Thursday, July 30th

It’s official! We are proud parents of a new son, Nicholas Roman. We had court this morning at 10 am in which the judge approved our application for adoption. We were so nervous and didn’t sleep well the night before. Everything is more stressful than I imagined. We left our hotel early and arrived at the juvenile court house around 9:30am, so we had to wait for everyone to show up. In Kazakhstan, adoptions are a closed hearing and only parties involved attend the hearing. The hearing is not held in a court room, but inside the judge’s modest office. We were assigned to the new young female judge. There are 2 other judges, one ‘good’ and one ‘bad’, fortunately our judge seemed ‘good’ and very positive. The court is in the process of moving to another building and will apparently have another 4th judge.

At our hearing, there were 9 people, including us. There was the judge, very serious and young in a deep red robe sitting at her desk; to her left was her secretary taking notes by hand; to her right was the prosecutor who was dressed in a uniformed shirt. Sitting around the room around us was the district representative, the representative for the babyhouse, our translator, Galina, and our facilitator, Tatyana.

The start of the court hearing began by listing all the individuals attending the hearing and reading our rights. Then the judge started to ask questions, beginning with my hubby. He had to tell our reasons for the adoption and make a request for the adoption, to request the name changes and request a change for the birth date. The judge asked questions as to why we wanted to adopt in Kazakhstan, about our education, jobs, discipline, how we handle disagreements as a married couple, how involved is my hubby with the kids, asked why we don’t have another biological child, what are our responsibilities as parents, how the girls are reacting to this adoption, who is taking care of them while we are here, etc. The judge and prosecutor asked why we wanted to change the birth date. We told them it was for school so that Roman would have more time to learn English and acclimate and it was important to us because of the school cut off in California which is December 1st. At this point we learned there is a law that this can only be done if the child is under the age of 3. We were disappointed by this, especially me, but of course that would not affect our decision to adopt.

After this, the representatives from the district and the babyhouse each had a turn to make statements recommending our application for adoption. After this everyone abruptly stands up and we exit the office. Because our application included the request for a birth date change, we had to handwrite a statement that we wanted to make our adoption application with no change in the birth date, which is October 5, 2005. Galina translated this request and presented the papers to the office. Then we were all ushered back into the judge’s office where our adoption of Roman was made official. We told the judge and prosecutor, as well as the representatives, ‘spaseeba’ or thank you in Russian and we left the room and court house.

After this, Tatyana took us out to lunch with her driver, Dimitri, and Galina for a celebratory lunch. We went to a restaurant not far from the hotel and shared shashlick (shish kebabs).

We were not able to visit Roman today as we were told they were cleaning and the babyhouse is closed. So tomorrow, we plan to buy some fruit to give to the babyhouse and we have been asked to buy diapers as part of our donation to the babyhouse. The rest of our donation will be pooled with other families to buy some new furniture for the babyhouse. Tomorrow we will visit Roman as his new Mama and Papa.