Lux et umbra vicissum…

All of us have ups and downs, right?  We have our exciting moments and our depressing moments and everything in between.  In a sense, we’re all on an emotional roller coaster, it’s just some people have more of the kiddy version (lucky ducks!) while others have the death defying pee-your-pants kind.  (And sometimes we jump from one version to the other, just for fits and giggles.)

Then sometimes our roller coaster gets really odd.

Have you ever had something scare and depress you significantly while something else elates and excites you immensely AT THE SAME TIME?  For instance, have you ever been diagnosed with cancer and are awaiting a PET scan with a good possibility of the results being bad news and then received a response from a book agent wanting to see more of your work that you’re hoping to get published as a previously unpublished author?  No?  Well, I can tell you that on the emotional side of things, this is incredibly confusing.  My roller coaster has split in two and is going two different directions at top speed, and my baffled emotional center is trying to figure out how to handle that.

At this point, I could dance and hug and kiss everyone and generally be crazy, but if someone does something that even slightly bothers me I may very well jump down their throat about it.  I feel like I’m buzzing with energy.  I’m quite literally vibrating.

So I’ve concluded that splitting your emotional roller coaster is a bit like splitting the atom: sometimes that energy is used in positive ways and sometimes negative, but the energy is there all the same.  Meanwhile, I believe I’ve found a new form of insanity for myself.

I think I’ll go take a Valium.

Who among us has not looked up symptoms or information about a diagnosis on the internet?  Let’s be honest: when it comes to what’s going on inside our bodies, we feel like we have a right to as much information as we can get.  The difficult part is sorting through that information in a meaningful, non-paranoid way.  That’s where things often break down a bit for all of us, and that’s where I find myself today.

I could challenge you to look up information on almost any form of cancer and find happy news, though some might be less unhappy than others.  That’s something I should remember from the start; I should probably just avoid looking up anything at all before further testing so my stress level won’t go any higher than it already is.  Unfortunately, the need to know what’s going on is a stronger motivation than the knowledge that I might find upsetting answers, many of which probably won’t even end up applying to me.  It would be interesting to see a study of how many people either self-diagnose incorrectly or over-diagnose based on information they find on the internet.  Funny thing is, even if that number was absurdly high, most of us would likely still do it.  It’s hard not to when it can take so long to get in for the actual medical tests and specialist visits.

Choroidal metastasis, the kind of cancer with which I was diagnosed by the eye specialist, is an interesting bugger.  It’s usually either associated with breast or lung cancer, and since we know I already had breast cancer that’s the likely culprit.  That wasn’t disturbing to read.  The next part was, though.  Multiple sources say roughly the same thing: by the time you see choroidal metastases, it’s pretty late in the game of metastasis and indicates a poor prognosis.  Most patients who are diagnosed with choroidal metastatic cancer are then found to have metastases to other parts of the body, most frequently the lungs, bones, liver, and brain.

Me being me, I couldn’t just stop there.  I had to know what the symptoms of cancer in some of those other sites might be.  Since I knew next to nothing about cancer in the liver, I decided that was where to start.  The first, most common symptoms listed are loss of appetite, nausea, fatigue, and weight loss.  Whoa… let’s take a break from research for a moment to look back one year ago.

In March of 2017, I contracted a horrible stomach bug – one of those ones that has you lying on the floor in the bathroom because a) you don’t have the energy to move, and b) you may as well stay there because you’ll be back soon anyway.  Not long after the virus went away, I began having trouble eating.  Sometimes I was nauseated, but more often I just wasn’t hungry.  I felt constantly full.  This lasted for 6 months or so, the first 4 being the worst.  Over the first month or so I lost at least 30 lbs, and by the end of 4 months I had lost 50 lbs.

