Finally Some Good News!

We had a good weekend with Flower. The director let her stay with us even over night! One of the reasons why he did it was that half of the kids at the orphanage are sick. So we picked her up on Saturday morning and did some shopping. She was so sweet that she said "thank you" and gave us hugs and kisses after every thing we bought for her! I wonder how long this will last... The rest of the day we spent at home. We brought her a coloring book with some mazes and challenging games in it. I noticed she doesn't give up right away and doesn't ask for help. She tries to figure things out on her own. Also we noticed she is a picky eater. Well, this will change: I use a system that worked fast with Anastasia. Right now we are on "our honeymoon", all the rules are out of the window. We stayed up late watching movies and tickling.

On Sunday we let Flower sleep until she wanted to. She has been teling us that she doesn't sleep in on the weekend and gets up at 8 or 9 AM. Well, she slept until 10:30 AM. I guess at the orphanage it gets too loud in the morning. We went slipper -shopping (we foud out she didn't have any slippers to walk around the house). Then I see Bob quickly trying to stop some people. Usualy my husband doesn't do this for no reason! And he doesn't know anybody here. At first I thought that maybe they tried to steal his wallet. But then I saw they were smiling. It was Flower's brother and his wife! What a surprise! We decided to go to a cafe and have some tea and talk. We had a good time! They asked me a lot of questions about life in America and I think they feel even more comfortable trusting Flower to us now.

Later that afternoon we went to the water circus. We were sitting in the 2nd row watching the show. Then a clown comes out and walks arownd looking for volunteers from the audience and comes straight to Bob ... OMG!!! Bob can't understand anything in Russian! This could be bad... He picks Bob and 3 more then the show starts. I was SO nervous! The clown gives Bob 2 crumpled beer cans with pebbles in them and wants him to do the "La-coo-ca-ra-cha" to the music followed by a swivel of the hips. The crowd liked that! Hey, that's MY HUSBAND! Then the other 3 do their part with other things. Then all of them do it with music playing. The clown comes back to Bob and asks him to do it again. He obviously didn't like what he saw, so he grabs a weapon (filled with air) and takes my hasband to the back, off stage behind the curtains. Then we hear a scream ... and the clown comes back alone ... without Bob ...! He had 4 candles burning, he comes to them and blows out the first one and finished with the sign of the cross (he killed Bob!!!). The people were laughing. It wasn't funny to me. I screamed in Russian, "Where is my husband?" It was too loud...nobody heard me. Flower said, "I'm afraid, I don't like it". I told her it'll be OK. In my brain I was thinking all kinds of stuff: they found out that he is an American and kidnapped him for ransom and we won't have money to finish the adopton or maybe they took all the money he has and killed him!!! I started to pray, "God, you didn't bring us so far to finish everything so bad. Please, plaese, please protect my husband. I need him and we need to adopt Flower". Then one by one the clown does the same with the other 3 people. I got it then: they couldn't kill all 4 people! Finally, they all hold hands coming out and take a bow. I don't remember the last time when I was SO HAPPY to see my husband alive!!! Thank you, God!!!





OK, now about the good news. I called the Russin Interpol on Monday. They said they mailed my clearance! So, it is on the way or maybe it is already in Kiev! It means we are not coming home without Flower! She was happy to hear that, too. She trys to guess when our court hearing will happen and counts the days. Yesterday we visited her for a little bit. When it was time to go we hugged her and told her "bye-bye". She said, "One day we won't say "bye-bye" to each other any more" and smiled. One day it will change. One day this girl will be an orphan no more.