Our 2001 Adoption - part 2

MEETING DMITRIY A nurse brought us in a tiny little blonde haired blue eyed boy - screaming at the top of his lungs! His name... Dmitriy. Nina told us "you have to take this one too..." We played on the floor with the two little boys. Dmitriy sat on Johns lap for a while... no longer scared - but refused to give us a smile. He was very serious! At 17 months old - he was very small and had just started walking on his own. We played with both boys for awhile. During this time, we were not pushed hard at all to decide on the adoption. It was late afternoon when Nina finally asked us if these two would become our sons. After a brief discussion - we decided that they were the ones.

OUR FRENCH TRANSLATOR, SVETLANA

Not long after making the commitment to start paperwork, we were ushed back into the Directors office (thankfully she was gone for the day) and we started talking to the Asst. Director, Lydia (who is now the director). Nina told us that she had to go back to Kiev... uh oh. In the room was an attractive dark haired woman. She was introduced to us as Svetlana. Svetlana was to be our translator during our stay in Kremenchuk! We talked for a few minutes and thought - no biggie.. until she told us that she is truly a FRENCH translator and does not know English very well! UH OH! Nina told us that she was unable to find anyone else to help us while she was gone. We figured that as long as Svetlana could get us around and could understand the basics, we would be fine. Svetlana left - telling us that she would see us in the morning at our hotel.

THE NOTARY AND NAMES

Nina and our driver wisked us off to the "attorney" aka a notary - to start signing papers. We get to a nice office and wait in line. Nina introduces another large older woman named Ludmilla. She is apparently our "attorney" or something like that! This woman spoke awesome English! She was excited to meet us and talk to us! She was very nice and put us at ease, until Nina came over and said "What will their (the boys) names be? We need it now for the papers..." Ummmm... NOW? Names were not something that we had thought about AT ALL! Nina gave us like 5 minutes to come up with names! Wow! We decided to keep the boys Ukrainian name as their middle name. We came up with Alex and Jason. After signing some unknown papers - Nina took us to our hotel.

HOTEL KREMIN

Nina and our driver took us to this odd looking hotel that sat next to a large town square that had a statue of Stalin. Very communist indeed! We were quoted a price of $45 a night, which included our own bathroom with hot water. Before we commited, we were shown the "nicest room they had"... lets just say that it was nicer than alot of other places that we could have stayed! Down the hall from our room - it reeked badly of sewer gas! I think that we were on the 5th floor, and we had a little balcony... whoo hoo!