Meet the Carrollskis!

Praise God! Our hearing went without a hitch and the court approved our adoption of Vlad pending a 10 day waiting period. So, although it is not officially official, we're celebrating anyway.

We are now, Papa Bill, Mama Beth and introducing....Vladyslav Williamson Carroll! In Ukraine the convention is for children to take their father's name as a sort of middle name or description. Vlad had been Vladyslav Alexadrovitch (literally, son of Alexander) Markov.  We decided to replace Alexander, the father he never met, with William the person who will actually be his father. Williamson...son of William. Not sure what he will end up going by. Early indications are "Liam" but we'll see how that pans out. If he wants to continue going  by Vlad that's fine too. We had wanted to keep the name Markov as a second middle name but they wouldn't let us. Apparently they never heard of this concept here. They told us,  "Markov is his surname, it can't be his middle name." Our protest, "Yeah but in America you can  have ten names and call yourself "Storage Unit # 32" if you want to," fell of deaf ears.

The courtroom was small and cramped, Beth, our translator and I sat in the front row in front of the judge, a middle aged woman who had that bored, tired, judgey look about her. Also there was a representative from the public welfare department, a prosecutor who looked like she was about 25 and dressed for a rave and several other courtiers.

After several minutes of talking amongst themselves the Judge asked me to stand and asked what I was asking of the court. She also asked a few other questions about where we live, where I work etc. Then she asked Beth the same series of questions. Then the judge read aloud from parts of all the documents we submitted. Everybody looked on the verge of sleep. There was another series of questions, how we met Vlad, when did we decide to adopt him etc. The Judge asked Vlad if he wanted to be adopted etc. and it was all over in under an hour. They dismissed us into the hallway for about five minutes and then called us back in and gave us the favorable decision. After signing some papers and saying "spaceba" we were out the door.

We went out and celebrated over Ukrainian pizza and ice cream and then took Vlad back to the orphanage. Tomorrow is his 14th birthday and we are hoping to get permission to take him out for the day. We plan to actually take custody of him on September 11th and then head to Simferopol to work on changing his passport and getting his visa etc.

Thank you all for your prayers, thoughts and kind words of encouragement. We are also grateful to our facilitator and translator here for all the incredible hard work they put in that resulted in such a smooth hearing. We thank God for  giving us the victory in spite of our weaknesses and for rescuing another orphan from a very uncertain future.

I just came across these verses as I was trying to find some appropriate scripture to thank God. This is perfect:

Sing to God, sing in praise of his name, extol him who rides on the clouds; Rejoice before him. His name is YHWH (Jehovah.) A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows is God in His holy dwelling. He sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing..." Psalm 68: 4-6.