Separation is approved!

We heard from our facilitator that separation is approved!  After some paperwork is submitted, separation will be finalized.  Then we wait approximately 10 days before we go to court with the girls.  After that there will be a 10 day waiting period.  Then we take the girls out of their orphanage.  They can't wait for that day!

A day in the life of the crazy Americans... 

Our days are pretty slow with not a lot to do.  A usual day follows.  We wake up late for us, about 9 to 10 a.m.  We're becoming lazy!  Then we will shop for groceries if needed and explore Balta a little more.  We read and play games and cook our meals.  Then about 2:30 p.m. our translator comes by and we travel 17 miles to the girls' internat (boarding school).  We have a driver who drives us.  We visit with the girls for 1 hour and 15 minutes (used to be 2 hours until director cut the time down.)  We work on their English, give them a snack and then, if it's warm enough, go outside and play on the playground.  The girls love to play tag with us - doesn't require a lot of words and they have a lot of energy.  The person who is it is called "salo" (pork fat) and when they go to tag someone they might say "Privet salo" (Hello pork fat.)  It is so funny.  Thank goodness I have been running, although you'd never guess if you took a look at me that I ran a half marathon almost a year ago!  Then we are driven back to our hotel where we might shop if we didn't earlier and need groceries, make dinner and then read or play games.  We'll stay up until about 11 p.m.  We want to go to bed earlier, but the pizza place next door is busy, loud and open until 11.

A lot of little things happen throughout the days.  For example, one day we decided to deal with our light at night situation.  The pizza place next door leaves a light on at night that shines directly into our bedroom window only about 10 feet away.  Our curtains aren't thick enough to stop enough of the light so we put up a couple of our empty suitcases on the window sill.  We laughed to ourselves that people would think we are crazy.  The suitcases block the light a little, but the window is big and rises far above the suitcases!  So we took our translator over to the pizza place and spoke with the owner about it.  Come to find out he owns the hotel too!  He told us to shut our curtains.  We told him that we do, but it's not enough so we had put up the suitcases.  At that point he told our translator that he had thought we were crazy Americans when he saw the suitcases in the window!  The owner grumbled a bit about turning off the light and said he'd do it for one night.  Thankfully it has been turned off most nights since then.