Tea with Tatiana!

Saturday, November 25

Instead of Tamarra coming to pick us up at the bowling alley, Tatiana, the coordinator shows up. She asks me if I am ready to commit to these children, I tell her "yes I am"!!! She pretty much knew that would be the case and had taken it upon herself to start working on the paperwork that she will need to file with the court in Birobidzhan for me to formally adopt these kids. Tatianna tells us we need to go to some officials office so she can print the paperwork and I will sign it. We go to Olga's office, not sure who Olga is, but she has something to do with adoptions in the region and also find out that our driver for the day is Olga's dad! This is a small town, so it's really not that big of surprise. We also find out that today, Saturday, November 25 is Russia's "Mother's Day"! What a perfect day to sign these papers! We arrive at Olga's office and Tatianna has screwed something up on her computer and needs to retype the paperwork, but instead of her doing it, she asked me to retype it from a template. It turns out I am typing my own petition to adopt, it was a little intimidating trying to type this on a Russian laptop with these two very important people looking over my shoulder as I typed, I was just praying that spellcheck would work in English! Finally finished with that, and Tatianna invited Gail and I to a back office where she had set up a little tea party! It was just like chatting with your girlfriends, we found out Tatiana loves to shop, goes to China (1 hour flight) often to find bargains and asked me to bring her back a pilates dvd when I return for my court date. At this point, if it would help to move my court date up, I would bring her a real live pilates instructor! The tea time was actually a really lovely experience, one of the highlights of the trip!

Tamarra then shows up and we are taken to Pasha's orphanage to visit with Pasha again.