Home for Christmas?

The internet has been down on this entire side of town for about four days now.  Occasionally I've gotten flickers of life, but not enough to work with.  Wonder of wonders, this morning when I tried to load Facebook, it came on!  And there were emails!  And everything!

Needless to say, then I spent the entire morning dealing with a backlog of things on the internet, from important emails (from the Senator's office) to checking out reports of Cyber Monday sales.  Several people had written me long emails or messages about how they are doing in their own lives, or responding to my blog posts, which are my absolute favorite thing to read.  I even forgot about how grumpy I was!  All this while making tea and going potty and suggesting that a full-size little girl not sit on top of a toy car, and all kinds of things like that, of course.  Finally, I realized that Buttercup desperately needed a nap, and then the kids would come home, and I hadn't done anything else all day long.

But you know the worst part?  I didn't feel panicked about everything that I hadn't gotten done, or worry about rescheduling my whole week.  Do you know what jumped into my mind?  "Yay, that means I'll have something left to do tomorrow!"  I did sweep the floor with Buttercup napping on my back, though, and I made a call and now I'm writing blog posts.  That's pretty productive in Three-children-and-me-Uganda Land.



It's time to go home.  It really is.  There is Advent happening at home, which is my favorite season of the year.  I've debated what to do for Advent here, and decided to ignore it.  Because first of all, it feels too exhausting.  And I think it would just make me miss home even more.  And also, I don't have any fun activities or presents or books or anything to pass out on the different days, not to mention an Advent calendar or wreath or anything like that.  I thought about coming up with Bible verses to read on the different days, but decided that my children are too chaotic for Bible verses that don't come with illustrations and yes-or-no questions, which is pretty much all of them.  Hibiscus told me her version of Adam and Eve, which is about as straightforward as they come, and it made me want to hide my head under a pillow and turn over her entire religious instruction to someone else.  Her abstract theology is even worse.

Anyway, back to Advent.  One of the elements that I find the most powerful is the image of darkness into light, and how Advent leads us to the Solstice, and by Epiphany we are seeing more light in our days, like Christ is the Light of the World.  It kind of doesn't work when there are no seasons.  I'm sure that people in tropical countries come up with other ways to make theology real in their lives (after all, God made the tropics, too) but again, that feels like too much trouble.  I do not plan on spending Advent in the tropics, ever again.  Give me my sweaters and my dark candlelit nights, and dreary weather warmed by good company.



Will we be home by Christmas?  That is the question.  Either we will get our paperwork finished in the next couple weeks, or all the offices will close and I will plan on mid-January.   The judge might take pity on our visa problem and get the guardianship orders written up this week or early next week, in which case we could probably make it home in December.  That's possible enough that I'm not making concrete plans for staying.  If it takes her closer to her original estimate of the 19th, everything else is not going to happen in time.  I'm resigning myself to that, but not yet making plans.  Although I did just buy another 5-kilo bag of rice, which should last us to January.  People who adopted through this program last year are encouraging that officials will hurry our paperwork through so we can be home for the holidays, but most of the officials have changed in the last year, and the whole system is backed up for months' worth of cases and I have a feeling that MY family Christmas is not of very high priority with them.

We have to get guardianship papers from the judge.  Then we can apply for Ugandan passports, which apparently usually gets done within a few days... unless they decide to all go to their kids' Christmas play or something like that, which would probably take at least three days, this being Uganda and all.  Then we need a US visa, which we could get in one appointment.  But they only have appointments on Monday and Wednesday, so if we got our passports issued on Wednesday we would be delayed for a week in the best-case scenario.  And since everything has been backed up for months, all the appointments at the Embassy might be filled anyways.  Or we might need a second hearing, like we needed a second one for the Uganda side.  Then after all that, we will need plane tickets.  Ordinarily, that would be as simple as changing the date, but in late December, who knows if four tickets will be available?

Meanwhile, I'm filling my days with exciting things.  Like sweeping the floor.