Soccer, Church, and More Soccer

Our weekend was pretty low key, on Saturday we took Mariada to her soccer practice. We meet teammates and her coaches all who love her very much. We got to the field first and when the coach pulled up in his Toyota pick-up he and another coach got out along with 10 other girls! He goes and picks them all up every week. The girls all shook our hands said hello and walked off giggling with Mariada it was very heartwarming. The one coach spoke good English while the other one spoke zero, so he asked to be translated. He wanted us to know how happy he was that Mariada has parents and that she is a very good kid, he thinks it’s wonderful that foreigners adopt Albanian orphans, especially the older children, (then the translator starts to laugh, and tells us that now he is joking) but he wishes that we would have waited two months because they have a cup match next month and Mariada is fifty percent of the team! HA funny guy. The practice was two hours long and I was the only mom present, there were a few dads that showed up and one grandpa. Girls have only been allowed to play organized soccer for two years so it’s great that Mariada is on a team at all. The English speaking coach pays for her fees and even sponsored her to travel to Norway for the World Cup games last summer; he made sure that we were going to keep her playing because he thinks she has a lot of talent. I don’t know too much about soccer but I do know that she LOVES it so yup, I think within a year I’ll know everything there is to know about soccer! On our way home she says, Mom, Dad I love soccer so much. I was so overjoyed to hear a full sentence I wanted to turn around a let her play some more :)

Sunday was church, and then Fredi and Prenda invited us to play a game of soccer with his team, so Mariada and Bob did that while I stayed back with Prenda and helped make diner. She made taco’s which were a bit different than ours but really very good. When we sat down and prayed Prenda was talking with Mariada, then she turned to me to fill me in and Mariada wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with theses shells and what not, she had never seen taco’s before! She ate three of them!
It was after nine when we left so we came home made a few phone calls and went to bed, Mariada get’s up at 6:30AM for school. UGH

We just heard that the Judge is back at work and we should be able to have our hearing on the tenth, please continue to pray that this happens, we love being here in Albania but would very much like to have the stress of making her “ours” lifted off our shoulders.


Mariada'a Church, it was a full house this past Sunday and every single person came up to us and shook our hands, very nice Church.
Running drills.
Dad, showing her how it's done :)
The view from our penthouse! I keep warning Mariada that we don't have mountains in Michigan, she laughs kinda like I must be kidding, I'm gonna have to get goggle earth up to show her!