I'm having another one of those "woe is me" kind of days today :( It's not any one thing, but a few different things all kind of combining to make me feel glum.
I have a tendency to completely freak out whenever I have a party or event, and convince myself that no one is going to come. Every birthday party I have for one of the boys, every Pampered Chef/Discovery Toys/etc. party, even (if you remember back to last October) our big garage sale fundraiser. It's embarassing to admit what a freak I am, but hey, why not share that with the world, right?! What I should have learned by now is that usually people do indeed come, and in fact more often I am blown away by the attendance and success of the event. Witness the $2,500 raised at that garage sale I was convinced no one was coming to! So now we are having this dance fundraiser on Saturday, and I am getting myself all worried again that not many people will come, that all the hard work Sarah and I have put into it will be for naught, and on and on... I really am my own worst enemy! Combine that with the shower my BFF is having for me just one week later, which only a very small percent of guests have RSVPed for, and I think I've decided to throw my very own pity party freak out instead. Sigh... I am sure both events will be fantastic, but I still always seem to need to worry first. I wish I could skip that step!
I think part of my feeling weird about the shower is that when she asked to have one for me and started looking at dates, we were so hopeful we would be traveling in May, so we decided on April to make sure our court date didn't interfere with it. And now here we are almost to mid-April, and not only are we not close to traveling, we don't even have our court date yet. I feel a little awkward, I guess. And things still seem to be very much up in the air in Ethiopia right now.
If you remember my posts from early March, there was much worry about a proposal from MOWA, the ministry in Ethiopia that must send a letter to the court approving all matches between parents and child. They claimed they were going to start writing only 5 letters per day instead of 40-50, everyone freaked out (me most definitely included), and we worried about significant delays. But then we kept hearing great things about progress being made and things seeming to stay as they had been, so I quit worrying about it. Well, a few days ago the US State Department posted a new notice, saying that although MOWA had been working quite quickly over the past few weeks, that was just to clear the backlog of cases, and all new cases submitted for court would probably be processed at the 5 per day plan. Ouch. Since they are still working on the old cases at a fast pace, it remains to be seen how all of this plays out for real, but understandably, I am freaking out a bit and very nervous about what this means for us. It sounds like it won't be as bad as we feared originally, since they are clearing out the huge backlog and cases with court dates through early May will most likely be taken care of. But there will still be a bunch of cases before ours (assuming they even handle them in a "first come, first served" order-never a guarantee). Our main concern right now is that courts close for most of August and September, and we really, really, really want to pass court before that. It seemed like it would be easy to do. Several families with our agency who were submitted for court on March 9th (so 19 days before us) got their May 25th court date on Monday. Following that logic, we were/are hopeful that we might get a date for mid-June by the end of April. Even if our MOWA letter were missing at the court date, we figured having a 6-7 week cushion before the court closed would be plenty of time to pass. But if this slowdown really occurs, even if we have a June court date (Please God!), there is no guarantee our letter will come before August. Sigh... And of course, this could all worry us and make us crazy and then everything could still be fine. I would happily take the worry now for that to be the case later! :)
Oh, and, although we are hoping and praying more than anything that we do receive a June court date, we also just learned that June starts the peak travel season, and our plane tickets will probably be $500 each more than we had been thinking. So, you see, pretty much everything is designed to make me completely bonkers right now!
I tell you, this adoption process is a remarkable one. It is so filled with the highest of highs, and then just as quickly come the lowest of lows. I feel like I have been worried and anxious for more than a month now. Here's hoping some good and reassuring news comes soon.
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