Now you’re probably asking me why I didn’t go to the doctor about this.  I did.  I went to my regular doc, and at first he just prescribed an anti-nausea medication.  When the lack of appetite persisted, he sent me to a GI doc.  The GI doc did an endoscopy and colonoscopy (which I’d rather never have again just because the prep is so horrible), and found nothing amiss.  So instead of any of the doctors trying to look further, the GI doc said it was probably just that my intestines hadn’t recovered from the virus I’d had and it could take up to a year.  From what I gathered when he gave me this diagnosis, it wasn’t based on any sort of scientific research but stemmed from thinking he had other patients who had had something like that happen.  Honestly, I suspect he thought I was faking, though why I would fake that I really don’t know.  It wasn’t like it was fun.

What drives me absolutely nuts is that you hear so many people saying, “Report sudden weight loss or gain immediately,” but when it actually happens no one seems to care.  My doctors know my history of cancer and it still didn’t raise any red flags.  Why?  Why did no one ever bother doing a full body scan when I was having such odd symptoms?  Why did I only get nods and pats on the head when I asked if things could indicate cancer?

Also over the past year, I developed unexplained spotting and saw my OB GYN.  She at least was trying to check me for different things, culminating in a hysteroscopy and D & C that showed nothing.  What I find odd is that, in that whole time, I never had tests on my ovaries other than her internal finger check.  Ovarian cancer has been undeniably linked to breast cancer, and it’s notoriously difficult to catch because its symptoms are so often diagnosed as other problems.  It’ll probably turn out that my ovaries are just fine, but I still want to know why that avenue of possibility wasn’t pursued further.

People are always recommending advocating for yourself when it comes to your own health, but we don’t talk much about what happens when you try to advocate for yourself and are ignored.  If I lived near a more populous area, I’d probably have a choice of doctors to go to and could relatively easily get second opinions.  Where we live, there’s not nearly as much choice, especially when it comes to specialists.  If a specialist here tells me he thinks something will go away eventually and the choice is to either wait to see if he’s right or try to get a referral to a different doc 2 hours away… well, you want to trust the first doctor.

So here I sit, almost a full year after the strange symptoms of severe loss of appetite, some nausea, definite fatigue, and significant weight loss, waiting for an oncologist to call back so I can make an appointment to check whether my previous cancer has spread anywhere other than my eye.  I hope he’ll find that the eye is the only place that seems to be affected – it’s entirely possible, though not as common – but either way I feel cheated by the system, a system which right now seems happy to let me sit around doing nothing while a relatively fast-growing cancer is working towards eradicating my vision in one eye.  Most of the doctors and nurses I’ve met are kind people, but something is broken here.

Have you ever wondered why an illness that isn’t inborn can be so hard to kill?  If you think about it, most sicknesses that you pick up along the road of life are usually fought off by our own immune systems, sometimes with the help of drugs like antibiotics.  There are a few obvious exceptions, of course – immune disorders that are contracted later in life, for instance – but in general, contractable diseases are also fightable diseases.  So why is cancer any different?

Though cancer isn’t something that spreads from person to person (for reasons I’ll mention later), it’s also not something innate.  Oh, we may be born with a predisposition to it, but the actual disease isn’t a chronic condition that we inherit from conception.  This means it has to come from somewhere, so where does it come from?

All sorts of things are blamed for causing cancer, some of them with more factual foundation than others, but the basic source of the cancer is our own cells getting a little too creative.  Have you ever heard the statistic that our body replaces every cell with a new one in a seven year cycle, so after seven years you’re basically a completely new person?  The statistic is actually bunk, but the idea of our cells dying off and being replaced is absolutely true.  You might remember the term “mitosis” from your high school biology class, it being the splitting of a cell into two “daughter cells” with identical genetic information to the original.  The problems happen when a cell emulates your basic teenager and says, “I’m bored with this whole copying over and over and over thing.  I want to be DIFFERENT!”  At that point, it gazes in the mirror at what it looks like and decides to distort the mirror a bit to produce at least one daughter cell that doesn’t quite look like it.  Voila!  It has created something special.  And very possibly cancerous.

Since these new cells are still technically part of our own genetic system, be it a mutated version, they can’t pass to another person.  Do you know how difficult it is to graft one genetically different thing with another?  Suffice to say, farmers, surgeons, and geneticists have to work pretty hard and fairly precisely if they want to do this.  Our cells don’t naturally do it on their own.  That’s the good news.

