A busy day

We made our mad dash over to Sumy to work on several important documents.  If you are a citizen of Ukraine, you have to have an internal passport as well as an international passport.  The internal passport has things like your home address, vocation, where you are licensed, etc.  We have to redo Julia's because her name is changing, so even though she will only be Julia Perry for a few days in Ukraine, she still needs a new internal passport.  This is a 5-day or so process when things are working.  We also went to generate a new birth certificate with her new name, and Libby and me listed as her parents.  There was also some document which needed the services of a notary, plus both of the above actions have to be notarized.  Unfortunately, everything is NOT working.  It seems there is a national notarizing computer system that has been down all of yesterday and today.  No one knows when it will be fixed.  Nothing we need can be processed until the system comes back up.  So while our trip was successful in that we met everyone we needed to meet, we came back empty-handed.  The trip itself was a hoot.  We rode in a taxi, so there were 5 adults in a car that could not have been bigger than a civic.  Driving style was both similar and different than Stas.  We did not go nearly as fast, which was a relief, but he took a much more relaxed and casual approach to passing vehicles.  He just went whenever he wanted, whether something was coming or not.  So it was not uncommon for us to be three across - the car we were passing, the oncoming car, and us.  It's a good thing our car was small!  We did not take up much room.

Tonight will be a new adventure.  The Fox's two older kids are sleeping here tonight.  Their new apartment is not working well for sleeping arrangements (not enough beds, and no heat) so we will keep the two oldest kids so they can focus on their youngest.  We'll see how it goes.  I need to remember to not be a grandpa (not feeding them sugar before bedtime, and definitely not sticking a suction cup toy to my head, but that's another story) and get back into daddy mode in a big hurry.