Greetings from Biro

We finally told V yesterday about the adoption and she was very happy.  She said she wants to go home with us and I think the thing that made her happiest was that Pappa told her that Bailey is now her dog (szabaka) too - she really liked that idea "my Balla" as she says.  She gave us lots of kisses yesterday (first time doing this) and kissed both sides of our cheeks and then did this to Chase who was laughing.  She really relaxed with us and played a lot more with John today.  She would take his hand and hunt for Chase in hide and seek.  She was sad when we left today and kept asking when we would be back, she was not pleased that she was staying behind and Chase was coming with us.  We promised to be back in the morning.  We are going to visit her twice today at the orphanage and have permission to take her on Saturday to a place called Pit Stop for lunch which has a play area and then Baskin Robbins (which is attached to Pit Stop) for a very small ice cream cone.  They have some pretty strict rules on what we can feed her and how long she can be out.  That is ok because we know in 10 days she will be coming with us to the hotel and we don't want to rock the boat for other families.  We also started planning her going away party with the orphanage director.  It is going to be on Dec. 23rd at the bowling alley in town and they are going to let her whole group come to the party.  They won't allow us to give them pizza but said we could do light cake and fruit along with juice.  We hope to get a dj too as the kids love music.  John and I are going to take C and V to a toy store here next week so that they can pick out gifts for all of the kids in V's group so she can give them to the kids at the party.  The orphanage director found out at court that John is a computer programer and was very excited about that.  Now they want his help with the computers at the orphanage.  He is glad to help but said he will need the translator to tell him the alerts that pop up on the computer screen.  I think our donation to the orphanage is going to be computer related :)

We all slept well last night and Chase is still asleep which is good.  John and I were both nervous before court and had not slept well that night.  Court was long and they asked a LOT of questions, especially about religion, why we had not adopted from Mexico (came up a couple of times), why we did not want a healthy baby and also about immigration.  We were drained when done (John did most of the answering and I think that the prosecutor realized that he got nervous and just hounded him).  I handled the religion and immigration questions and there were over 10 of each of those.  The judge walked out of the court after 2.5 hrs. straight of questions and came in less than 5 minutes later with her verdict.  We brought pictures which both the judge and the prosecutor liked looking at.