The Wednesday edition of what happened to Joe and Teri today.

The Wednesday edition of what happened to Joe and Teri today. 09-07-09
I didn’t realize how much I would miss the internet until I was without it.
This is being typed on Thursday morning before our court date. Yesterday was a full day. It started with making omelets, my wife, Teri likes her omelet dry. She cooks it up in an omelet pan turns it over and cooks the other side before she adds the middle. I like mine moist, she says it skeeves her. I knew when she said let’s make them together she was asking for trouble. I cooked our omelet on one side then tried to flip it with the top of a pan and it fell apart. I reassembled the eggs as best I could added cheese and I thought it tasted pretty good she made faces and ate in silence.
It was not time for a discussion on omelet quality; we were going to meet the girls today. We had a new translator and driver, the driver doesn’t speak English and our translator, Natasha did introduce him I just don’t remember his name.

They picked us up in the morning and drove us out to the school and orphanage. It was about a twenty minute trip and neither of us felt like speaking, both of us lost in our thoughts. We arrived in front of a big grey building surrounded by a low gate with a path lined by flowers to the front gate. We went inside and upstairs. Howard and Marty spent the better part of a day waiting to see Vanya but I think the dinner we went on in July with them and the orphanage director had a very positive effect the girls were waiting for us in the director’s office. They ran into Teri’s arm and hugged her, then they noticed me and both came and gave me hugs. We spent the rest of the day together in the common room. There were at least three other kids that I saw there that needed me to adopt them. One was a small girl that reminded Teri of her cousin and seemed very sweet. A second girl who was just entering puberty and needed a mother to get her through the rough times coming. And the third one and the saddest one a boy who ignored the whole goings on because you could see he was mad that no one had come to adopt him and he was going to go into the world as an angry adult and it was just very sad.
We bought with us three cameras to take pictures of everything and it quickly got out of hand. Nastia got one camera, then Elena got the second camera and someone borrowed the first so Nastia came and got the video camera and several batteries later with had several hundred pictures of every inch of the second floor and everyone who lived on it.
After our adventure with the girls we had our meeting to discuss the next day’s court hearing for custody of the girls. We went over the girls medicals, the questions we would most likely be asked and how to prepare our opening statement. We were told that the judge, a women whose name I don’t remember might interrupt the opening statement and ask questions and to just go with the flow. I was to write up an opening statement just in case.
After that we went to dinner with the people who are becoming our newest best friends, Fran and CJ Manone. I had French fries and beer, so I was happy. We stayed out too late so our translator who looks fifteen chastised us about it. It was the second time that day she had done it the first time was when we went walking with the Manone’s at the open air market and we didn’t tell her. She did really piss me off when she said that after dinner she would call a taxi and it would pick us up. I thought that was why we were paying a driver and I said I was not comfortable with that and Teri says it’s OK, we’ll figure it out. In the end she comes with our driver to pick us up at nine thirty and that was when we were chastised the second time. We went to bed late that night 10pm.