How our BIG adventure started

The insanity...oops....I mean adventure started when Wendy watched the 10:00 evening news August 2006. They had a segment about a group of Ukrainian orphans coming to Colorado for 3 weeks on a cultural exchange who needed host families. The host family would feed and house the child and provide transportation to and from the activities. Wendy was working part-time and decided this was an adventure she was capable of handling. At this point, Joe was banging his head against the wall asking himself for the thousanth time why he married her (my adventures usually meant pain and suffering in the form of money or lost time on the golf course for him). We have 2 teenagers to deal with, why not cart around another child?

To make a very, very long and frustrating story short, we fell in love with our host child Nykolai (a.k.a. Kolya) Katsy before he even stepped foot in our house in March 2007 and decided if he fit into our bizzare family we would offer to be his forever family if he would take us. The "poor child" was bribed with Wal Mart toys and clothes (clothes which our children would never wear in fear their friends may find out) and "dragged" to Hawaii for a week (a trip that was pre-planned and had already been cancelled once due to a snow storm shutting down DIA......). After the 2.5 weeks of enduring crazy Americans, he decided that he would tolerate us as his forever family and accepted our offer of adoption.

As you can deduce, it has taken us over a year (13 months, 5 days and 4 hours to be exact, but who's counting?) to get to this point where we feel safe enough to develop a blog (where the h--- did they come up with that term?) to inform the limited number of people in the world who are patient enough to listen to our rantings about the adoption process and tolerate my run-on sentences, of our impending trip to Ukraine.

Our Dossier (I capitalize this because it cost us over a gazillion dollars to create and mail therefore it should have it's own identity) has finally been submitted to the Ukrainian government (on March 31, 2008) and they should be giving us a travel date by the first week in May.....2008. We hope to travel sometime in June.....2008, with our 2 teenagers. We are gluttons for punishment aren't we?

Hi, Joe here, I have read and approved the above message. By the way, blog is short for web log. Thank-you.