T-minus 11 days til court...

Hey Everyone,

Big news yesterday! We have our court date and it is scheduled for Wednesday June 13th at 10:30. This is the start of the end if that makes any sense!! All of our paperwork came in which allowed Olga to get the date scheduled.

So...we are essentially in waiting mode now. Olga has gone back to Kiev as there is nothing for her to do here. She will take some paperwork to the SDA in prep for court and then she will come back here to take us through the proceedings on the 13th.

With court on the 13th it looks like we will be coming home (assuming all goes well from here on out) around the 3oth of June. This is about 7-10 days later than we had originally hoped and planned for. I am not sure if we mentioned this or not in earlier blogs but there is a mandatory 10 day waiting period after court which is called the appeals period. This is meant to give time to any remaining family members to contest the adoption. In our boy's case there is no known or interested family yet we still have to wait the 10 days.

One of the Italian couples has court right after us on that Wednesday. They are adopting a 4 y/o girl named Dasha.

The Canadian couple (Darrell and Kelly) also got their date yesterday. They finally go this coming Wednesday - we are very happy for them as they have been here WAY to long!! Andrea and I went out to dinner with them to celebrate over pizza and coke! We traded war stories and I have to say that their trials have been much tougher than ours. First of all they have been at this for over two years where we have been working on it for about 10 months. They have had to redo their paperwork (start to finish) about 3 times which has propelled them near the $40K mark in expenses. They are certainly ready and deserving to be through with this. They invited Andrea and the boys out in November when I go hunting!! They live about 20 minutes from the Winnipeg airport where I fly into when hunting in Kenora.

We spent the morning with the boys. Lucas said "banana" and Brady was talking more as well. He was saying "pappa" for the first time. Once again the morning was spent watching the boys stuff their faces with crackers, cookies, lollipops and a banana. They are like two little eating machines. The kids are fed well in the orphanage so it is somewhat perplexing as to why they crave food so much. Perhaps it is their way to bond with us or it provides them some level of comfort??

That is it for today - we actually were not going to blog until Monday but we wanted to give everyone the latest news on the court.

Enjoy your weekend - das vedana!

Chris & Andrea