Meet Tetyana Sage!

Things could not have gone any easier than they did today in court! We went into a small court room with about 5 people. One was the Inspector for the orphanage, one was the prosecutor, one was the judge and I have no idea who the other two were. Our judge was a woman. She wasn't very smily but then we haven't had too many smiles from Ukrainian strangers here. I felt like I was in mass....we had to stand up and sit down about 20 times.....ok, about 5 but it felt like just when we sat down we had to stand again! They asked us easy questions:
-Why do you want to adopt Tetyana?
-Why are you adopting from Ukraine?
-How much money do you make?
-How big is your house?.....bring pictures of every room. This was very helpful. We had a hard time trying to figure out the metric conversion. It didn't seem right that our house was only 200 sq. meters!
-Do you know the responsibility of raising a child? Duh....Luke was sitting right there!
-What are your occupations?
-How will you handle the transition when you get home?
-When will the child go to school? In our case, she won't go until next fall because there is only about a month left of the school year. They wanted to know what I would be doing with her to help her learn English. When I told them I was certified in teaching they thought this was great!

Our facilitator was really nervous and I was trying to reassure her everything would be fine. I guess the last court hearing she was in lasted 2 hours!

After court, we had lunch at the fancy restaurant here. It was Tetyana's first time in a restaurant that the director knows about. She was pretty nervous. We worked on her manners and she did great! The director corrected the open mouth eating..it was cute to see the director trying to teach Tetyana how to be a little lady. We have so many great first's ahead of us!

So now we wait out the 10 days. We are thinking of taking an overnight trip to a place our facilitator knows about. She says it is a cute little town and there are some castles to look at and it is near the Black Sea. Drew forgot the name of it. Yana and her 8 year old daughter are going to go with us. She said she really likes it there. We asked if Tetyana could go with us but they said "no". We understand and told Tetyana we would only be gone a couple of days.

Once our 10 days are up we are going to visit Tetyana's school with her. The director is going to arrange it all for us! She is so great. She told us all of the children in her orphanage are available for adoption but isn't sure why the SDA isn't giving their files. It is so sad. We are going to get names of the children and pictures. I really want to come back next year. I told Drew this afternoon"why not just have 4 and round out the number!" He frowned at me! Maybe I can talk him into one more. If we could come here again and go through the same process it would be so easy! This region is the best!!