Train ride

Hello friends, its 5:00pm here and we have been on the train now for the last 2 hours! Our train is due to arrive at 3:00am. Unfortunately I am in a cabin with people I don't know, but I'm ok now. I was afraid at first, but I am fine now. I don't have to much to report today since most of the time we will be on the train. I will try to get some sleep! I will report in tomorrow. God Bless!
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Hurry up and wait

Good evening everyone, we left our apartment at 9:45am this morning. We needed to go to hope orphanage to have the director sign some paperwork that pertains to Alina's adoption. She was running late for the meeting, it turns out she had to stop and pick up a 3 year old boy and take him to her orphange. He has a 2 year old brother also, but his brother went to the baby orphange. The boys don't have a father and the mother left the young boys in an apartment for 1 month by themselves, no one knows where she went. So the boys went to the orphange! This is what was told to us. He is so cute! How? why? These are questions I always find myself asking. All the staff came out to meet him and comforted him. We had a nice visit with the dirictor, she voiced concern for Alina, and was very happy that we came for her. She signed the paperwork and we were on our way. Next stop the court house. Olga had us wait down stairs and said wish me luck and hurried up stairs to summit our dossier. She came back about 15 minutes later full of smiles and said it was excepted! Now we are off to have lunch. Lunch was good as always. We had time we didn't have to be to the notery until 2:00pm. After lunch it was time to go purchase or train tickets. We tried to get a train car all to our self but they only had 4 upper seats in 2 different rooms. This is disappointing for now David and I will share a room with 2 strangers. Oh well what do you do! now its time to meet the notery. She to was running late, she went to see her son in the hospital. Once she arrived there were many interruptions, but finally the documents were notarized! Finally we had to take our documents to the assistant inspector so she can write up our consent forms! She told us to bring them to her house so she could work on them tonight so that our paperwork would not be held up, so we got a cab. We got home and packed up our things for our long journey tomorrow. In the morning we will go back to the notery to have Tanya's paperwork notarized, which was smart thinking on Olga's part.! That way this part will be finished a head of time! Our train leaves at 3:30pm tomorrow and it will take us 12 hours to get there. The assistant director will pick us up at the train station at 3:00am and take us to a hotel. How nice is that, she is happy that we are coming. Tanya told her her parents are coming for her. How did she know this you ask? We never said we were coming for her. She just knew! Well have a good night. God Bless!
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Rainy day

Good morning everyone, it's 7:15am and I just set down with a cup of coffee and read the comments that everyone has left. I do want to apologize for not having pictures up on the blog. Here's the thing I only have my black berry. My phone is acting as my computer. So when we return home we will put pictures up. We do want to thank everyone for there prayers! We want to say hello to our 2 nephews Durrell and Denver who are our youngest followers. We love and miss you! We want to thank Julie for making the blog happen and keeping us updated. We want to thank Jamie, Julie, and Dad for the phone calls and e-mails! We want to thank Mom for taking such good care of Basil and the girls. Today it is raining so we will be running around in the rain. Its ok! Well I will go for now, need to get David a cup of coffee. Peace and God Bless!
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Early drip

Good afternoon everyone. This morning we got up at 6:00am which is really good since I haven't been sleeping that late. Which means we got a good nights rest! I made David and I some coffee and we relaxed and talked, well some time about 9:00am I noticed the toilet kept running, so I told Dave about this and he looked at it, well he fixed that problem then he noticed that the valve at the toilet was leaking. Well let's just say my nerves at this point got the best of me! I felt sick, here we are in someone's apartment and the pipe is leaking. I was worried that the ladies floor was gonna get ruined, so I called Angelina and she called the land lady. She came and started talking to us and of coarse we didn't know what she was saying so I called Angelina again to get her to translate. The land lady said don't worry it's not our problem. Which means it's not our fault. She was very nice and said someone would come to fix it. Angelina told us to go ahead with our plans to see Alina and someone would come while we were out. So we did. We had a nice visit with Alina. She was surprised to see us. She didn't know we were coming! She surprised us also yesterday while in the hospital she got her ears pierced by another child there! Well I guess she didn't feel the need to ask her parents. It's ok it just surprised me! We talked for about an hour then we had to go. Our driver was waiting and the meter was still running. Ha Ha! After we got back into Gorlovka we went to New York Street pizza place. American pizza place sort of! We ate then came back to our apartment. Once we arrived the door to our building was locked and the key that we are to use isn't like a normal key. So Dave kept trying to open the door but no luck! Well here I start to panic again. Before I knew it the door opened and at the door was a little older woman who so kindly tried to tell us how to unlock the door. I think I understand now, but time will tell. Once we get up to our apartment then we have 2 doors to unlock which takes awhile to do! Now we are back in our apartment for the rest of the day. Ooh wee my nerves are crazy! Dave and I wish Alina was here with us then we would feel more comfortable! In any case tomorrow we will do more paperwork and hopefully successfully accomplish some things. Take care and God Bless
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Moving day

