It's a Girl!

Whew! Where do I begin?
Yesterday, we went to court at 3, and after about 1 1/2 hours we had an immediate decision by the court that it was in the best interest of the child to be adopted . . . our adoption was approved by the court. There are three ways things can unfold:
1. You can go to court, wait 10 days and then get a decision.
2. You can get an immediate decision and still have to wait the 10 days, but with this, you can proceed and get paperwork processed.
3. You can get an immediate decision and they can waive the 10 day wait.

We got the 2nd choice with a promise to buy the court house new doors! Crazy system!! Anyway, because of this, we were able to leave last night and we drove to Kharkov and stayed the night. We ate dinner at the hotel restaurant, which was probably the nicest place Marina has ever eaten and it was quite upscale. We stayed at Hotel Kharkov. It was like any 4+ star hotel in the States. We got a room with a king sized and a roll-away for Marina. There were'nt any rooms with two doubles/queens, just that or a two bedroom suite and since we are trying to save $$$$$$$ whenever possible, she got the roll-away. She seemed thrilled to stay there and made sure she was first in line to take a bath in the BIG bathtub. We got to sleep around 11p.m. and then had to be up at 6a.m. and we left by 6:50a.m. It was a cool rainy day and not the kind of weather you want to go out in. We drove like mad-men to her birth city, which was really a village in the middle of NOWHERE. It was beautiful though, and when Serge slowed down to around 80 mph, I could see a bit more. When your driving 100+mph things are a bit blurred!! He somehow managed to avoid the cows and geese that locals were driving down the roads and across them to pasture I guess. It's mainly old women and men who are out with these farm animals. The soil here is so rich - it's black, literally black! So, when we reached the center of the village we went inside and they wrote up a new birth certificate naming James and I as the parents of . . . Marina Dawn Fisher :) We chose the middle name Dawn, because it is a new begining or a new day, new start for her, plus James sister Crystals' middle name is also Dawn. Marina seems to be happy with her new name although she would have preferred Elizabeth, like Jordans' middle name. So, at 9:30a.m. on October 13, we officially became her parents. After we got the certificate, we drove back to Kharkov and ate lunch. Then Serge had another man meet us in Kharkov and drive us back to Novaya because since it was Sat., we couldn't get her picture taken for her passport. Monday or Tuesday we will have to make another trip to Kharkov to get this done. Then we return to Novaya and wait the remaining days. On the 22nd we will leave with Marina to Kiev and then go to the US Embassey to finish up getting her Visa, etc. This will take another 3 days and by then it will be the 25th/26th, so we will just stay in Kiev until the 1st, because it isn't worth the expense to change our tickets to retun only a few days earlier. This will give us a chance to see the city with our new translator Marina in tow, and we can work on buying some gifts to bring back.

One really neat thing happened on the way back to Kharkov after we got the birth certificate . . . we were crossing a HUGE lake that is really a resevoir, but we saw two swans with 4 babies with them. Serge pulled the car over so we could take it in and take a picture and he remarked a couple of times how rare it is to see this. I said maybe it was a sign for us because now we have 4 children of our own! It was really neat anyway :)

So, Marina can stay with us now or stay at school, but she is being closely monitored for her high blood pressure, which luckily we were able to borrow a blood pressure cuff from the people we are staying with, but anyway, she has to take medicine 4 -5 times a day and we think it would be best for her to stay at school for now until we can buy a b.p.cuff for ourselves. She will be better monitored and being in school will give her something to do. Here there isn't much for her to do except watch tv and she may as well be there for the routine.
We will still visit her every day as we have been though.

One thing I wanted to tell you is that the reason Serge gets away with the way he drives is because a friend of his who is the head of security for the government in Kiev, gave him one of his cars wich is a black SUV - Lincoln Navigator, with black tinted windows and special license plates that identify it as a government car, so he is seen as exempt from the laws of the roads. That's the way he told us anyway. He runs red lights, speeds faster than the spedomiter can register, does U-turns where he feels like it even in the midsts of bumper to bumper traffic, and all the while people are stareing, but seem unalarmed. We have gotten a kick out of all of it! It has been an adventure for sure.

Well, I am going to make another entry about our flight here, only because I am using this as a journal for us to remember and I didn't get to post my thoughts about it earlier. I also want Marina later to be able to read this and understand all that happened while we were here.