An important day:)

Hello everyone! Today was an important day in our adoption process. We had our court interview with a person called the Defender Of Minors. This is the person who approves our case and submits it to the courts to go through the process. You need to have the baby with you for one week to make sure everything is going O.K. before they will do this interview & get the ball rolling. So as of today, Athena has been with mommy and daddy Zuge for one week! The meeting went well and our paperwork is officially in the courts as of this morning. In the meeting they asked questions like "Why did you choose Colombia to adopt from?" and "Would you like to adopt from Colombia again?" They also asked us how much information the orphanage had given us about Athena and her birth family and then went through her file to see if there was anything else that they could tell us. After today, we do not need to be present at any more meetings or interviews for the court process. It will all be done by our lawyer.

When our case is done moving through the courts and the last judge signs off on it, we will have what is called "sentencia". After sentencia we will have few more days of paperwork to get Athena's passport and official name change and things like that and then we will be able to come back to Wisconsin:) There are so many different courts and judges that any given case could possibly be assigned to, that they cannot predict how long sentencia will take. It will most likely be a few weeks. Until then, we are free to do any sightseeing we would like and be tourists in this beautiful country:) Tomorrow we are going to a place in the mountains called Monserrate. We will tell you all about it and have pictures in our next update!

Here are some pictures from this morning with the whole family dressed up for our big interview:)