Thursday, May 13th

Our lawyer had a good meeting with the judge today. She is a new judge and this is the first time our lawyer has worked with her. This is also the judge’s first foreign adoption case. Our lawyer believes that this will work in our favor and end up being a good thing. The judge didn’t question any of our paperwork during the meeting, so we should be ok on that front. Our extended visas expire on May 25th and Svetlana asked the judge if we could please have our court date before May 25th as we will not be able to extend our visas again. The judge said that she needed to think about it and review our case. She will call Svetlana tomorrow and let her know when the court date will be. We have to be out of Kazakhstan by the 25th, so worse case we will leave on the 25th!


Tomorrow we are going to Ekibastuz! This is the village that D is from and where he was born. We are going with Svetlana as she will be doing some work for our case there. We are all crashing our friend Marie Chan’s visit to Ekibastuz to visit her son. His orphanage is located there and she has made this journey several times! We are excited to see where D is from, but are not looking forward to the hour and a half car ride each way! This will also be the first day since we met our little guy to not visit him.  Oh well, I know he will appreciate the pictures from there someday!

Had a great visit with D today and when we picked him up, he not only had his backpack, but the toy still in it that he took home yesterday! This is nothing short of amazing! Typically when he takes a toy home, we never see it again; it ends up lost or broken. He is doing great on the computer game and looks at us each time he wins a little challenge so he can show us! High 5’s all around!

After our visit today, our social worker took us out in search of a Kazakh blanket. We went to this large building that offers all different types of classes for kids. (Something similar to a YMCA type of place.) We visited an Art Teacher there who hand-makes all kinds of traditional Kazakh items. We found a great blanket and table decoration. She was so excited that we liked her work that she wanted to give Dustin a traditional Kazakh hat while he was trying it on, she also brought out a small one for D! Adorable! Can’t wait for the father/son pics! The people are so nice and friendly and want to share their culture with us.

We are trying to learn a few more Russian words/phrases each day and it is going pretty well. Along with D learning English every day – I am hoping that our transition at home goes as smoothly as possible!

As I type this, Dustin is playing D’s Cars game on the computer to try and unlock some new things for him…or so he says!

Love,

The Stone’s



PS – We got the water back about 7:00 last night!