Today is Court Day

Hello! or I should say, good morning!

Yesterday was a great day starting out with a breakfast full of rich conversations and beautiful stories told by Segy and Angelica. After breakfast our driver took a nurse around to all the Dr's for us and had her show our medical reports to them. They signed off on everything and we are medically good in the eyes of the Russian court. We also saw Lex's medical report on Monday and he passed everything with flying colors. the only thing we need to check out in the US is his heart. He had a murmur at birth but they have never been able to detect anything since then.

Since or driver was busy Jason and I had the oppurtunity to relax for a couple of hours. We watched a movie. Or I should say we watched the cheesiest movie in the world, "Troy". We think they really wrote it to be a comedy. Well, that got us talking about some other comedies that have happened on our trip. I hope these don't offend anyone but, we have witnessed some amazing sites. One being a full set of gold teeth: not on a young rapper, and not a removable grill but a full set of BLING on a 60 year old man! It was amazing! Another was when we went to take Lex to get his passport picture taken he got to travel in the car with us, get all dressed up or should I say tied up. The ladies at the orphanage had that poor wearing two ski hats, a coat with a hood, and a scarf wrapped so tight I am not sure how he was breathing! Anyway, when we got to the photo place, which is not a "happy" photo place, that consisted of one room with some ancient equipment and a scary old man. After unrapping Lex the old man places him on a stool in the middle of the room. Lex has been very brave this whole time but after being on the stool for a minute (because the man was warming his ancient camera) he started to cry. We comforted him and he ended up doing great. It wasn't until then that I noticed what he must of been crying about the man taking the picture had a mole on the end of his nose that was the size of his nose.... can you say plastic surgey?? Another thing Jason and I can't get over is in our room we have crunchy carpet... not sure how you get crunchy carpet, but we got it!!

After we had a few laughs Jason and I decided to go eat. Little did we know the laughs would be on us. We walked past a few places and decided to eat at a restaurant that looked very nice and had been recommended to us called the Art Cafe. Most of the restaurants in Russia are cafeteria style and you can get by with a lot of pointing. Okay, there was no pointing here, no pictures no ANYTHING that even resembled English. The waitress was sweet but we could not comunicate so Jason ran back to the hotel to get our translation book. Even with our translation book we could not pronounce things well enough to have her understand us. We must of made a spectecle of ourselves enough that a sweet young Russian man came over and knew enough broken English to help. Honestly, we would have never eaten if it weren't for that man! God bless him because it was our favorite meal so far. I had a mushroom soup (it really was mushrooms) in a heavy cream sauce and Jason had brocolli soup and then a salmon (we think it was salmon) fliet with wild rice and a cream sauce. It was about $30 meal.

Okay I need to hurry so we can get to court but wanted you all to know we have court today at 10:30am. Then we offer to take people involved in the court process to lunch and after will go visit Lex again. Our plan is to head to the train after our visit and roll back to Moscow. We'll be in moscow tomorrow morning, Oleg will pick us up and take us to the US Embassy where we need Jason to give me power of attorney since he is not returning to Russia and then we catch a flight to Germany to see our kids and Jason's parents and grandmother.

I hope to blog soon but not sure when I will have wireless again. We love you all and are so thankful for you and your prayers!!!

Much love Jason and Stephenie