The bad news is that these naturally-produced cells also manage to evade or even convert immune system cells.   Though the immune system does help to fight many cancer cells, very possibly killing some off that most of us didn’t even know were there, some of the stronger cancer cells can strong-arm immature immune cells into actually helping them instead of killing them. In other words, the mutated cells become bullies and start to take over the playground.

I suppose you could say the cells are being “smart” when they react this way – who needs AI when you’ve got cells with their own creative bent? – but just like most bullies, their actions are only leading to their own demise.  Eventually, either through treatment or death of the host, the bully cells will die off, and it will be ALL THEIR FAULT.  No mercy here.  Just another illustration of why bullying is stupid.

So for those of us fighting cancer of any kind, we’re basically taking on the class bully, the kid who in wanting to be “different” or “special” chose the path of tyranny.  My biggest question here is this: why cancer?  Why can’t I have mutated cells that allow me to teleport or shoot lasers from my eyes (instead of maybe having to have them pointed into my eyes instead)?  Come on here, I need more X-Men and less Wrong Turn.  Is that really too much to ask?

Short version: my cancer is back, but in my eye

Back in December, I got a headache that lasted for the whole month, and with it there was a disturbance in the vision of my left eye.  I thought it was an ocular migraine because I’ve had them before, so I just waited for it to go away.  I let it go until late January, when I finally called my ophthalmologist.

You know, I don’t think it’s ever a good thing when your doctor looks at something, gets a worried look on their face, and says, “Oh… I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.”  I was immediately referred to a specialist in my town.  I saw him twice, the first time on a Saturday because they wanted to get me in quickly, the second time the following Tuesday so they could do more tests.  Guess what!  The specialist wasn’t sure what it was either; he just called it a “retinal lesion”.  So he referred me to another more specialized specialist (I just called him the specialist specialist).

It always takes a bit to get in to see a specialist specialist, of course, so my original appointment was a month after the first specialist’s.  When I called to let them know that the thing was noticeably growing every day, they got my appointment moved up by two weeks, so that was cool.

The appointment was today.  After hours of tests, the specialist specialist came in to see me and showed us how the lesion we were seeing was the largest one, but there were others.  Then he showed us the fluid under the biggest lesion.  He also pointed out the little things that were cancer cells.

Technically, they would need to do a biopsy for a definitive diagnosis, but eye biopsies aren’t something they like to do if they don’t have to.  Everything he was seeing pointed to cancer – not eye cancer, mind you, but metastasized cancer.  There’s a good chance it’s leftover cells from my breast cancer 6 years ago, but we can’t be sure without a full body scan.  I get to visit my oncologist again!  Yay!

I’ll be calling the oncologist on Monday.  If no other cancer is found, I’ll need radiation treatment to my left eye.  That should take care of the cancer there.  I’m just really hoping he doesn’t want to put me back on any of the cancer meds.  Between having to change my psych meds and all of the other side effects, it was NOT fun.

So here’s to doctors who find this stuff so we can deal with it appropriately.  God was watching out for me.  If those cancer cells had landed somewhere else, even somewhere else in my eye, they probably wouldn’t have been noticed this soon.  We’ll have to see where the journey takes us this time.

It’s been a while, but in celebration of the completion of my first trilogy, I’m reopening my blog. 🙂

The search for an agent is definitely stressful. Thing is, even if I never get a word published, I’ll still be writing. That should mean it doesn’t matter so much if I find an agent or not, right?

That’s what my logical mind says.

Meanwhile my emotional mind is doing something more like, “WAAAAAHHHH AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!”

The trilogy follows a girl and her friends on their quest to restore the magic that exploded and left them four years ago. It’s a modern world, which was actually a bit of a challenge since the premise is fantasy. I automatically picture girls with their long skirts blowing in the wind and boys in tunics, but my characters generally wear jeans and t-shirts. It’s been fun, too, to think about what the world would be like if pretty much everything was done by magic, and then the magic went away. Violently. I’ve enjoyed exploring that world – the world of Atheria.

