Hooray! for Family Day!

Today is April 9, 2007. This is the day we officially became a family! Our translator, Lena went to court today to pick up our official court decree from the judge. We were supposed to go with her, but the judge called her early in the morning and told her to come right then, since he had another appointment at the time we were scheduled for. No matter, when Lena came for us she already had the decree in hand. Then we went off to the registrar’s office to register our documents. It is all final and official. No one can contest anymore.

Some people would call this our “Gotcha day,” but we decided that we don’t like that term, so we will use “Family Day.” As we wait for Lena to finish up some paperwork and set up a time for us to go and get our sweet little boy for good, we are discussing some things we might like to do in the future on “Family Day.” We will probably like to do something to celebrate Russian heritage and to celebrate family.

We have Ruslan’s clothes and the final gifts for the orphanage workers all packed. It is snowing outside. We are waiting again. We just found out that we will not be able to go get Ruslan till tommorrow since our social worker was sick and pre-prepared our documents with tommorrow's date on it. Since no one is in the office to change the date, so we have to wait. Oh, well, it's what we are good at. At least for now.

To bide our time, we went to use the internet and have thoroughly enjoyed your posts. Thanks to all of you who were able to send us an email. I have been trying to send individual responses, but for some reason this computer won't let us do that. After we get Ruslan tommorrow, I am not sure how much time we will have to make replies, since we will have to go all the way down to the internet cafe to do that (right now we use Lena's computer across the street from our apartment).