Court is Successfully Completed

It is a rainy day in Romny.  A sad day outside, but a joyful day on the inside.  We nervously waited for 11:00 to arrive.  We were at the court building on time and went up to the 3rd floor and waited in a narrow hallway.  The prosecutor (I never really did understand what her role was) arrived late so we had to wait for her.  All at once, we were ushered into a very small court room.  It was set up more or less like you would imagine.  On the bench, sat the judge dress in a black robe in the middle, with a "juror" on either side of him, and the court reporter next to one of the jurors.  There was a podium in the middle facing the judge, and two rows of seating facing the bench.  We sat on the right side facing the judge, with Svetlana sitting with us.  On the left side sat Julia, the assistant orphanage director, and the local child protection social worker.  There were one or two other people in the back row.  The judge began, reading a lot of formal documents for the record.  The entire event was very formal.  Svetlana tried to translate on the fly, but mostly he was just reading into the record, all the documents that had been accumulated up to this point.  Now and then, Svetlana would say to me or Libby, "stand up and say 'yes'" and we would do so.  Don't always know what I was saying yes to.  We had to state our name and address, occupation, etc.  There were only a few questions for us.  The main question, was they wanted to make sure we understood that Julia had epilepsy, and that we had the means to take care of her.  As we were answering some of these questions, Libby noticed both the male juror and the prosecutor smiled and seemed friendly toward us in their demeanor.  There were no probing or difficult questions asked of us.  Julia had to get up and say she wanted to be adopted by us, and that she understood she was leaving Ukraine behind and going to the United States.  She was nervous, but she did fine.  Then the judge and jurors and prosecutor left to go deliberate.  They returned fairly quickly with the court resolution saying they approved the adoption, approved Julia's name change, and approved of a new birth certificate being issued with Libby and me listed as her parents.  We are done and Julia is ours!  But wait.  We still have to wait ten days before we actually get her, so even though she is ours, she isn't quite ours yet.  Julia cried tears of joy at the end of the proceedings, and the judge kindly said to Julia that today was like St Nicholas' day for her.  All of this wore out Julia, so she returned to the orphanage to rest, and we went back to the hotel to hang out. (And hopefully take a nap, since we have an all night bus ride tonight).  We finally briefly met the Fox family this morning, but we are still having trouble getting together.