Wow....

Wow...I LOVED your comments on the last post about "traditions for Thanksgiving".....Thanks for playing along!

News for today is no shocker! The judge said he "couldn't make a decision still", so he adjourned the court hearing AGAIN until this Monday at 11am.

I have contacted the Embassy again to see if they will make contact with him again.  In the meantime, I am drafting up a letter that will be sent to MANY high offices in Kaz. Maybe this can get something done for all of the families in our situation.  We will see....

Traditions...

So, for some holiday fun- I want to know one tradition you have that is just for Thanksgiving????

I love to hear!

Happy Birthday Selah!

Happy 2nd Birthday Selah!

Your Mommy, Daddy, and big brothers love you!

We pray that we are getting closer to bringing you home forever....

no verdict still...

No verdict again today.... we were adjourned once again until Wednesday. 

The good news in that was, at least, it wasn't a negative verdict (yet), the bad news is it just keeps delaying the feeling of being in purgatory!

prayer

I have a HUGE request to ask of you: Could you take a minute to say a prayer tonight (Thursday night around 8-9pm). Our verdict is scheduled for tonight at 9pm our time. We have been given an indication of a slight chance of some good news. But, of course, it is very slim still.

I would faint if we got a positive verdict. But, there is a little glimmer of hope after hearing that some things have been happening even since we left. Of course, it could still be negative. And if it is, we are in for a very long appeal process with an unknown end result.

If you wouldn't mind saying one more prayer for us tonight, it would be great.

I will update you as soon as I know the result tomorrow.

Home and....WOW!

After a very LONG 3 flight trip, we are home. My step mom, Barb, picked us up. Thanks Barb! :)

And it is through tears that I write this, because we came home to flowers, a stocked fridge and pantry, dinner for tomorrow night in the fridge, gift cards to Publix, Walmart, and the movies, homemade cookies, bottles of wine, they put air fresheners things in our house so our house smelled good, "we love you" banner on our garage door, a welcome home cookie cake!

Amazing!  THANK YOU to whomever did all of this. THANK YOU! 

Goodnight.

Coming Home

In 7 hours we will be boarding the plane to come back home. We will be home Tuesday night, your time.

In regards to the "details" of all that has been going on, I would rather not post on the blog.

Keith and Cheryl will be bringing the boys down on Thursday and they are going to stay with us through Thanksgiving weekend. We are so happy they are going to be with us. :)

We will keep fighting to bring our daughter home because:

She is our daughter and God made that clear, so until the door is totally closed, we will keep going. It doesn't look hopeful to keep going, but we will never know until we get there and get slammed in the face by the door, right?  But, if we give up now, then we will live with the regret of not knowing what could or would have been.

We love you. We can't even express how thankful we are of all the emails, phone calls, comments on the blog, the couple that deposited some money into our checking account (you know who you are!) and prayers you have provided for us. If one thing is for sure, it is knowing that we are loved and cared for back home. And that is what the Body of Christ truly is. Thank you for serving our Lord in that.  We hope to have the honor of doing the same in return.

Around town...

As you can see by this electrical box outside of our apartment door, we are not that safe. We are glad that our apartment is made out of concrete so that we don't burn alive! :)

We walked by this "Sex Shop" and couldn't resist to snap a pic. And NO we didn't go in. You never know what you might find in there, while in Kaz!!

You, too, can purchase a Pig's head to eat at the local Meat Market!!! Mmmm...tasty! :)

Or you can just settle for the other "horse" meat just laying around.....

Enjoy!!!

update

We haven't had our final court date officially yet. We are hoping for Monday. The judge keeps delaying and stalling to give us our negative verdict. So, we aren't technically at a "no" stage, but its been made pretty clear.  So its like 99.9999% a No, and the rest a possible yes. But, I would probably FAINT if he gave us a yes, at this point.

