Documents All Submitted

It was a beautiful day again, but I spent most of it inside the Inspector's and Notary's offices.  I'm not complaining because now all of our documents are submitted to the court.  On Monday we'll be assigned a judge (by a computer), and then the judge will assign us a court date.  There are 7 judges.  I'm told 6 of them are good, but 1 is very mean and does not approve of foreign adoptions.  He's even been known to assign the court date 3 months out.  We're praying not to get him.

For some reason we're never told when the deadline is to choose a new name until 30 minutes before the document has to be submitted to the Inspector and the Notary.  Vera called in a panic to see what our new name is, and I told her we'd just started suggesting a few names to Malvina yesterday.  I thought I had another week to decide.  If I'd known we had to choose it by noon today we would have been thinking about it carefully yesterday.  I told Vera I wouldn't choose the name without Malvina being a part of the decision.  We raced to the orphanage to pick up Malvina so she could choose from the 7 names I very quickly narrowed it down to.  Within 10 minutes she had narrowed it down to her two favorites.  It didn't help that Vera kept saying, "Quickly, quickly.  Just  choose one.  We must hurry!"  For heaven's sake, she's going to be called by this name for the rest of her life.  You don't just flip a coin to make that kind of a lifelong decision.  She finally decided to combine her two favorite names, so she'll be known as "Allison Rachel Kimball."  I had a feeling Rachel would be part of it after seeing her offer to carry two buckets of water into the orphanage for the cook yesterday.  That and the fact that I had to go through a long adoption process to finally end up with another daughter---kind of like when Jacob wanted to marry Rachel, but had to marry her older sister and work for 7 years first.  It's all good, and I can't imagine life without my two sons.

Yesterday Igor, Eli's best friend who is no longer at the orphanage, came to Feodosiya to spend the day with Eli. They had a grand time together and  shared many gifts with each other.  

This morning Alex's brother, Costia, came to spend the day, and they will travel to Dzhankoi tomorrow to spend the weekend together with their sister who has a 6 month old baby girl Alex has never seen.  Eli is traveling with them to Dzhankoi to surprise his Aunt on her birthday.  His aunt is his mother's identical twin, so she shares the same birthday as his mom who has died.  I would love to see her face when she see's him standing at her door.

This is a picture of Eli with his buddy Igor.

So that leaves me alone with Malvina tomorrow.  We're hoping to have fun together, but I wish I had someone to translate for us.