On their way!

John and our eldest daughters Haylee and Naomi left early this morning (3:30 am in the taxi) to fly back to the Ukraine. Our 10 day wait period is over and now they can go get the children out of the orphanage and work on coming home!

They made it safely to Chicago this morning and after a 5 hour lay over they will take their long flight to Frankfort this afternoon around 2:30 pm central time...
arriving in Frankfort at 5:45 am (9:45 pm our time I think) and then layover again, fly out at 9:50 am (1 am our time) on August 14th.

Please keep Johm, Haylee and Naomi in your prayers, as well as me at home with the 6 youngest... :) I will miss them so much, and the great help they are to me too but I'm so glad they can be there to help and spend time with their Daddy. Of course, I will greatly miss my husband and it will be very hard for our family being separated for so long, again, but we thank God that we are now working on getting Lily (Lacie, Lusa) and Joshua (Taras) out. We continue to pray for God to help us through it...

This morning we read and are starting to memorize Psalm 121:

"I lift up my eyes to the hills--where does my help come from?
My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot slip--He who watches over you will not slumber;
indeed, He who watches over you will neither slumber or sleep.
The LORD watches over you--the LORD is your shade at your right hand;
the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.
The LORD will keep you from all harm--He will watch over your life;
the LORD will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore."



They will arrive on Haylee's 13th birthday...she is very much looking forward to spending her birthday in the Ukraine like she'd hoped. They plan to go to have birthday dinner in Kiev with Irina our translator and then catch the overnight train to Odessa, then a taxi to Izmail again --arrive mid Sunday. They are very excited to see Lily (Lacie) and Joshua (Taras) finally. Haylee and Naomi will not get much time at the orphange this time (like last year) so they hope to at least have a party to give out cookies, balloons and little bracelets we made for the other orphans in their gropupas. Then they will get our new children out of the orphanage probably Monday evening, to be able to drive to their birth cities on Tuesday to begin the process of getting birth certificates, passports, medical exams and finally the US Embassy appointments.

They will be there about 2 weeks....we have tickets for them to fly home again on August 31st, but we hope it will go much quicker and they can come home sooner.
Haylee and Naomi will be taking over the blog over there...which they are happy to do!