Well, today has not gone as we had expected. The driver was late picking up Yulia from the train station this morning, so instead of leaving our place at 8:00 this morning, it was almost 9:00 before we left. Our first stop of the day was to pick up the court order that officially makes us Mikaela’s parents, and that took much longer than anyone of us thought. Yulia caught a mistake in one of the documents, and because there were ten copies of it, it was about an hour before all of them had been corrected and we could proceed to our next step, which was to get that court order notarized. This step went smoothly and fairly quickly, and Kristie and I were both encouraged at this point, and our excitement was growing. Then, just about thirty minutes ago, we got some news that is very hard to swallow. Yulia had taken Mikaela’s original birth certificate to the vital statistics’ office in order to have it re-done, this time with her full legal name, Mikaela Colleen Godwin. After waiting for nearly two hours, she reemerged from the building and told us that she had been told that they are too busy to process our request right now, but that we can return and pick up her birth certificate at the end of the day today (5:00 p.m. local time).  While we are glad that things are still moving, this means that, unless God changes things around this afternoon, there is no way that we can apply for her passport today, meaning that we won’t have it by the end of this week. There are still two steps that need to be done after obtaining Mikaela’s birth certificate before we can apply for her passport. At this point, it looks like we will have to wait until tomorrow morning to complete these last three steps, which also means that we are going to have to wait until tomorrow afternoon or possibly even Thursday morning to get Mikaela from the orphanage. This is all so frustrating because she is legally ours and we can go get her anytime we want, but with all of the running around town that still needs to be done, we remain stuck in the same situation that we were to start the day today. I am trying hard to remain thankful that we are still here and that nothing has gone amiss with her adoption, and that we are still very much on track to take her home with us. The disappointment comes in the timing of all of this. We long to have Mikaela with us, to have our family whole once more. We are also homesick now, and the thought that we could be departing for home just a week from tomorrow had lifted our spirits greatly. Now, however, that looks like an impossibility, and our hopes of being home by July 4 are also dimming slightly at this news. I am trying not to complain, for without God’s grace and provision we would not be here right now, and if for some reason He desires for us to remain in Ukraine longer than we had anticipated, then we want to trust Him and to do what He would have us do while we are here. But while there remains a chance, however slim, that things could begin moving again this afternoon, we are going to pray for that. We are concerned about Mikaela’s health and want to have her with us. In fact, we had hoped to have her examined by a medical missionary pediatrician in Kyiv this weekend, and that is part of the reason that we had been praying so hard that we would have her passport in our hands this Friday. If we don’t have it until next week, there might well be no opportunity for her to see him. Again, we want to trust God with every detail in all of this, but we do not want to cease praying for these things just yet.