We made it through court!  It was an interesting experience.  I have never been in a courtroom before, but it was not too far off from what I expected.  The judge introduced everyone; there was us and Lana (our interpreter) with the prosecutor, recorder, and a social worker for each of the boys.  The judge asked several questions-everything from why my visa said “Moscow” and not “Vladivostok” to questions about schooling for the boys and about our house.  She also asked several questions about why we chose Russia.  We were surprised that we didn’t get any questions about why we chose to adopt two unrelated boys at the same time.  The prosecutor asked a couple of questions about discipline and church.  We did learn not to chew gum in court; Lana gave us some gum right before we went in.  I got rid of mine, but Shannon was chewing it.  She stood up to state her name and the judge said, “Are you chewing gum?”  It was a bit humorous. 

But court went through without problems.  Lana said that it was one of the easier cases that she’s seen.  It took about 80 minutes; she thought that because there were two boys it would be closer to two hours, so that is very good!  Thank you everyone who was praying for us! 

So the boys are ours… after a ten day waiting period.  We have never really understood what the ten day period is about until the judge said that we had ten days to appeal the case.  Which we are not going to do.

We are heading home tomorrow- and it will be a very interesting day.  We will leave Vladivostok at 10am local time and then follow the sun.  We have about 19 hours in the air plus a 3 hour layover in Moscow, but it will not even be 6pm when we land!  So the day will go on for a very long time.  We hope we get to sleep on the airplane.  And as an aside, we thought we had the longest trip, but we met a family here at the Vlad Motor Inn who are from Southern California- and they had to go through Moscow, too!

We are going home so that we can spend time with the kids and then we leave again on September 5th (returning to Vlad on September 7th) to get the boys.  We will take care of paperwork for a couple days here in Vladivostok, and then we will spend a week in Moscow taking care of immigration paperwork.  So from the day we left until the day we get home with the boys we will have spent two nights in New York City, four nights on an airplane, five nights in Vladivostok, seven nights at home, and nine nights in Moscow. 

We have been waiting for this for so long… now we have just a little more waiting.  It really feels like we are coming to the end!