Happy Birthday Alina!

Today is Alina's 11th birthday.

Yesterday she told us she wanted a HUGE cake so she could eat a lot and get really fat.  She told me she was very hungry.  She also wanted to have enough cake to share with all the kids in her group.  Finally, she told us she wanted a BIG present.

So today James and I grabbed our bag of tricks and came up with this celebration:

1.  We played Happy Birthday videos from all our kids back home (Except for Isabel... we're still waiting for her to email us her video.  tsk tsk Isabel!)  ;-).

2.  We gave her 2 small gifts.  She got to make her own bracelets and a craft butterfly that I (thankfully) picked up at the dollar store before coming to Ukraine.

Alina modeling the bracelets she made.

Alina making her butterfly.

3.  We purchased 2 cakes (one for the family and one for her group) as well as soda so we could celebrate by eating lots of cake (per her request).

The beautiful cake.

Mom and Alina getting ready to cut the cake.

Albina and Maks getting ready to eat cake.

4.  We sang "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" to Alina.

5.  We gave her a birthday card.

A birthday card for Alina.

6.  I took pictures of the beautiful birthday girl.

Alina with dad, Albina and Maks.

Alina with dad, Albina and Maks.

Alina all dressed up for her birthday.

7.  Then Alina insisted on taking pictures of me and then dad and me.

8.  We asked Alina if she wanted her main gift now or when we leave to go to America (we had planned to wait, but decided to give her a choice).  She said she wanted to wait.  So we played games and chewed gum (one of the favorite daily activities) until it was time to say goodbye until later this afternoon.  

During this afternoon's visit we primarily played games (just like usual).  Then Maks found dad's phone and somehow got his music playing, so we had a dance party.  It was a fun afternoon!  (Please don't ask me why I chose to record most of this sideways.)

One of the sweetest moments today happened when two of the ladies that work at the orphanage came in to wish Alina a Happy Birthday.  They gave her a chocolate bar and a mug that has pictures of our family on it as well as a picture of the orphanage.  I got choked up when I saw this sweet present.  I failed to get a picture of it, but I'll try to remember to take a picture later.

And finally... in other news:

This morning we got an exciting phone call and learned that we have a court date to meet with the judge and finaliaze things with our adoption of these kids.  Our court will be held on February 8.  While this is 2 days later than our "best case" scenario, the good news is that it doesn't actually change our timeline (If our court was scheduled on February 6, our 10 day waiting period would end on a weekend which wouldn't do us any good since paperwork can't be picked up over the weekend.  That means our waiting period would actually become 13 days.  Moving our court date to Friday keeps our waiting period at exactly 10 days and becomes the same day as if our court were on the Wednesday.)

Progress is being made.
We are enjoying spending time with our kids.
And James and I are even enjoying spending lots of time with one another.
Amazing!