We’re up early, so when the director’s call comes, saying he’ll be at our apartment in four minutes, we’re ready to go.

The city is full of traffic, and the sidewalks are packed with mothers and fathers escorting their beautiful children to the first day of school.  Practically all the children are carrying bouquets of flowers for their teacher, and it’s impressive that it’s such a family affair.

Then, within 15 minutes, the streets clear, and we’re standing in front of the Ministry, waiting for the gates to open.

When they do, we’re escorted to a small room at the top of a set of stairs.  Dan and I sit on a couch.  A woman who is a social worker sits across from us, and the director translates for us.  Immediately, she wants to know what we both do for a living and how long we’ve been in the adoption process.  She nods as though our answers are satisfactory, and she pulls out two little girls’ files.  What?  No boy?

As soon as she presents the picture of the first one, I’m hooked.  I can tell Dan is, too.  But we wait patiently as they make calls about the second one, who ends up having serious and unsolvable health issues.

Once we’ve said “yes” to this first little girl smiling shyly into the camera—little green dots on her arms and face…it’s the lotion they put on bug bites and scrapes—the director reads some of her history to us.  [We’ll find out more when we visit the orphanage on Wednesday (we have to get an official referral first, which will come by tomorrow at 5 pm, and then we can make travel arrangements to go see her).]

The girl was found, abandoned, on a street in the Potalva region along the Dnipro River, when (they guessed) she was 1 ½ years old.  After the orphanage took her in, they somehow located her mother and her two older sisters who had already been placed in foster care (where the parents will get government aid for them until they’re 18).  The orphanage was able to determine her birthdate after talking with her mother.  She’s about 2 years and 4 months old.

The city of the orphanage is about 300 km from Kiev (3-4 hour drive), so we’ll be driving there with a translator, most likely on Wednesday morning, but we will know for sure by tomorrow.

We absolutely, positively, cannot wait to meet her.

And I still don’t know why I had a dream about dear little Benjamin.