Adoption journey story part #3

Since my journal entry was 8 pages long for this day and most of what is written is very private information or personal feelings, I am choosing not to write all of that here. You will have to just let me paraphrase what happened for you.

April 3, 2003-

We left at 4:30 in the morning from Kiev to travel to Cherkasy, the region where we would be adopting our girls. We had to stop and pick up the Inspector before heading to the orphanage where the oldest girl( age 4) was living. (Lets call her A) After we arrived the director went and got her for us. She came walking in wearing a red dress with ponies in her blond hair sticking out all over. She had big blue eyes and was so pretty. She seemed nervous but came right over to Mike and stood by him. The director made her recite a little poem that she had memorized and she seemed to do a good job, but not that we would really know since we didn't understand Ukrainian. We got to go into a separate room and play with her. It was hard because we couldn't understand each other, but we played peek-a-boo and she thought it was fun.
Then we left and went to meet her littler sisters at the baby orphanage on the other side of town. The doctor for the orphanage came in and spoke to us in English and I was relieved a little at that. She had the girls come in. The older one (we will call her S), who was three, came over to me after being prompted to and sat on my lap. She had a frown on her face and the doctor told her to smile and she did and it LIT up her entire face!! She is really cute. Another blondy with a really bad orphanage haircut (short) and blue eyes. The youngest girl (We will call her Aa) was teensy. She looked to be the size of a 9 or 10 month old and they said she was 20 months old. She had brown hair and brown eyes and she just cried the whole time and wouldn't let me hold her. They took Aa away after a few minutes and we got to go with S to where her groupa played to see her in action. She played really well with the other kids and we watched her do a puzzle game.
Then it was time to leave the orphanage and make our choice. Yes, they actually expect you to make those kind of life-changing choices that fast. We asked if we could go eat first. I was a little nauseas after not eating for so long and being pregnant (which no one there knew). We went to the McDonalds in the town and ate and then Sergei pressured us again to decide. Mike and I walked off alone to talk for a bit. We made our decision and went and told Sergei and Nikolai (our driver). They both hugged us and said congratulations.
That meant that we had lots of paperwork to do, so off we all went to get our apartment rented for the duration of time that we would be in Cherkasy. We got one that a lady rented out to people adopting all the time. The rent was $30 a day. Pretty reasonable. Then we had to go to the Notary's office to get the petition to adopt written up and signed. We signed so many papers that day! At one point, Sergei came in and asked us if we wanted to change the girls names. We said that yes, we would like to do that and he said, "okay, I will be back in 5 minutes to write them down so that we can get that paperwork done today also." Five minutes? Wow! So we changed their names to American-ish names. A was changed to Meghan Mae (after grandma Nancy's middle name) and S was changed to Rachel Eve (after grandma Eve) and Aa was changed to Jennalyn (closest thing to Jana, without actually being the same name).
Then we went to the Internet cafe to email everyone but couldn't get connected. I wish we had been able to take pictures of the girls on that meeting day, but that is not allowed until you actually decide to proceed with adoption.

*In case you are wondering...children ages 0-3 are housed in the Detsky Dom or baby orphanage. When they turn 3, they are moved to the toddler orphanage. I don't know at what age they leave there. I guess around 7 or 8 when they are school age and then I think they go to like a boarding school type orphanage where they stay until they are 16. At that point they are then basically kicked out to go fend for themselves. That is the reason that the girls were in two different orphanages. Rachel was three, but had just had her birthday and hadn't been moved yet. Also, another amazing fact is that they became available for adoption the week prior to us being there, but no one else had been given their referral to go see them. We were the first!!