In the meantime, we have been fighting....can't be specific here.  We have NO IDEA at this point if she will EVER be our daughter officially. She will always be our daughter in our minds and in our hearts. If we have to release her, then it will be like a death. We already feel that way. This is hard and heartbreaking. I am not looking forward to coming home and seeing her room all made up. I will be packing up her room and putting everything in the closet. It is too hard to walk by it everyday....constant reminder. :(

We have been hanging out with another american couple (gary and josie) that we have enjoyed SO much. They have become our family while here. They remind us of our friends from home. We are so blessed to have their company. They are coming over tonight for dinner (Fri night).We are making chicken (we think its chicken!), yellow rice I brought from home, peas, and bread. They had us over a couple of nights ago and she cooked us a gourmet meal in KAZ! I couldn't believe she found half the stuff at the grocery store here! They are adopting from the city, not the area with all the mess, and they are adopting a little boy. They have had a wonderful, smooth process. We are happy for them.

We don't know yet when we are coming home. But, I will let you all know here on the blog when we do know.

Have I mentioned how much we miss our boys?!?!? We want to take a family vacation somewhere...just the 4 of us.  We don't care about the money anymore....we are tired of not doing anything b/c of "making sure we have enough money for the adoption". We are done putting our life "on hold".

Never Mind...

Never Mind... We are coming home soon (without Selah).

We are hopeless.

NEED PRAYERS NOW!!!

We need your prayers now more than ever....I can't say what is going on right now. But, please PRAY....the battle may have just begun, but this could possibly end it positively. Once i can say, i will. But, know the only reason we have to not say right now is to protect our case.

PLEASE PRAY!!!!!!

Well....

We have been postponed yet again.... We don't know until when. We have been given two different stories, so we don't know what is up. But, by the end of the week, we hope to know something. We never even saw the judge today, but we sat in the court room while our coordinator met with him in private. Our coordinator is the one who told us he needed more time.

We know that your prayers are working, so please don't lose heart. If the prayers weren't working then the judge would have just given us a negative verdict back on the first court hearing and been done with us.

Things are happening, we feel it.... Please keep praying!

We are frustrated and tired, but have hope. We will go to see Selah tomorrow after not seeing her since Friday. That is always hard on her and us when she hasn't seen us that long. Please pray for our time tomorrow.

We miss our boys like crazy. Keith and Cheryl- please give them a big KISS and tell them we love them SO much!

We can't thank you enough for all of your faithful prayers! We love you!!!

SNOW!

Last night (Saturday night) we met up for dinner with Gary and Josie, another American family (from Pittsburgh) who are here adopting. We had a wonderful time with them. We are looking forward to more dinners together. On the way to meeting them for dinner we had to run in the rain for 10 minutes. And then on the way back, it was raining and we had to run home. Shane said, "on our next adoption, lets try to remember an umbrella!" (Just an FYI, umbrellas are like 40.00 here!...so we will run in the rain)

We woke up this Sunday morning to SNOW! and I mean ALOT of SNOW! Its actually very beautiful. I took pics, but can't post them right now b/c we are in an internet cafe. I will soon.

I have butterflies as the day nears the end, because it means its closer to tomorrow's court.

Your time tonight at 12 midnight will be our Monday at 11am. Thank you to every one of you all who have been so faithful in praying for us. It really means so much.

We will post on the blog as soon as we have the results of tomorrow's court hearing.

Love to all,
greta and shane

Charity Ball

Here we are at the start of our Cigar Sales! We ended up selling alot of cigars for their charity!

We walked two miles up hill to get to the place b/c we were trying to save our money and not use a cab. Yeah, so I made sure I wore my Nikes and then put my black dress shoes on once we got there.  (We ended up getting a cab to go back home...)  A woman can only handle so much....

