The Power Struggle Begins

We saw Sam this afternoon at about 3 pm (6am CST for the folks reading at home). He was very excited to met us, and we were excited to see him. He ran in and gave us hugs, and was wearing the sweatshirt that we had given him 6 months ago. We had to wait until later in the afternoon to see him, because they had just picked him up from the hospital today, and he needed to take a nap. He didn't sleep. He was too excited to see us. We played a couple of games with him and he was really hyper. We had to calm him down a little, and had to say нет (no) a bunch. He is a curious boy, and since we did not have a translator today I think he was trying to get away with as much as he could. He shutdown for a second when I had to take him away from a fancy tea set that was in the room for some reason. That was really our first experience with him shutting down, but I think we handled it just fine. Children who live in orphanages sometime just shutdown completely. This is known as "fight or flight." We have to be careful to unprogram this behavior from Sam, and it will probably be one of the bigger challenges that we face when we get him home.

Tomorrow is our court date, and we have court at 11am (or 2am CST). Hopefully, all goes as planned and our request for Sam is approved. Carrie says she is very calm, but I think that is because I have been volunteered to do all the speaking in court (yes, I did just throw her under the bus, but we are married and I will probably get in trouble for it later so stop giving the computer screen such a dirty look). I had to write a speech today for our court date tomorrow, so at least something is prepared for court. I do feel like we are prepared. I remember my brother, Dennis, always use to say that if you have to cram the night before a test you are prepared. We am not cramming so we guess we are either prepared or in complete denial.

Please pray that we both have the words to say and that we can effective communicate tomorrow.

P.S. I used the micowave in our apartment today which is in all Russian, and somehow I ended up defosting my 5 minutes and 50 seconds. I did manage to figure out how to use it later. I also just tried to spell check this blog and every since word was put in red, because somewhere blogger thinks I am typing this in Russian.