We have a court date!!

Wow oh wow!

So we thought we would be traveling sometime in January for our court date...wrong!!
We travel two days after Thanksgiving!!!
This would be a pretty lame blog post if I didn't fill you in on the story right? OK here it is...

We knew when we got matched that the courts were closed for the rainy season. Over the past two years we would get an email telling us when they closed and again when they opened back up...

The scene: K-9 Kennels on Ft Leavenworth
Occasion: Unit Activation Ceremony (Army talk, I know, a whole other blog!)
When: October 24th around 11:00

We're all standing around mingling, waiting for the ceremony to begin. I grab my phone to put it on silent. I notice I have an email. It's from Holt. Our case has been submitted to the courts for a date....

The scene: The PX (Army store, like a Walmart without the groceries and with name brand stuff)
Occasion: Killing time before I meet my friend to take a financial class on Post
When: November 7th, around 1:30

I'm walking through the clothing section at the PX.  I look at my phone and see that I have an email.  It's from Holt. It says "Congratulations, you've been assigned a court date in Ethiopia of November 27, 2012!".  I stop and say (loudly) "OH MY..".  An employee is standing nearby and asks if I'm OK. I answered "yeah?" then "yeah.".  Then I walk away shaking.

We get to meet him. We get to finally meet him. All these years of wondering what our child will look like and now we get to hold him. Hug him. Kiss him. Make hand gestures to try and communicate with him. Give him some new clothes. A photo book of his new family. A story book with our voices reading it to him.

I walked around the store for about 10 minutes then go out to my car and pull to the back of the parking lot where I'm to meet my friend so we can go to our class. I'm parked facing the entrance to the main stores on Post so there are a lot of people driving by that can see me...I'm bawling by now. Happy, but bawling. I call my sister and apologize for not being able to go to Orlando to visit her for Thanksgiving. Being the awesome person that she is, she's happy for us and says it's no big deal and it's totally worth it. As soon as my friend gets there, I simply hand her my phone with the email pulled up. She looks at me, sees I've been crying and is a little speechless at first (or I was still in shock and simply didn't hear anything she said :P).  Chris is back down in Ft Leonard Wood for SRT training (military SWAT). He hardly ever had cell reception so I texted him. He got the text just as they were about to do a drill. I didn't want him to be distraced and not do well so I sent another text assuring him that I would have everything under control.

The next day I woke up quite early for me, 7am. It was too early to get much done but I had a list. 1. Call the travel agent Holt provided. 2. Find out what we need to do for visas. 3. Call preventive medicine on Post and schedule for immunizations. 
Well the travel agency is in the Pacific Time Zone and opened at 8am (10am) for me.  The Ethiopian Embassy in DC wasn't answering their phone and I was having a hard time finding the phone number fore preventive medicine on Post!! 
Thanks to some other ET adoptive friends, I found out we can get our visas in the airport when we land. I finally found the phone number for preventive medicine and now know that we can just walk in for our shots. I took a nap. Shortly after 10am, I called the travel agency and booked our flights!
Then I called the dogsitter and changed our booking from the week of Thanksgiving to the week after, called the Vet on Post and scheduled to get the kennel cough vaccine for the dogs, went onto the United Airlines website and signed up for the frequent flyers program, found our passports, forwarded our intinerary to Holt, talked to the director of Africa programs at Holt and booked our hotel (through her) and got other answers to questions I had AND added the travel dates to our white board calendar! I'm sure there is more I got done but it's a bit of a blurr now.

The trip will be very short and we will only get to spend a few short, precious hours with him.

We leave on Saturday, November 24th (Yeah, in two weeks!), mid morning...arrive in Addis Ababa (where we will be staying) late in the evening on Sunday.  We get to meet Ephraim on Monday, have our court date on Tuesday and play tourist on Wednesday the leave late Wednesday night and return home Thursday evening. Ouch. (Some families leave the same day of their court date!)

I don't know if we will get to spend more time with Ephraim on Tuesday or Wednesday but I hope so.  I think I may need to bring a half full suitcase so I can fill it up with stuff to bring home! We want to have things in our home to remind us of Ethiopia and the culture.

I think the next two weeks are going to fly by so fast I'm not even going to remember baking pumpkin pies or eating way too much turkey. Even with Chris' deployments, I don't think I've ever wanted time to fly so fast as I do now. I'm pushing back tears as I proof read this even, I'm not sure when they'll stop...April maybe??