Six-Days-Before-Christmas Update

I still haven't found my proper, comfortable indoor shoes.  I know I packed them somewhere obvious at the very end, but they have not emerged.  It gives me joint pain to walk on tile floors with bare feet, not to mention then it's cold and you can feel all the dirt, so this is a big deal.  However, perhaps we are on the upwards side of the moving pain, because I did cook a proper dinner tonight, with boiling pots and everything.

✪ Apparently the children agreed that Emerson was on duty last night.  He is not nearly as dedicated as the girls are to finding little things that bother him multiple times a night, but when he does decide that something is wrong, he engages said dedication to making sure it is really wrong and I miss a nice big block of sleep.  Last night something bothered him on the skin around his eyes, and it really hurt.  We probably spent an hour in the wee 'smas trying to clean whatever it was off of him.

✪ The toys were all in such disaster when I packed them up, that it made me feel like never giving the children any more toys to play with, just letting them mess around with sticks and plastic cups and things like that, if they can't take care of their nice things.  Except Emerson's legos; Emerson has been taking meticulous care of his legos.  But I underestimated him: he also very carefully packed his special "no-sharing" basket, and he did better than I did insofar that he remembered exactly where it was, and he has unpacked it to play with his favorite toys.  Obviously, this creates a big problem because the girls don't know what they like or where it is and it's all mixed up anyways, so all they see is Emerson's no-sharing toys.  I'll let you imagine the ensuing "conversations."  Meanwhile, Hibiscus left some toys outside, drops others on the floor and doesn't even bother to not step on them, and was chewing on something else until it was un-fixable.  Obviously, my first instinct that all the children were not taking care of their toys was incorrect, and Emerson is actually quite meticulous for his age.  On the other hand, Hibiscus is actively destroying everything destroyable.  Buttercup is kind of like a three-year-old, more or less.  I am debating the parental validity of taking toys away from only one child.

✪ My original idea was that the cat would be mostly an outdoor cat, and he (or she) could come in and play when the children were around.  However, I forgot to take into account how when you move, it is not reasonable to put a cat out into the yard and hope that he won't happen to wander away looking for home and just disappear.  So I kept him inside until he had gotten some meals and some snuggles.  Needless to say, he quickly and completely became an indoor cat!

After a little while, I started to become concerned about the littler box situation, or rather, the non-litter-box situation.  We don't have one, and I don't intend on getting one, partly because this is supposed to be an outdoor cat, and partly because I doubt he would know what to do with one if he bumped into it in the night.  So where is he doing his business?  I can smell a little smell, if you know what I mean...

It turns out that the answer is: down the drains.  Almost all bathroom in Uganda, like most of Africa and Asia, have a drain in the floor.  The cat is going on top of the drain, and neatly scraping the tile floor to "dig" himself a little hole.  I have seen the footprints, and watched him in action.  It is really incredibly clever, and he could not have possibly found a better potty-ing solution.  Unfortunately, he is more clever than the engineers and construction workers who actually made the drains.  Which should be at the BOTTOM of the bathroom, and are not.  When I go to dump a little water down to flush them out, the water sits around the level floor of the upstairs bathroom.  Downstairs, it actually floods out into the hallway.  It's the little things that can drive you crazy!

✪ Our highly-recommended potential maid has quit before she has even begun.  I guess I should start asking around to see who else is highly recommended, unlike the last horror story I heard, of a maid "jumping" while she was watching the children, including a 9-month-old baby.  (Meaning she just up and left.)  Meanwhile, I am feeling extremely resentful about the probability of doing my own dishes.

Which is a little silly, but if you've got to live in a third-world country and drive on roads with river beds down the middle, and spend three days getting the obvious appliances in your new apartment to materialize; then you might as well have someone to wash your stupid dishes.

✪ I suppose we are actually making some logistical progress.  I find myself starting to get excited, like we're actually getting somewhere, and then remember feeling that way when we got all our paperwork submitted.  Which was almost four months ago.  Or when we were actually assigned a court date.  Two months ago.  Or when we woke up in the morning and it actually WAS the court date.  Exactly a month ago.  And you notice that right now we are moving into a new apartment, which is in Kampala, so none of those dates got us any closer to America whatsoever.  So I think "NOW the series of predictable paperwork events is actually starting!" and then I think to myself "shut up, being excited, and go clean the cat poo out of the drain."

So at this point, we have the verbal confirmation that we have guardianship of the girls, and then the lawyer got the actual written and sealed ruling, and this morning we had our appointment at the passport "office," and then we went and picked up the ruling, the irrevocable consents from the birth parents, and about four inches of paperwork to hand to the Embassy.  This officially means that Uganda considers us the only and forever parents, but since they already considered us the complete parents for three years, and America has yet to acknowledge that we have the right to parent these children, it does not actually make much difference in our actual lives.  Once we get the passports, we can have the medical appointments, and once we have that we can ask for our first interview with the Embassy for American visas, at which point we learn how long we have to wait for our real interview.

The passport non-office was interesting.  We walked through security into a compound with various drab concrete buildings in a square around the edges, but all the action was under a bunch of tents in the middle.  Several tables were set up at the front, with various government workers, and other people filing back and forth putting folders in front of someone or arranging them on another desk.  Then a great many benches were set up faces the desk areas, like a church congregation, except you couldn't actually see what happened at the front, and it didn't seem to matter.  We had an 8:30 appointment and probably arrived around 8:40, and sat down right next to another family.  I was attracted by the American-looking mother with the African children.  My children were attracted by the games she had out, and immediately joined right in.  It turns out that we had actually had court on the same day as well, so had slightly met each other before.  It was nice to spend the couple hours of waiting time with someone to talk with, and something new for the children to do.  Because of course there were a couple hours of waiting time!  We had also met a representative of our lawyer's office, who told us what to do.  After a while, she drifted by and informed us that someone had said our paperwork was "very fine."  Somewhat later, she told us to be ready, and I told the children to put their backpacks on, and she kind of laughed and didn't actually mean THAT ready.

Eventually, we went up to the desks for our "interview."  The man flipped through the other family's file, specifically looked for a couple of papers which the lawyer's representative showed him, and stamped his stamp on just about every page.  Then he sent that family to another desk, and looked through our file.  The only question he has was why the file only had Hibiscus's name on it if there were two girls, and the lawyer's assistant mumbled something that they had submitted two files but it wasn't allowed, and he asked again and she wrote Buttercup's name underneath the first name.  And he stamp, stamp, stamped.  That was the entire "interview."  He didn't even ask to see my passport, although there was a copy in the file, but he did look at us, so it was possible that he was confirming that we were who we were supposed to be.

Today is Thursday, and the passport people won't be at work next week.  So possibly, with a great deal of prayer (says our lawyer), the passports will be ready before the vacation.  But probably not.  So we are on the wheel of possibly-predictable productive paperwork, but there is a giant roadblock right in front of us, by the name of Christmas Vacation.


Meanwhile, there are way too many mosquitos in our new house.  I am not sure where they all come from, but apparently I've got another month or so of them!