Thankfully we arrived in Russia on time and without delays on Monday evening. Our travels were long and we were definitely tired but everything went well. We were met at the airport by our facilitator and she immediately began to prepare us for our court appointment scheduled for Tuesday afternoon at 3:00. Over the past week she spent a lot of time visiting with officials and others who work at the court offices trying to gain some perspective on how court may go. She seemed rather uptight and nervous about what lied ahead. I guess she was anxious enough for all of us because once Matt and I got settled at the hotel we both fell right to sleep and actually slept very well considering court was only hours away.
Nobody really knew how court would go given the recent developments in Russian adoptions. There was also some uncertainty about whether or not a decision on our adoption would be delayed or postponed by the judge. Apparently there was a time last week when our court date was in question so anything was possible today. We were preparing ourselves for the worst and our facilitator was prepared for a battle. Thankfully our court hearing was nothing close to a battle. It appeared all the legwork our facilitator did leading up to now was beneficial because our court hearing literally lasted 10 minutes and was nothing like what we expected.
Court was rather informal. We spent most of the time waiting in the hall and when they were finally ready for us, we went into an office where the judge, a secretary and a prosecutor were all seated around the judge’s desk. Her desk was a typical office desk, nothing fancy or formal and definitely not like a judge’s bench you would see in a movie or on TV. The only somewhat formal thing was that the judge did have a black robe on that reminded me more of a graduation gown than a judge‘s robe. We sat down across from the judge and she opened up by asking us if we had any intentions of sending Sasha back because she didn’t want to lose her job if we did. After that the questions were normal inquiries about our first visit to meet Sasha, our home, our jobs and our understanding of Sasha’s medical history. Next the judge thanked us for being willing to adopt a child with a medical condition and then formally approved our request to adopt Sasha. Then we left and headed back to our hotel. Not quite the massive ordeal we were anticipating or the celebration we were envisioning. I think the plan is to find some place nice for dinner to celebrate but that may be more difficult than it sounds since we only know of two places to eat in the area.
We will sign some documents to process Sasha’s birth certificate in the morning so it’ll be Thursday before we can go to Armavir to visit Sasha. We are really anxious to see her especially now that she is officially our child. As many of you know, we have to wait 10 days before the judge will “seal” our adoption papers and during those 10 days we can only visit her. These next 10 days will seem like the longest days of our lives. Pray that we can enjoy them and use this time to learn more about Russia and Sasha’s heritage.
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