Our First Real Visit to the Orphanage

We just got back from seeing our little girl and being with her whole "group" of eleven at the orphanage during their play time. There are five girls and six boys of 2-3 years of age in this one building with 3-4 caretakers watching them. (There are babies in another building on the property.) In the hour that we were there, two different doctors stopped in to check on things. It was far better than we could have ever imagined. One of the caretakers named Maria gave me a tour of the small facility. Each room was just renovated, with fresh paint and new looking furniture. There was a play room, a sleeping room, bathroom, small kitchen (the food is made in another building and brought over for each meal), and a room with tables for eating and lockers to keep all of their clothes and jackets in. The floors had nice clean tiling with carpets on top of some of them. The room that the kids slept in had very new looking cribs that were all the same in three perfect rows. The cribs had matching bed linens on each one. The bathroom was very clean with potties lined up along the walls and hooks for each child. Outside there were three separate playgrounds with nice equipment, each for a different age group. It was impressive. Paul chased our little one around the room for a lot of the time. She absolutely loved it. Every time he caught her, he would tickle her and she would laugh and run away from him again. You could tell how much she loved the attention and to be held. Even in one day you could see how much more comfortable and affectionate she was with us. We had a 19 year old boy (or do I call him a man?) come to translate for us. He sat between Paul and me at church last Sunday and had translated the entire service for us. He is studying to be a translator at the university here and was so kind to us. He was very helpful because up until he arrived, Paul and I were doing a lot of charades trying to communicate with the three caretakers. We hope that we can go visit her everyday. My only fear is that I'm going to want to adopt the rest of the precious 2 and 3 year olds in the room! Forgive me for giving so much detail, but I want our daughter to be able to read this one day and learn more about what her life was like before we met her. Tomorrow we will find out our next steps. Our facilitator told us to renew our apartment for three weeks so we took care of that today. Three weeks seems like a long time, but Paul will be able to leave after court, which should be in a week or two. Thankfully our apartment is in the center of Lviv so we can walk to grocery stores, restaurants and shops very easily. They say it's the most European city in Ukraine with the most beautiful architecture. We feel very blessed to be here. Another day I'll have to write about all of the funny things we've accidently bought and said while trying to live in a place where we can't even recognize the letters of the alphabet! Many of you had told me that you cannot make a comment on our blog. I would have LOVED to have heard from you and apologize for that. I will look into this. In the meantime, we are getting e-mails and would love to hear from you!