~The end of the 10 day wait~

The mandatory 10 day wait period is now over! THANK GOD!  During the 10 day wait that started after court there was nothing we could do as far as making progress towards coming home because you do not get the court decree until 10 days after court.  The plan for tomorrow is to wake up VERY early and go to the court house to get the court decree, travel about an hour or so to Gabby's birth district (Nova Kakhovka, Ukraine), which is still in the region of Kherson but is a seperate district to get her birth certificate and some other paperwork...I'm going to do my best to see if our driver and facilitator will drive us by the maturnity house where Gabby was born and stayed for 2 months prior to going to the orphanage, if they do I will take pics :), and then come back to this district and apply for Gabby's passport. The passport is a tricky thing and could be the one thing that holds us up here.  Apparently there use to be a passport here that was a "red passport" and it is rarely used anymore and there are limited amounts of them. The wonderful thing about this passport is it is issued the same day.  The blue/new passport takes 4-7 days to issue.  If tomorrow we get the red passport then on Saturday or Sunday we can bust Gabby out of the orphanage & travel back to Kiev (another 8 hour drive...but thankfully we do not have to take the 13 hour train ride back) and then go to Gabby's mandatory medical and embassy appts.  We would be able to leave for home on the 12th.  If we don't get the red passport then we can add another 4-7 days onto our stay :(  so lets pray for a red passport to be approved for us tomorrow or no later than Monday.

Now...onto some good news.  Yesterday we were able to take Gabby out of the orphanage and go with our driver and facilitator to have Gabby's visa picture taken!  We were able to dress her in some clothes we had bought and she was an absolute doll! We were afraid that she would be scared of the car ride because we had been told by caregivers at the orphanage that this is often the case for the children but not for little Gabby. She was amazed! She was watching everything and boy do I mean watching..nothing gets by her!  She was smiling & laughing and it was wonderful.  We got to take her for a walk down town up a beautiful old street (no pictures of this because we forgot the camera in the car at that point) and she loved it!  Gosh I can't wait to take her out of the orphanage and bring her back here with us...AND OBVIOUSLY TO GET HER HOME.  However, we must do this when we are close to traveling back to Kiev because until then we will be busy paperchasing and running back and forth and it would be very hard on Gabby. All of the changes will be a big enough adjustment to have to deal with but then to be traveling so much with her would really do a number on her...I'm sure.

Now...onto what you really want to see...THE PICS :) 

Who knows...maybe next time I post will be "Gotcha Day" and she will actually be out of the orphanage. We can hope & pray!

This is a picture of when I was getting her dressed for her visa picture :)  Look at those little jeans how cute!

She was literally trying to climb the walls here, lol.  She is ready to get outta there, haha.

She loves doing this. She laughs so hard she almost cries, hahaha.

Getting ready to go get her visa pic. taken

But first she had to give mama some lovings :)

Gazing out of the car window in amazement at all of the new things!

Nobody...and I mean nobody..loves spaghetti like this girl, LOL

Thirsty girl :)

Hope you all enjoyed the update. I have some videos that I need to post but blogspot is being a pain and not letting me right now. Hopefully soon though :)