Well, we had court on Friday morning - the judge (the head judge, apparently, by the way) was very nice, only asked us about 4 questions, then asked us to wait outside for his decision - which took about 15 minutes, then the paperwork took another hour, it seemed.  The thirty days was waived (actually, it was only mentioned by way of the question "you ask to take the children right away?", to which we of course replied "Yes").  Then the boys had to go back to the orphanage - oh, they hated that!  They thought they were going to stay with us.  We then went back to the hotel for a couple hours, then Cinya picked us up to go first, to a government office to get the new birth certificates (with their new names on them, in Cyrillic), then to the notary for certified copies of the birth certificates, where the Director of the Orphanage met us, to sign a form that went with the certified copies, then Cinya's father (the lawyer) took the original birth certificates to get started on their Ukrainian passports and we went to the orphanage to get the boys.  Cinya's dad met us there and started working to get the boys released, even though it was now 4pm and the director was gone for the weekend.  Penny and Cinya went to the small children's section (about 2 miles away) to get James and give the head caretaker of that secion a gift, while I went to give gifts to Charles's group and "group mother" - whew! everyone was crying, especially the group mother and Charles' best friend, a little girl that will be adopted to France next year.  When I came out from that, Cinya's dad had pretty much got the paperwork done, so we were able to take the boys with us to the hotel for the night.

Saturday morning, we caught the 6am (that's right, 6am, and we were not the only people on the train!) express to Kiev, with Cinya, and were met at the train station by Nastya and her husband, who took us to the apartment (not the same one we had before - this one is bigger and nicer, with a dedicated bedroom and a full kitchen), closer to the NAC than before, not that that matters anymore.  In the afternoon, we walked to the supermarket, bought about 50lb of groceries, then got lost because I decided to take a different street to get back to the apartment!!  We eventually found it, pretty much by acident, but by then my arms were almost falling off - I haven't carried groceries that far for decades.

Today, we went to church, by metro, which was a BIG adventure for the boys, especially James.  It was good for them, because they got to see a larger ward, still in their own language - Primary was bilingual Ukrainian/English, because there are a lot of English speaking children in the ward here.  The weather worsened while we were at church, so after taking the metro back to our starting station, we took a taxi partway to the apartment (becuase I didn't know the address to give the cabbie), and got ripped off - a private taxi, without meter, who charged us 25gr to go about 5 long blocks (he actually wanted 30, but I had misunderstood when I asked him how much before the trip started - he held up 3 fingers and I thought he meant 3, not 30).

Tomorrow, we go for the emgration medical (have to pay USD100 each, but in grivnas rather than dollars, go figure) and should find out if we have UA passports.  If we have the passports, we can go to the embassy on Tuesday morning and fly on Wednesday, otherwise we will have to back everything up another day.  At that, we are ahead of the game, because we left Sumy before we had passports, having given Cinya's dad power of attorney to pick them up for us, so we could get started on things at the Kiev end.

The boys are starting to learn a few words, and a few other things - like No, for James.  He has already had two timeouts for ignoring No - and he hates them!  Charles is starting to use a few English words and attempting to communicate rather than grunt.  Ice Age and the Care Bears are getting a workout on the computer DVD player - thank goodness for the laptop!

See everybody soon!