The Judge said, "Da"

Monday – 6 Apr – 7pm (Britt’s turn to blog)
Today we added a little boy to our family. The judge returned “a positive decision” and approved our adoption and name change request. So, officially on April 17th, Artyom will become Maddox Leonidas Singleton with Britt Harold Singleton as his father and Keri Lyn Singleton as his mother. Now we’re even MORE impatient than before. He’s ours, we want him, why can’t we have him? Court started 20 minutes late because the orphanage director forgot the scheduled time. After he was openly berated by the judge for the first five minutes, we began. The judge asked us to confirm our identities and our wishes as to the adoption, and that we understood our rights. Then a long list of information about us was read aloud for the court record. We presented photos to the judge, and Britt got to make his big speech to the court, pausing after every sentence for the translator to speak. Next came input from the orphanage director, child welfare counselor, and the government prosecutor. They were all in agreement that the adoption would be best for the child. Then they asked why we wanted to adopt another child when we already had three. Sticking with our home study verbiage, I said that our family was incomplete because we can’t have anymore children of our own and we would like another boy. So the judge responded with, “So your family is incomplete because it’s incomplete?” To which I responded, “Yes, your honor.” (Not the smoothest answer I admit, but what else was I supposed to say?) Then they asked Keri her thoughts and she said that neither of us had siblings very close in age and we see how close our girls are, and how sometimes Jack is left out, and how he could have a brother to be close to, and the court completely agreed with that analysis. (Maybe Keri should be an attorney) After that the judge left to contemplate her decision. We all rose when she left and hardly got seated again when she was back with the decision to make us the “Singleton Six plus Duke.” We were in court 37 minutes and that included the 5-minute tongue lashing the orphanage director got for being late.
After court, we went back to the hotel where Keri proceeded to analyze every possible way to do our next trip on the new dates that were given us. Then, after she calmed down and had it figured out, we met some friends for lunch. After lunch we went inside the Church of the Spilt Blood (pretty church from last trip). It was incredible…over 7000 sq m of mosaic tile (each tile is less than 1 sq inch) pictures (if my math is right, that is over 70,000sqft). Every walled surface is a mosaic tile picture from the Bible. It was built from 1887-1907 and then was used as a warehouse from 1917-1972 (so sad). It was restored from 1974-1997 and reopened as a museum in 1997. We’ll put some pictures on the blog when we get home.
As for now, we have to leave the hotel at 3:45am…so get packing. We will be back here on the 17th and hopefully be back in the USA with Maddox on Apr 25th.