Finished!

Embassy of the United States of America
Kyiv, Ukraine

Congratulations on your successful adoption!

Superstitions are for pagans. Today, Friday the 13th, is a day that the Lord has made, and we rejoice in it!

In July of 2007, we started on our adoption of these two great kids. Today, Friday, February 13th, we completed everything. We are done. All that remains is to come home.

We were able to get the kids' American visas today. I must give credit to the personnel at the US Embassy, Officer Egli at the DHS/USCIS office in Bloomington, MN, our social worker, your prayers, and the Lord, for a speedy resolution to our problem.

Due to an oversight on my part, I did not provide our updated homestudy to the Dept. of Homeland Security. Incredibly, I was able to get another updated homestudy from our social worker, and get it processed and approved by the US Government all within 24 hrs.

We lost a day here in Kiev due to my screw up, but as it turns out, we would have lost a day anyway because the machine that prints visas at the Embassy was broken down on Thursday.

We fly out at 5:35 AM from Borispil airport. Ugh, we have a 2:15 AM wakeup call. We will fly into Chicago and stay overnight, then continue on to Sioux Falls on Sunday afternoon. If you'd like to meet us at the Sioux Falls airport, we are coming in on United flight UA5965 on Sun. Feb 15 arriving at 2:30 PM. We would love to see you there.

This will be our last blog post from Ukraine. What an adventure this has been. Our SDA appointment was on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 27, 2008.


Here's a few pictures.


Valentina and Sergey waiting for our ride to the US Embassy to pick up their American visas. We were also moving from our apartment to a hotel. We had to stay a day longer than anticipated.



The kids playing with $8500 that I paid our facilitator today. This was our 3rd and final payment. They were quite amazed, it is equivalent to 69,700 grivna.



All the running around in Kiev caught up with the kids.



Each child has a sealed envelope that we received from the US Embassy today. We have to keep them in our carry on bags on the airplane and must present them unopened at our US Port of Entry. It contains all of their official immigration documents. The US visas are affixed to a page in their Ukrainian passports.



We also received instruction sheets from the US Embassy that tell us what we need to do at this point. The sheets are very helpful, and start with the quote that I have above.