Things moving quickly...... sort of

Thankfully we were able to resume our visits today, though for some reason the kids were particularly unphotogenic. The picture of Madden below was about the only decent one we got. She is extremely difficult to photograph- if you don't get the right angle on her cheeks the shadows make her look quite odd. We both need to work on our camera skills.

Just before our afternoon visit, we were told that our preliminary court hearing is tomorrow. This is earlier than we expected, but it is a fairly short proceeding and shouldn't be too stressful. However, that hearing is the last hurdle before our actual court hearing. We had dinner tonight with a couple adopting from another agency, and they had their preliminary hearing today and were told that their final hearing is tomorrow! So, if this happens for us we would have our final hearing Friday and get custody on Saturday!! This is much sooner than expected. However, for reasons we don't totally understand, this will not actually allow us to come home any sooner although we may leave for Almaty on the 16th rather than the 19th. So, if this happens, we basically will have the kids two fulls weeks over here, which should be a real challenge. We won't know for sure that the 15-day waiting/appeal period in Kazakh law is waived until we have our final court hearing. The Judge has discretion to waive it, and we expect that he will, but there is no guarantee. If it is not waived, we have to decide if we want to stay here an additional 2.5 weeks (utter insanity) or fly home then come back (another $5k in airfare). We're really hoping not to have to make that decision. We should know tomorrow afternoon when our final court hearing will be, but it looks like we could be parents by Friday afternoon.