Well, I'm alive, anyway!! I haven't posted much because I've been traveling for 12 days, though I'm told it was only 2 1/2 days... (Feels like 12!)

Monday evening after court, Mark and our facilitator dropped me off at the train station for the overnight ride to Kiev. Boy, was THAT hard!!! I didn't think it'd be THAT hard to say goodbye!!! I felt like such a traitor for leaving! It just felt WRONG. But my brain knew it wasn't, even if every other part of me thought it was. It was horrible leaving. I wanted to jump off of that train soooooo badly.

Anyway, after the train arrived in Kiev at 8am, I went to the Embassy to sign some papers so that Mark could finish up when his turn came in 2 weeks. After that, I did some souvenir shopping (I love shopping!)and then went straight to the hotel at the airport. Got there by noon, but without air conditioning, and the temps outside around the 80's range, my room was so hot I couldn't sleep!! So I pretty much laid there and sweated until 3am when I gratefully went down to catch the shuttle bus to the airport to catch my 5:30am flight.

Met a really nice Ukrainian-turned-Canadian lady who was fascinated by my story about Reece's Rainbow and Erik and now she wants to adopt!!!

That flight took me to Frankfurt where I had a 7 hour layover (yes, 7 hours). I met some really sweet kids in the Ukraine airport while waiting for that flight. They were from CA and spent the summer in Ukraine visiting their grandmother. Delightful kids! On that flight, imagine my surprise when my 2 seat mates were a mother and newly-adopted son from Ukraine! She had an interesting story: she and her husband went to Ukraine to adopt 2 teenage girls. When they got there, they found out not only that they had a 12 year old brother, but that the girls decided they did not want to be adopted after all and they ended up with the brother!! Took 2 months and lots of headaches, but they were on their way home to AZ and they happened to be my seat-mates! Cute boy, seemed like a really nice kid.

Normally, I'm pretty shy and keep to myself when I travel, but this time I made so many friends! LOL I even sat in Frankfurt with my Ukrainian-Canadian friend and had lunch! Ha, ha!

After a LONG 10 hours, we made it from Frankfurt to Orlando and I was HOME!!! Mom and the boys were there to meet me, and it was sooooooooo good to be home. The streets here are very smooth, BTW!!!

I had 1600 e-mails waiting for me, hardly any of them junk - just mainly stuff from the child amputee group I'm with, and the Reece's Rainbow group. And, of course, a pile 2 feet high of regular mail!! Included in the regular mail were several letters from Natasha, which was fun. She sounds like she's doing GREAT! She sounds really happy and like she has a purpose now. For so long in high school all she did was party, and no doubt she knew she was going nowhere, with no direction. Now, she has a purpose and a plan and I think she's really happy about that. :o)

I am going to try now to put up a video montage, if I can figure it out. Wish me luck!!!