We hear stories of this in the foster system here in the United States, but many of these children live in orphanages of 150 children or more, with no adult supervision. That these kids still found joy in the simplest things and were thankful to us for our time and love was amazing to me.

We fell in love with not only Nastia, but with all of the children. Costya, Sasha, Dima, Yura, Lena, Maxim, and Misha are all amazing kids. They were just dealt a really bad hand in life.

An international adoption requires you to kill more trees than a small forest. Sorry all you environmentalists, we’ve tried to email and scan as much as we could, but it’s just not possible.

There is the home study and the background checks by – in our case – no less than seven government agencies, including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and Interpol. You have to compile a dossier of documents, which all must be notarized and then apostilled. An apostille is basically a document from the Secretary of State of that state saying that the notary is valid. You have to have one for every document.

Currently we are waiting for immigration to process our paperwork to officially submit everything to the agency in Ukraine. Then, they have to process that and we get a court date in Ukraine! It is our hope we get a date before the end of the year!

I constantly check my email for updates from our lawyer in Ukraine. I always have my ear out for alerts from my VK account (that’s basically Facebook in Eastern Europe) in case Nastia sends me a message. When you are an adoptive parent, and your child is on the other side of the world, you hang on to every last bit of communication. Every word, every smiley emoticon, and every heart that gets texted.

So, that is why my heart is on the other side of the world. As Tom Petty once said, “The waiting is the hardest part.” Hopefully, it won’t be too much longer.

Check out our blog at: http://love4nastia.wordpress.com/

Dr. Bundy is an emergency physician with the Baptist Health System in Montgomery, Ala., and a former photojournalist, who not only sings in the car, but talks to herself, is addicted to diet drinks and shoes, and thinks emergency medicine is the greatest specialty.