We had a great time meeting people from all over the world. All the people that were at this event are people who work here in Kaz, but are from other areas- Australia, London, America, Italy, Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey....just to name a few. BUT, they ALL spoke English and were ALL very friendly.  We were the "newbies" so we were asked a million questions and I even got a proposal! :)

messages

I just had to post what my father-in-law sent to us of our messages from Seth and Gage:

"I love you mommy. I'll love you all the time. I love daddy and Selah too. I'll get a leaf all the time for everyone. You can get any toy for me and Gage. When Selah grows up she has to share. I'll give Selah a toy and I'll be your friend everytime. from Seth"

Gage wanted his mommy again today but he didn't cry. I told him that I had received an e-mail from you saying you missed him and you wanted me to tell him and Seth that you loved them. He seemed fine after that.

Thank you Keith and Cheryl!!!! And thank you for emailing us pics so often. It is AWESOME to see their faces! :)  And thank you for taking such good care of them. We have a peace knowing that they are in good hands.

We had a short time with Selah today. She only wanted to be outside. She only cried a little bit in the beginning, but then was pleasantly distracted by the balloons Daddy had bought for her!

We are going to a charity event tonight put on by some american families that live here. Its an event to raise money to help the poor, handicapped, and elderly here. We will actually be helping the americans at the event by selling cigars as part of the fundraiser!!! :)  Pretty fun. 

Have a great weekend.  Court is on Monday!!!! 

huge progress

We didn't see Selah until 3pm today. The first part of our day was very rough emotionally.  We have been having struggling times with Selah and we were already anticipating another rough day with her.

We get to the Orphanage and they bring her and she cries, of course. BUT, she calmed much quicker this time. The caregiver calmed her a bit and then I showed her the markers and coloring book from yesterday. She came over right away to it and then the caregiver snuck out.

We had the BEST DAY we have EVER had with Selah today!!!!!!!  Literally, Shane and I every so often would out loud say, "Thank you Lord for this"!!!!!

She gave us a glimpse of what she will be like once we get custody and have her everyday. She laughed like crazy today. She spoke to us in russian. She asked Shane to do things for her (this is HUGE). She interacted with us in ways she has never done before. I can't even describe it good enough in words right now. We are still on such a high from our time with her. :)

We will see her in the morning, but then will not be allowed to see her Sat or Sun, and we don't know about Monday either b/c of court. Whenever we have a break like this, she regresses back. So Tuesday will be difficult again. This is why we just need to have her everyday consistently. But we are just sooo happy to have had a glimpse today of what is to come!  And of ALL days, God knew we needed it today (when we were at our lowest).

poop

We just got back from visiting our Selah. She still cries when they bring her to us and clings to the caregiver...we couldn't blame it on the room we were in this time. So the Director calms her down and speaks to her in russian.  Tells us to go outside with her again. We would be more than happy to, because it makes her happy. She was just fine outside with us. Not as happy and smiley and laughey as yesterday, but there were no more tears while we remained outside.

Shane pushed her around on the bike.

I did the slide thing again with her.

We brought markers and a coloring book and we showed her that outside. She loved that. She loved taking the marker out and then putting it back in.

We had to bring her in, because she had a poop accident. They took her and then brought her back like 10 minutes later for lunch and she screamed again and didn't want to come with us. Whew! This is exhausting.  The Director calmed her down and then left. I was then able to feed her and she was fine.

Whew!!

Realized that there were poop remains on my sleeve. yummy.

Last night we met up with another american family that adopted from a surrounding region called Shymkent. They are here in Almaty just until friday to finalize the last part of the paperwork. Their son is SO cute! We have already matched Selah and Ben up for a future marriage. ;)  We met for dinner last night and we have plans to have dinner with them again on Thursday night. We so enjoyed their company and we are looking forward to being with them again on thursday.

Please be in prayer that our judge will give us a positive verdict on Monday. We are very unsure as to what the decision will be.

smile and a laugh!

Today has been a tiring one! Whew! I am drinking Airborne as I type because my body is feeling rundown.