Hello everyone, we don't have a lot to report today, but here is how our day has gone. We moved into an apartment today, by the looks of things someone lives here but is renting it to us for 4 days. It is a very nice apartment in Gorlovka. I don't really know where I am but its ok. Angelina's husband picked us up then picked up Olga then took us to our apartment, then took us to an Ukrainian restaurant dropped us off and went to pick up Angelina. We had a nice lunch. We talked for a while then Angelina and Nick left to celebrate Nick's birthday. Dave Olga and myself got a cab exchanged some money and headed off to the grocery store. After that we came back to our apartment and here is where we will stay until tomorrow morning. We are going to see Alina tomorrow. Yeah! Monday we will be busy running around doing paperwork. Then hopefully on tuesday taking a overnight train to see Tanya on Wednesday. We hope things will go as smoothly with her paperwork as Alina's has. We will keep you informed.
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David- Hello all
I figured I would try posting a little message. Have a few little stories about how God has watched out for us one occurred when we went to the SDA due to politics and the hurt on ukraine by the worlds economic crisis some one shut off the electricity to the SDA building due to payment issues we had our meeting anyway but they could not find tanyas documents and could not use the computer to locate them. While we were in our meeting they got a call that electric was back on and they were able to find them. Another was on our way to the train station we had a few hrs to kill so our drive asked us what we wanted to do we decided to go to a mall and eat and walk around. It was a few min from train station. We walked around and ate when we returned to our car their was men hooking a sling to our car and a few others. There was 2 crane trucks and a few flat bed trucks they use the cranes to lift the car and set it on the flat bed trucks. Had our car with all our belongs been taken we would have missed our train. Our drive spoke with the men and they said luck was on our side that night and unharmed our car. A new law states that if you catch them before taking it they have to give it back. The drives here have meet my expectations they due use every bit of road and acceleration their cars can give. They also use their bumpers to speed pedestrians across the cross walks. Ukraine could have saved some money painting the lines on the road. But it makes going exciting
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Keeps getting better

Ok let me start by saying I love Ukraine! Our day started at 4:00am, we had breakfast at 6:30am, then left the hotel at 7:00am. Olga picked us up and took us to the Minors Affairs Service where we met with the head inspector. During the meeting she asked us a lot of questions pertaining to children. What made is want to adopt, how did we meet Alina, how do we feel about Alina's condition, are we still interested in adopting her knowing that her condition is serious and so on. We answered honestly of coarse. We told her we love Alina and we will take care of her and as soon as we return home with Alina we will get her to the doctors, she said she would be interested in know what the doctors in America say. She feels American doctors are very good. We were in her office and talked for about an hour. At the end she said that she liked David and I very much. She feels that we are very good people and admires us for still wanting to take Alina in spite of not knowing what her condition is. We said she is our child and we won't turn our back on her. she told us of the apartment that Alina has and said we needed to decide what we wanted to do with it and she told us Alina has some money in a bank account but she doesn't know how much. We said we would talk to Alina on both accounts and see what she wants to do since these things belong to her! She gave us the approval to go to the hospital to see Alina, and her assistant went with us for her observation. We went in to the hospital and Alina came running out and gave us the welcome we had hoped for! She looks really good. Her face is back to normal and her speech is much better. Our little girl was very happy to see us! We hugged a lot and cried. She was sharing a room with about 7 other children whom she was so proud to introduce her parents to. Then before I knew it the assistant inspector pulled out some plain paper spoke to Alina in russian and Alina began to write. I asked Olga what was going on, she said Alina was giving us permission to adopt her! So long story short they gave their consent for adoption! How great is that! We did speak with the doctor and she said Alina had something a wrong with her muscels and would have to take medication for a long time, but her condition is cure able. We had to say goodbye to Alina because we had other paperwork to be done. So we went to her orphanage to get the paperwork done there. The director won't be there until monday so the social worker will do the paperwork and have the director sign them and Olga will pick them up on monday have them notarized and go to court to get a court date. So hopefully this will all be done on monday so Tuesday we can head of to see Tonya. Alina should return to her orphanage on Tuesday. So this is good news! We then went to have some lunch and David and I are now back in our hotel room. It is only 2:00pm so we will just relax for the rest of the day. Tomorrow we will get moved to an apartment, then I don't know right now what we will do for the weekend. Olga hopefully will do something with us. Maybe we will visit Alina again this weekend. So that's all to report for now. Today was another successful day. Thank you for your continued prayers. God Bless! The Quinnams
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