Waiting for our court hearing – day 7

**updated**

Enjoying cheerios. He really likes them now.
















Playing with Gabriel.








I had no idea Eric took this picture. I was giving him kisses telling him who they were from. If he is in the mood for kisses he sits and listens intently on who they are all from.





Wednesday, February 27, 2008

We finally found out today when we are going to court. It is going to be on Tuesday, March 4^th. Although we still have no idea what time. This Friday, the 29^th our team will be going into court on our behalf and go through all our paperwork with the judge to make sure we have all the correct documentation. This is the step that has been stressing us out since we got here. If we don’t have all the paperwork in order it can delay the adoption by months and may require us to return to the United States without Lincoln to get the paperwork corrected. We have been half holding our breath for this particular day to come and go. Assuming everything is in order on Friday they will then tell us what time our court hearing will be on Tuesday the 4^th. Say a pray for us, Eric and I will fall apart if we have to redo any of our paperwork and leave Kaz without our son.

On a high note both our visits today were wonderful. Our Lincoln was in very good spirits. He was so playful today and wanted to cuddle a bit. He rarely wants to cuddle so I cherished this today. Our playroom was a bit hectic again this afternoon but Lincoln seemed to be mesmerized by it today, much better than yesterday when he got all stressed out. He was really talkative today and he wanted to practice is “walking” around the room with us. At our morning visit we changed him into a clean outfit and put slippers on his feet for the first time. We believe if we had shoes for him he would be doing a lot better with his walking. The slippers helped a bit. I did notice that he was having an easier time keeping his balance. He raced along the couch today and made it all the way to the end and half way back before he started to loose his balance. This is a big improvement. Eric and I are going to try and find some shoes at the mall for him tomorrow or this week. We measured his foot with our hand, we are hoping that will be good enough to get shoes for him.

Sorry, I didn’t take very many pictures today. I was enjoying holding him and cuddling. Eric has a ton of pictures on our nice camera but those are much too large to post on here. We will share them with everyone once we get home. I wish we would have thought to bring a computer software program that could shrink our large pictures into smaller ones. That camera is so quick it really catches a lot of his facial expressions.

In between visits today we stayed at the apartment. We ate Ramen Noodles again. I am beginning to hate those things. After lunch, Eric actually took a nap, which he never does and I took a shower. We only have one towel so we can’t both take showers in the morning. Well I guess we could but neither of us wants to get stuck using the wet towel.

This evening we went out to the Kazakh restaurant for dinner again. We love this place we get more than enough food, plus beer and wine for usually under $12 a person. It is fantastic. Tonight the main restaurant where we normally eat was closed for a banquet so they asked us to eat at the café part and they told us they would cook us whatever we wanted from the main menu. Nice. (I think they remember us from our other two visits.) The café was about a block down the street and when we walked in it was a tiny little place that only had seating for 22 people. We had eight people in our group tonight plus our translator. Our translator just stayed long enough to help us order and she translated some of the menu for us so we could come back again without her. We now have portions of three different restaurant menus translated for us so we can go without help. Some restaurants have English menus but we of course don’t enjoy those places as much. Dinner was really a lot of fun. It was nice to sit down with the new families and get to know them personally. We can only get so much visiting in at the baby house while our kids our playing, eating, throwing up, crying, etc….

Our dinner gang – Ben & Karla (America), Agnes (Belgium), Joel & Gen (America), Bernadette (France) Eric & I {Carlos & Rosa (Maria’s new parents) were not able to make it out to dinner tonight}. The dinner was last minute planning, Eric orchestrated it for everyone. It was a bit of challenge trying to figure out how we were going to get everyone there and home again. The biggest challenge was Agnes & Bernadette are working with another team so we had to call them and convince them and their driver to bring them and pick them up again. The rest of us have Ceric as our driver and we just squeezed into his car and he brought us all home. Thankfully he has three rows of seats in his car.