Mila and Cheeseburgers

Several of you have asked me to explain where we are at in the adoption process. Typically, after you meet your child you have to verbally agree that you still want to adopt the child, which we did the first day. After that we went to the notary (which is more like a lawyer here) and got the paperwork started. We had to do a lot of paperwork prior to being invited to the country for our adoption, but there is even more once you get to your child's region. If the children have siblings there is a special form that needs to be aquired. Other forms include our intentions to adopt the child, what we'd like to change their name to, and a whole bunch of other technical stuff. There is a ton of paper chasing before you can secure a court date (and to add to our stuff they had to get the dossier-mix-up fixed first). Our facilitator got everything finished today and went to the judge to get a court date but the judge had already left, so she will go first thing tomorrow morning to ask the judge when she will hold court for us. We are still praying it will be this Friday, which we've been told would be the absolute earliest, but it's looking less likely now that she won't see the judge until tomorrow...but not impossible. So pray pray pray we can have court Friday! After court there is a mandatory 10 day waiting period. Some have asked if we think this will be waived. I suppose God can do anything, but the short answer we've gotten is pretty much NO. Even though Mila has medical needs the wait will not be waived in this region. Also, for some reason this region does not count Sundays toward the 10 days of waiting...I have no answer as to why. So our 10 day wait will be more like at least 12 days before we can start that part of the paperwork process, which includes new birth certificate, passport, tax-ID number, and cashing out her bank account to donate back to the orphanage. That typically takes about two days and then we will be able to have our "gotcha day" and break little miss Mila out of that place FOREVER!!! The earliest possible return home date would be the week of November 13th.

We got to visit the jelly bean twice today. This morning she was very very sleepy and struggled to drink her whole bottle. It was a lot of working trying to get her to eat the whole thing without falling asleep. I wanted to make sure she got all of it because I'm really not sure when her next scheduled feed would be and she needs every single calorie she can get. Sometimes I wonder if she is burning off more calories than she is eating working so hard just to take the bottle. I have learned that it is very common for "crib babies" (babies that have spent all their time in a crib) to be very stiff when they are handled simply because they are not used to being picked up. So I am confident between learning that, and seeing how much less stiff she is becoming, that it won't be an issue in the future. I look back at our first pictures with her and she was SOOOO stiff!!! Like a board!

Trying not to fall asleep before her bottle is gone

This is how she tips her head back if we hold her with her back to us!

Can't take her eyes off her Mama!

Always moving her tongue and her arms!

My sweet miracle

You can finally see that she really does have lips...haha

Love how she looks at us!

Her right hand has typical palm creases....

While her left hand has the palmer crease which is common in kids with DS (I've just never heard of a child having they typical crease on one hand and the palmer on the other...I think it's fabulously cool...anyone else's child have this going on?)

Gazing into her Daddy's eyes!

Love them!!

We worked on some PT tonight...trying to get her to hold her head up a little bit. She was doing pretty good!!

She was even able to turn her head while supporting it on her own! It was a little wobbly but she'll get there :) I'm pretty sure she has had no opportunities to work on head control

You have no idea how much I love her already...

So thankful for our gift! Doesn't it look like she has been ours forever?

Sleeping without a worry in the world...

So lucky to have eachother :)

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So after the mushy post....here is the funny stuff! We tried "Sam's Steakhouse" for dinner tonight. We had walked in before and they told us no English menu so we left. Well Anna talked to another family that was here and they insisted there was an English menu and they had fabulous burgers. So we went back...Shawn, Anna, and Jerad were soooo excited about having burgers. They saw this on the menu, and it was the closest thing that looked like a hamburger, so they all ordred one (I ordered pasta). Well imagine their surprise when they brought out 3 of these:

I thought for a minute Anna was going to cry. She was very dissapointed LOL. Shawn bravely tried it first and deemed it "not bad" but his face didn't match his words. Next up was Jerad, and finally Anna. I wish I could have video taped Anna's face!!! Shawn went and got a menu and asked the waitress in his fabulous pointing and gestures if it was the same thing as the picture. "DA DA" (yes yes) she pointed at the picture and pointed at his burger and held up 3 fingers like "You idiots, don't you remember you ordered 3 of these." Maybe it was just us but this burger did NOT look like that picture in the menu!!! We translated the words when we got hom and it said "Juicy chicken-beef cheeseburger" HMMMMM. Anyone else ever had chicken-beef??? LOL! They took a few bites and then politely covered up their burgers with napkins. Shawn was doing fine eating it until the rest of us started discussing what he might be eating. Maybe it was a goat burger, or a rat burger LOL! To make matters even funnier, we were the only ones in the entire restaurant and they had a DJ playing Ghost Busters and Michael Jackson! OH MY what a funny night! On the way home Anna said, "I don't know if I should take a shower or wait until I throw up first." LOL! Our parent-liason called us to check in while we were eating and she was cracking up when Shawn said "well we thought we ordered a hamburger but we have no idea what we actually got!" Oh and my pasta was delicious if you were wondering ;)

Praying to get our court date tomorow!!!!