Some Good News

Just a short update with some positive news....

First of all: Look who's here!  

With a second court date and all the delays, Mark decided to cancel some meetings and fly out of his trade show straight to us.  I couldn't believe it until I had my arms around him again!  He arrived late Saturday night and leaves next Saturday night.  I have never been one for ruining time together with worrying about time apart, but this time it is really bothering me.  It feels so natural to have him here and be able to talk with him and do things together, and yet I know our time together is just a brief blip and soon I will be back to all-by-my-lonesome.  So I'm trying hard not to worry about it, but failing!  And I wish I felt livelier and we were doing wonderful things for his time here, but I'm still absolutely exhausted, and there still is not much of anything to do.  Or rather, there's not much to do that fits between the school schedule and the nap schedule and the darn Kampala traffic.  

Yesterday, which was Sunday, we had a mild day and took a walk around our new neighborhood in the afternoon.  Buttercup fell asleep just before we got back, and I laid her down on her bed.  The older kids were supposed to rest, too, but Hibiscus was getting whinier and wilder and stubborn-er.  Before she went totally nuts, Daddy offered to read her books in the other bedroom, and they went in and snuggled under the covers with a big pile of books, and were asleep the next time I checked on them.  Meanwhile, Emerson and I played a little game in the living room.  What an amazing concept -- handling difficult behavior by giving the kids extra positive attention, instead of just helplessly demanding that they do things!  What a difference and extra pair of loving arms makes!

Next the bit of bad news: our second court date, which was scheduled a week from the first on (on Tuesday) has been rescheduled.  For Friday.  So we have to wait longer to have things with the crazy aunties resolved, AND it means all the rest of the paperwork is also pushed back... now almost two full weeks from the original hope.  Now (if everything goes well) it really is a race of hoping that everything will get done before the Christmas holidays start and our visas run out at the end of December.  But worst of all, it's a Friday afternoon date, and if there is any more tiny delay, we will run out of Mark's visit... and the whole point was that he cancelled things and raced over here for the court date.  So that makes me frustrated.

But the family had their meeting that the judge ordered yesterday, and apparently it went..... "well" seems like an awfully positive word to use.  The LC1 Chairman came to mediate.  (The Local Councils are the most immediate form of government in Uganda, and are very important in cases like these.  We have had officials from three different Local Councils involved in this case, and this LC1 gave very important and illuminating testimony at the first hearing.)  I spoke with the lawyer on the phone today and we will meet with her tomorrow.  Phone conversations are always so difficult here -- I can manage to understand one or two words out of three!  But the gist of it seemed to be that the father said he would commit suicide if the aunties did not stop objecting to the adoption, until finally someone or other (aunties themselves? other family members? not sure yet) thought that it was pretty unreasonable that someone would have to commit suicide in order to make his own decision about his own children, so the aunties had no choice but to back down.  Um, well, that's one way to reach family consensus!  

So hopefully we can get to understand what happened a little better tomorrow, speaking with the lawyer directly.  There is also paperwork that the LC1 made up from the meeting, which will be signed (or something like that).  So I think this means that the worst probability of the aunties' case being successful is over, although who knows what will actually happen in court.