It was a tiring day for good and yucky reasons. We started off our time with Selah "yucky". When they brought her into the music room she screamed! and I mean screamed! I was trying to hold her to console her and she wanted nothing to do with it. She was thrashing, arching her back and trying to run for the door. (What we later found out, is that she doesn't like the music room anymore). She did this for a good 10 minutes....

Anyway, the Director came in and consoled her. It is still sad for me that I am her Mom and can't console her yet. Its hard. It will come with time. I know. But, its still hard now.

Sooo, the Director calms her down with a boatload of Russian words. And then directs me to come with her. We walk down the hallway and the Director is so sweet, she was telling me to hold one of Selah's hands as she held the other. And then scooted us out the door to play outside.  Selah started to warm up, but not quite yet. We were met outside with a bunch of other children that are her age. And let me tell you, I CAN'T get those sweet little children out of my mind! They were ALL so beautiful. The caregivers kept telling them that I was "sveta's mama" and I felt bad they were saying that to them, because these sweet children may never be adopted due to the system. Oh my heart went out to these precious children.  Shane came out later and one boy ran up to him and said, "Papa?"..... *sigh*  If only we could adopt them all!

Anyway, Selah started noticing the other children all around me and started getting more curious. AND the caregivers kept telling her to go with Mama. (They are all so encouraging of us, which is so nice).

Then , I asked Selah if she wanted to get on this little bike thing and she came. I pushed her in it for awhile until I no longer could remain in the bent over position any longer. :)

Then, I held her hand and took over to the playground. Huge step that she let me take her away from the caregivers and the other children.  I put her in the plastic slide and she would slide and then I would lift her up into the air before she hit the bottom. Ok, this was THE BEST THING I HAVE DONE WITH HER, because SHE FINALLY gave us a huge smile!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is huge because we have never got a smile from her, last year we had to tickle her to get a smile!  She has a beautiful, beautiful smile! And gorgeous teeth!   So I did this, of course, for as long as my back could handle it. (Which is probably why I had to pop 2 advils and drink some airborne!)

Then, it gets even better!!!! We play this ball thing with Shane and she ends up LAUGHING!  And I mean chuckling! Shane and I literally thought we had died and gone to heaven. If only you all know how much we have been waiting for a smile, nonetheless a LAUGH!  We were having a blast and didn't want it to end!

I kept asking for kisses in Russian and she would come to me and stick her cheek out for me to kiss it. :) We did that MANY times, because Mama is soooo high maintenance with that.   Shane asked for a kiss and she came and stuck her cheek to him, but then wiped his kiss off her face. LOL..... It made us crack up!

We brought her in and tried to bring her to that music room again for lunch and again she would have nothing to do with it and started thrashing and screaming.....we think the caregivers and Director understand now that she just doesn't like that room!  They put us in another room and she was just fine.

So, the time started off really hard. But, ended beautifully!!!!!!!  We are hoping for the same tomorrow.

Happy Election Day!

Laughter

Laughing is what we did alot of with our time with Selah this morning!!!! And we sure needed a good dose of the laughter Rx!

She had us laughing at her cute little walk, the way she would pass toys between me and Shane, the way she would very hurriedly try to get away from Shane and then plop herself down on my lap, the way she would try very hard not to smile when I was trying to show her HOW to smile, the way she fed herself lunch, the way she would jam HUGE bites of food in her mouth and then store it in her cheeks, the way she propped her sweet little elbows on the table as she was looking at her book we brought, and then the way she looked at us with a "what?" when she saw us dying in laughter, and the way she would shake her head and say "niet" in her mouth (not outloud, of course) whenever we showed her a stuffed animal  ("Niet" is No in Russian)!!! 

 She was such a character today.

She still doesn't speak with us...the "niet" was literally in her mouth, she never opened her lips to say it. But she made it clear that she was saying "niet" to those stuffed animals!!! Ha, ha.

And she DID still cry when they brought her to us. But it lasts for a couple of minutes.

