Document Day. Allllllllll Day.

I'm writing from the car now & probably will be most of the day. It's 10am & we're in the process of getting Mena's new birth cert. Natasha has been up since the crack of dawn securing places in line & running around to the bank to pay for the documents. She has hopes of getting everything done today & being on tonights train back to Kiev! My role is chief breakfast-getter, cheerleader, & words of calm & appreciation. We've already hit a snag in the plans- a single letter in the court decree was spelled wrong in the date, so she had to go all the way back to court to get a new copy of the entire thing. Then back to the birth cert office where she was dying of embarrassment because we sailed by an entire roomful of grumpy people giving us major stink eye for bypassing the line. What they didn't know is that she was second on line since this morning. Then we got there only to find out that the court did not send a copy of the judgement of parental termination last year... So after a flurry of phone calls, back to the courthouse we went to get this document, & this is where we are now, Vladimir the ever-patient driver & myself waiting in the car. See, this is all the stuff you don't know about that happens behind the scenes, & it's part of the reason that the expense of adoption is what it is. Everybody works so hard & has to be so meticulous every step of the way- and something will invariably happen like this. Murphy's law & all that. I said it's the same in Canada- it depends mostly on the mood of the person behind the desk & if you happen to get somebody who is willing to overlook little mistakes or not. Though not having parental termination is basically impossible to overlook! LOL. So after we get this, its back to the birth cert office we go to barge past the line again. I said if Natasha felt bad that I would go first like the dopey tourist who doesn't know any better so people could mutter angrily about me, ha. 

(Did I ever mention how much I'm going to miss Ukrainian radio stations? OMG, greatest music EVER! There is just a blend of really bizarre music from the early 80's that is unknown in North America- and I worked for a record store for years! Some of it seems to be Europop, some of it is English new wave that never made it across the pond, and the best is Ukrainian copycat versions of stuff like Pet Shop Boys... but the lyrics are pretty crazy & don't always make sense. Like chanting "Armani! Armani! Let's self-destruct! I've got a lover who will dance with me!" My fingers are sooo crossed that I can get Radio Carpathia at home on the Internet!) One of the best memories in fact was this time when Vladimir was taking Ois & myself to the orphanage & there was a Tina Turner marathon on, and we started singing in the car, so Vladimir turned the radio up louder and he was laughing at us. He thought we were bonkers, but he said, "Ah! The Tina Turner- good!" and we carried on the entire way. Such fun! I love Vladimir.

Jumping ahead to the end of the day, we got everything done eventually, although it took the entire day because after all the running around back & forth to the courthouse Natasha caught *another* mistake in the paperwork at the birth cert place- they spelled my last name wrong, and they had to retype it all again. And it took forever. 

I'm going to break there, and tell about Mena's first night in the hotel next, as I'm now catching up on all of this 4 days later!