Today we take Liliana back to the apartment to dress her in some of her new clothes.  Dan wants to take pictures in front of the Lenin statue before the weather turns sour again and the mountains disappear.  She’s impressed by her clothes; she smoothes them out and adjusts them.  She feels her suede flowered shoes and kicks her feet.  It’s amazing she can detect the difference from her orphanage clothes.  Do all girls notice these things?  Indeed, when we get to the Lenin statue, and we peel off her fleece jacket, she puts up a fuss, because we’ve taken something nice from her.  When we point at the lettering on her T-shirt, she thinks this is important, and she’s all smiles again.

We stop for a cappuccino again and order her a sliced banana.  This time it comes with a small plastic monkey, and she’s elated.  She begs for some of my cappuccino foam, and I feed it to her with a spoon.  She looks like a poster child for a “Got Milk?” advertisement.

She loves the cuddle games, the tickling games, the peekaboo games.  It seems she’s catching up for lost time, and we’re happy to oblige.

It’s another pleasant day in Yalta.  Time has flown by in the last week, mainly because we’ve been so focused on Liliana.  Tuesday is the judge’s decision.  It’s then, I believe, we get to take Liliana for good.  Afterwards, there’s a lot of running around, getting her Ukrainian passport, traveling to her village to get her birth certificate–that sort of thing.  As soon as we’re done here in Yalta (the adoption director has predicted we’ll be done with these things by Saturday the 11th), then we return to Kiev to do the U.S. Embassy stuff (visa, medical exam, U.S. passport), which should take us 2 days, tops.  Then it’s home to Rochester.  At last.  Where we can introduce her to her new home.