Court Tomorrow!

We have had a very busy 2 days! Yesterday, we had great visits with the kids and today we had to leave out early this morning for the main city in this region to do more paperwork and then headed back to Novograd-Volinsky or "Big Novo" as we call it to do more paperwork and notarizing. By the time we finished everything it was past visiting hours at "A"'s orphanage, but her orphanage staff was very sweet to let us visit her for a little while...we had about 15 minutes and then had to head to "V"s orphanage before his visiting hours were over. Today, "A" came running out and was so excited to show us what she had learned at school. She came around and touched each one of us and said, Mother, Father, Brother, & Sister in English, except for it was so sweetly pronounced, "Maza", "Faza", and "Braza". We have been working on her English and our Ukrainian at visiting times some. (A little side note for those who are coming to Ukraine to adopt an older child that can read already. We found a GREAT picture book at a store called Children's World in Kiev. It has a lot of the basic words that they will need to know written in Russian and English and written in Russian how to pronounce each English word. It has been great for her! By the way, we will be sending out a post soon of more info like this that may be helpful to anyone adopting...we have a lot of info that we would like to share, just waiting for the first chance to post it :)
Tomorrow is our court date (Tues)! We are very excited! Court is at 11:00 a.m., but our facilitator is going to drop us off at 9:30, so that he can pick up the directors at both orphanages and the inspector for this city to bring to court also. We don't know how long it will last. Sometimes it can be very quick and sometimes an all day afair. After court, we will get some more paperwork signed and we will take "A" to "V"s orphanage to meet each other. She is so ready and wants to meet him so badly! Every day when we leave, she walks us out to the fence (that's as far as she is allowed to go) and when we get almost to the car, she yell's out bye to us again and says, "Don't forget to tell "V" that I love him"! So, that is exactly what we do! She and Grant also have a great time together and are bonding well also. They spontaneously give each other hugs the whole visit and play great together!
Well, like I posted before, there is about a month left in this process before we will be allowed to take the kids back to America. We knew before we left that if the process took longer, that we may have to go home for a short while and with the waiting periods and holidays coming up, we have made the arrangements to fly home on Thursday of this week and let Grant finish school and us catch up on some things at home and prepare for the kids coming home. After a short period at home, Jason will fly back to finish more paperwork...passports, birth certificates, etc...He will be with our facilitator Sergey the whole time and we just love him...We have spent so much time with him here that he is like family now :) Grant and I are hopeful that we will get to come back at the end when we get the kids out of the orphanage and fly home with them, but we are working to see if that will be possible right now! We have explained all of this to "A" and I made her a calendar tonight of how many days until she should be able to leave the orphanage, so she can check them off until then. I know that it will be hard for all of us, but we really feel that this is the best decision for now and we all talked about how once this wait is over, we will all be together forever...no more visiting for 2 hrs and leaving...She had a HUGE smile on her face when we said that! Oh, I just remembered a sweet thing that she did on our visit yesterday. We brought sidewalk chalk (Thanks to Marianna) to play with outside and she drew a huge heart on the sidewalk and wrote in Ukrainian, "I love you because you came here to me".
I have had a few emails about the kids sizes and honestly, I am not sure...everyday that I check their clothes, they have on a different size. I traced their feet on paper to try to find shoes at home to bring back (I got this hint from another adoptive mom). I think a lot of their clothes have been donated and they are sizes from all over the world, so it is almost impossible to tell by the tag. When they leave the orphanage, they are not allowed to take anything with them and you are supposed to bring clothes to change them into before they leave, so tomorrow I am going to try to get their measurements for sizes.
By the way, we will continue the blog even at home and we will have a chance to send out more pics with our post! Please keep us in prayer tomorrow for the Big Day!!!
Luv~ Mel