv region so we must wait. Slava was obviously frustrated as well. Darren is disappointed. Perhaps we haven’t learned our patience lesson well enough yet. I’m trying to focus on the positives and to have some sympathy for the judge as the reason for this (what we consider to be terribly inconvenient and difficult) delay is due to the fact that her father has died. In the grand scheme of things, it is I’m sure, a small blip. We will survive and this too, shall pass. We will, however, be relying especially on all our prayer warriors at home and around the world to carry us through this. So it looks like if our court is (hopefully – we should know for sure on either Friday or Monday) on Tuesday May 15th, then we think we would get to take Ivanna out of the orphanage Friday May 25th and our flights home on the 30th should work ok (barring any more delays which, you never know, just may occur). They do need a couple of days after she ‘gets out’ to get her passport and visa ready. If we can still make it home on the 30th – we will be VERY thankful. Another positive is that we should be able to meet up with another Canadian couple who have been in contact with us and are arriving in Kyiv on the 26th of May. We should be able to show them a few important places (shawarma guy, internet places etc…), introduce them to the city and metro, and most importantly to Mario’s and Shokoladnitsa! :) Hopefully they won’t be staying too far away from us (although we really are pretty comfortable getting around now) – we’ll have to find out from Lesya (I think that she was actually hoping we’d be all done and gone by the time they arrived so that they could stay here!). Maybe we can pass on some of the things that Jonathan taught us to help them make it through. We don’t have any other exciting news and I seem to be out of positives to focus on. I will have to try to brainstorm some more. I’m going to try to woo Darren outside (after a cloudy and cool morning it has turned into a lovely afternoon) to see if we can still do something positive with the day.
Later…naps won out instead of getting out and about.
(D)We’re now at Mario's, the wi-fi is working and the sky is beautiful and clear blue. There are always a few more positives.