Offically A Van Nice

We had court yesterday! We went into this little court room, there were 9 people there besides us and the Jenning's. We had our court appointment together as the same people were in attendance. There was the Judge, court reporter, two witnesses, court attendant, prosecuting attorney, Juvenille Services Representative, Orphanage Director and Yulia, our facilitator. Jenning's went first. It was a bit longer than ours, but in the end, the petition to the court was granted and they were declared Mariah's parents.

Then it was our turn. We were asked to stand up, state our names, dates of birth and occupations. Then everyone else in the court room did the same. The judge then went through our dossier and made sure everything was in order. She asked us questions about our income, our home, who would be caring for the children, why we wanted to adopt, if we had criminal records, if we understood that the child needed to be registered with the American Gov't when we get home. That was about it. They we stood up for them to go out and make their decision. We literally sat down for 1 minute and they were back in the room and we were asked to stand again. It took the judge a bit longer to decide for Jenning's so we were a bit nervous that they had taken such a short time to deliberate. But then, the judge smiled and said that it was the courts decision to grant us our petition for adoption....more stuff in Russian that I didn't really understand and then Congratulations and wished us a very happy, long life with our new family!

So, Jacob Paul Van Nice is now offically our son! We are in the 10 day wait process. This time will go pretty quickly. We will be here in Krivoy Rog until Wednesday night. Then we will take the overnight train back to Kiev where we will go to the Embassy on Thursday and sign all the appropriate paperwork. Then Joe will get on a plane on Friday morning and fly home. I will be staying in Kiev for a couple days and be coming back to Krivoy Rog on the train with Yulia on Sunday night! At that point, on Monday June 1st, the 10 days will be over and we will be doing the running to start all the necessary paperwork to get the birth certificate, visa, passport. Then after we have passport in hand, Jacob and I will return to Kiev to get his visa and his last medical exam. Once that is done, we can be on a flight home. I am guessing we will be home on or around June 10th or 11th, but we won't know for sure until we get much closer to that date.

I will post some pictures of our offical new Van Nice later today. (we were going to take some yesterday, however he was dressed in a pretty pink outfit at the orphanage and we didn't want anyone to confuse our new son with a little girl! LOL)

Blessings.