How Things Are Going

Here's Rachel painting my toes while I read my birthday wishes from our kids back home.   I'm still lovin' my toes!

On Saturday night we went out to the market a few blocks from our apartment.  On the walk back we saw this band of teenage boys playing on the street.  A girl was walking around with a hat collecting donations.  For a few grivna we got to enjoy some great entertainment.

As we walked home we passed a young man playing his guitar singing Radio Head's "Creep."  Then he sang Rhianna's "Umbrella."  His buddy was steering a remote control car with a hat strapped to the top.  We also threw in a few grivna to encourage them.  Rachel asked the singer if he knew any Christian songs.  "Just one.  Joan Osborn's What if God was one of us?" :) (Just a slob like one of us.) It was fun hanging out for a few minutes before going back to our apartment.

When we visited our Big Boy yesterday we noticed that his hair was shorter.  He got a haircut!

It has been very hot here the past few days so we decided to do a morning visitb to beat the heat in the afternoon.  When we got to the baby house we were surprised to see tons of the kids out and about.  Now it looked like 121 kids lived here.  As soon as our Little One saw us his face lit up.  For the first time I took out my camera and asked to take a picture.  One caretaker asked another and they said yes! 

After this picture, John went off with our Big Boy to play with his groupa in the sandbox.  Rachel and I hung out with the babies.  With Rachel holding another little boy, I set down our Little One to take out my camera.  He must have thought I was returning him because he started to get very sad faced and had tears coming out.  My heart melted, and I quickly picked him back up.  It was just precious.

After an hour it was time to take the babies back upstairs to eat and nap.  They allowed Rachel and I to help with this task.  I decided to stick around and took the initiative to remove Little One's outside clothes and put him in a t-shirt and little underwear. 

Let me say--

The babies here are so chunky!

I then asked if I could feed him his kasha.

They said yes!

This was the highlight of my day!

But it made me kind of sad too.  After about 2 minutes into feeding Little One another baby began to be fed by a caretaker.  That baby was done before Little One was half way done because the food was shoveled so fast.  And here I thought I was feeding Little One fast-- apparently not fast enough.

All around us was crying babies-- all wanting to be fed at the same time. 

I wonder why they feed just one baby at a time while 3 or 4 others watch and cry.  I am no expert, but I wonder why they wouldn't make meal time more enjoyable by feeding three at once and having them take turns.

One bite for you.  And one bite for you.  And one bite for you.

After Little One was finished, I got to tuck him into bed for his nap.  Such a sweet treat for the both of us.

Once we were finished with Little One, we went back outside.

I was able to get a few pictures of the kids playing outside.  They all have to wear hats.
Unlike Dennis and Alex's baby house where they had not one single bucket or shovel to play with and when I brought them they were taken or stolen, this baby house has tons of things for the children to play with.

It was so hot that the sand was very dry so a nice caretaker brought out a bucket of water to wet the sand so the kids could actually build little castles with it.

Love this picture.  Like daddy, like son.

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Now to update you where we are in the process.

To our big disappointment, we did not have court today.  The document we needed to be signed by someone back in the capital was not, thus delaying court. . . again. 

As you can imagine, this has brought a lot of stress to John and I. . . a second time.  Such high hopes followed by disappointment.

How many more days before our boys are free?  How many days until we are united as a family?  

We have had to cancel train and plane tickets with an added cost but with things completely out of our control, there is nothing else to be done.

It is what it is.

We miss our kids back home so much.  We miss our family, our friends, our church.  We miss each day that our whole family can't be together.

 We trust everything will work out for the good of the Lord, but personally my faith is weak right now.  Lord give me strength.  We are away from our kids right now.  And it is so hard to be away.  But we trust that the Lord will provide beautiful, gracious hearted people to step up in our absence.  This is so very hard to do.  But we have seen it happen again and again and we are in awe that though things are completely out of our control, our Heavenly Father still has a perfect plan-- even when we don't.  We need to remember this when things don't go as planned.  I especially need to remember this as we wait for this document.

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Ring Ring.

Just in.  We got the document!  It will be on a train tonight.  However the judge is working on a murder case right now and has no room in his schedule.  He is going to work us into his schedule for this Friday-- we hope.

Please pray for mountains to be moved.