Visitation and preparing for court...

We spent our second day of visitation today. Bryan is out running the streets of Tver...something that makes our coordinator a little nervous. I don't think he's ever had people as independent as we are, or Bryan is, and it totally freaks him out. Anyway, I am sitting here with not much to do but wait and NOT eat the ball of chocolate dough (ok, it's some sort of chocolate pastry we discovered last time, but it's like a log of brownie dough with some sort of flavoring we haven't figured out yet (Baileys? Cherry? Real vanilla?). Anyhow, I'm not supposed to eat it. I'm supposed to share. I'll probably eat it... It was cold today, but not raining, so even though they seemed a little hesitant, we took our visitation outside. We had a both heartwarming and heartbreaking morning greeting. As we go the orphanage is getting more and more lax about us following the rules. Before we had to wait in the main waiting room - now we can just go right in and say hi and see her for a second to let them know we're here. Every time we open the door the room goes berserk. We counted 12 kids in her room (as far as I can tell they have them divided into groups of about a dozen that they live with everyday). We opened the door and sure enough the room goes crazy with toddler coming at us. They keep little wooden chairs lined up like a wall so they can't get to the door, so they all group around there and try and get your attention. Esther was on the other side of the room when we came in and she got SO excited. She came running over and elbowed a couple other kids out of her way and reached up to us as fast as she could. I picked her up over the barricade and handed her to Bryan and she got this huge grin and turned back to all the other kids clamoring on the ground with this smug little triumphant look like, "They came for ME!" Or as we are trying to teach her big brother Ben to stop saying..."Suckers!" The workers seemed very excited that she reacted so clearly to us and told us that she had been waiting all morning. They said she kept going to the door and watching it and knew we were coming. That was a really good start...just don't think about the fact that in a few days she'll wait. And we won't come. That part kind of kills a little. Focus on the next time when we walk through the door, she'll never go back. Anyway, a good day of visitation. Cold...a man, who shall remain nameless, overpacked, leaving someone else with less room for warm clothes so guess who is underdressed? It's okay, my Scandinavian blood is way better at dealing with cold than his is. ;) She played quite a bit more and was much more vocal with us this trip. Before she was more curious about things we had, this trip she's been much more curious about us - willing to play games and touch us and openly expect us to react to her. They installed new playground equipment since our last visit, so we got to teach her to go down a slide. I think she will be joining her Dad and Luke on roller coasters...she loves being thrown in the air and thought the slide and teeter-totter were about the funnest things ever. She giggled non-stop at the slide. There was the climbing the stairs and sitting down a mile away anticipation and then the actual slide and then dad helping her up when she shot off...all very funny apparently. That's definitely the most talking and noise we've heard from her...except throwing the ball. She yells "Opa!" We don't know what it means...we'll have to ask. We were also able to measure her this afternoon - she comes in solidly in a 12-18 month size at 2 1/2 years old. We ate lunch with our coordinator today so he could brief us on what court will look like tomorrow. He's not allowed into court as he works for us, but we'll have a translator appointed by the court. Tomorrow the judge will review every paper in our dossier, read them (or abbreviated versions) to the prosecutor and make sure any questions about them are answered. Our part tomorrow will be pretty small - it's more about the last two months of paperwork. Friday we will be front and center. Court will take about two hrs during which we will questioned about literally anything and everything. Prayer requests: that court the next two days will go well and we will have good and well spoken answers to the many questions (as opposed to getting flustered...)