Sooo, at one point she kept patting her bottom and heading for the door, so I told Shane that I think she needs to go potty. (Yes, they already have her in panties-*sigh*)  So I take her down the hall and use charades to tell them that I think she needs to use the potty. So they take her and do their thing. So, they bring her back into us and she pitches a FIT! We can just imagine what she was thinking: "Noooo, I was just able to runaway from these people and now you are bringing me back!!! Noooo!!!! Darn, I thought I made a clean getaway!!"

But, once we sat her down and looked through our books with her, she calmed right away. DANA- She LOVES the "Back in my arms" book!!!! She really does. She points to the Mommy and we say "mama" and then point to me. Then she points to the Daddy and we say "Papa" and then we point to Shane. And then she points to the little girl and we say Selah and then pat her.  Then we started asking her "where is mama?" and she would point to the Mom on the page! Brilliant child! Brilliant!  LOL Ha, Ha.  We are using Mama and Papa because that is the Russian words for it and that is what the caregivers tell her we are. So we are trying to keep it consistent, but eventually we would prefer mommy and daddy. (Lately, Seth has been trying out new names for us. Its funny.)

We get to be with her every day this week from 10-12. We end our session with feeding her lunch and then they take her for her nap.

We know that each day will get better.  And then we need the 10th to deliver us GOOD news so that we can continue this time with her and then eventually bring her home! 

I Will Rise

I just HAVE to encourage you all with what God encouraged me with this morning!!!  

Shane and I have just been in a funk.... we are bored out of our minds, we are worried about what the Nov 10th court decision will bring us, we are saddened by our struggling times with Selah, we just want to bring her home with us so we can start our life together, the seemingly endless battle to bring this little girl home, some depressing news from home, missing our boys very much, our lack of sleep and tiredness, etc....

I have been asking God to strengthen me and to give me His peace.  

Do any of you wonder if the battles in life will ever end???? I know I sure do. It gets exhausting- this life. If its not one thing, its another. Once you end one trial, another starts. It can sure look and get hopeless.

We have our ipod and speakers with us (thank GOD!) and i was listening to a song that i have heard a million times before. However, this time God opened my ears to REALLY hear it. This is one of the ways God answers us!  This is one of the ways He loves on us.....right when we need it!

Here is what i learned from it: This life WILL HAVE struggles, pain, sorrow, heartache, disappointment, etc.... We will not be able to flee from it. Period. BUT, once we are in His presence all sorrow and pain will be gone and we will rise to be with HIM- forever!!!  This earthly life is SO short even though in our earthly minds it seems like this is it. This is all that matters. But, its not! And I am so thankful for that! :) We have a heavenly home that is SO much better and will last forever. So, in the meantime, I can CHOOSE to use this earthly life for His glory. I can CHOOSE to use the pains and struggles and sorrow of this life to know Him better, to further His Kingdom, to do His Will, to glorify him.  Because in all reality He is all that matters, His kingdom is all that matters in the end. Period.  This doesn't mean that our sorrow and pain goes away---oh no, it doesn't. And that is okay. Jesus came as a human on purpose. He chose to come and He knows full well all the temptations, sorrow, and pain we feel. He went through them and more....  So, when we struggle we become more compassionate to others. Our pain brings beauty, if we let it. Our pain makes us more aware of others' pain. 

So, we can CHOOSE to let the pains of this earthly life make us more like Christ or more bitter. I am choosing the first. 

"I Will Rise" by Chris Tomlin

Verse 1:

There's a peace i've come to know

though my heart and flesh may fail

There's an echo in my soul

I can sing, It is well

Pre-Chorus:

Jesus, has overcome

and the grave is overwelmed

The victory is won

he is risen from the dead

Chorus:

And I Will Rise when he calls my name

No more sorrow,No more pain

I Will Rise,on Eagle's wings

Before my God fall on my kness,and rise

I Will Rise

Verse:2

There's a day that's drawing near

when the darkness breaks to light

and the shadow's disappear

and my faith shall be my eye's

Pre-Chorus:

Chorus Times2

THE END