Whether the first trilogy gets published or not, I already have plot outlines for two more series in the same world, with plans for one after that. The Magic Whisperer, The Magic Singer, The Magic Writer, and The Magic War. I even have a vague idea for another one. Honestly, writing is too much fun to quit just because you can’t find a publisher. Besides, my family and friends enjoy them even if no one else gets a chance. 🙂

My Mom sent me this poem recently, and I wanted to share it. It’s a good reminder… and a good excuse! 🙂

BABIES DON’T KEEP

Mother, oh Mother,
come shake out your cloth,
empty the dustpan,
poison the moth,
hang out the washing
and butter the bread,
sew on a button and make up a bed.
Where is the mother whose house
is so shocking?
She’s up in the nursery,
blissfully rocking.
Oh, I’ve grown shiftless as Little
Boy Blue (lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).
Dishes are waiting and bills are past due
(pat-a-cake, darling, and peek, peekaboo).
The shopping’s not done
and there’s nothing for stew
and out in the yard there’s a hullabaloo
but I’m playing Kanga and this is my Roo.
Look! Aren’t her eyes the most wonderful hue?
(lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).
The cleaning and scrubbing
will wait till tomorrow,
for Children grow up,
as I’ve learned to my sorrow.
So quiet down, cobwebs.
Dust go to sleep.
I’m rocking my baby and babies don’t keep……

~Author Unknown ~

Growing up, I always did well in school.  Yes, I was one of the annoying kids who got upset if I didn’t get an A++ on a test and who ruined the curve for everyone else.  Of course, I was also completely lacking in people skills until college, but that’s beside the point.  I’ve always known I had some brains in there somewhere; the difficulty has been figuring out what in the world I’m supposed to do with them.

Through my school years, I enjoyed most of the subjects we were studying.  Well, I really didn’t like learning French in college, but in a moment you’ll see that there was a good reason for that.  With the rare exception, I found something to like about every class I was in, which may have made my schooling more enjoyable, but it also put me in a difficult position when it came to figuring out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.  Consequently, I became something of a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none and ended up majoring in theatre in college.  Why?  Well… why  not?  I couldn’t think of anything else I’d like to do more, though honestly I didn’t have the passion for it that some of the other theatre majors had.

It was in my college theatre experience that I discovered my love for management.  My favorite job in theatre was, by far, stage managing.  Acting was fun at times, and I had a great time as a tech, but stage managing was pure joy (along with a heap of stress… but once again, that’s beside the point).  Being able to start with an idea and help put the pieces together to turn it into a full-scale wonder was an incredible adrenaline rush to me.  But after graduation, the question arose as to what exactly I was going to do with my oh-so-marketable degree.  My new husband and I weren’t living in an area where I could start looking for theatre jobs and I don’t have the balance to be a waitress, so instead I turned to teaching.  I enjoyed teaching, but it still didn’t really feel like I had found my niche.

After my brief teaching stint in a local Christian school (which ended with extended bedrest and an eventual miscarriage), I moved on to customer service.  Eureka!  I had found it!!  The job I would NOT want to work in for the rest of my life.  My acting skills definitely came in handy, though.  From there, I found what seemed like the perfect job for me, creating, running, and teaching in a drama program for a nearby Christian arts studio for kids.  It was a fabulous job, and I did enjoy it.  Had I not become pregnant with our first baby, maybe I would have kept working there.  As it was, the time commitment required for the position was too great for a new mother, so that was that.

Fast forward to today.  Other than a brief time of doing a little email customer service from home, the Drama Director job was the last paying job I held.  It’s been more than eight years now since I actually worked for money, and though the eight children that we’ve acquired in that time certainly keep me busy, I’ve had plenty of time to think about what I might like to do with my life if I ever enter the workforce again.

So now that I’ve had eight years to reflect on the question, what have I decided is my calling in life, besides being a mother?

………?

I don’t know.  But I’m one big step closer to figuring it out!  And that step began with a little thing called  Classical Conversations.

Maybe some day I’ll type up the whole story of what led us to finally start homeschooling our kids this year, but I don’t want to go into that right now.  Suffice to say we had pretty solid reasons to begin on this particular journey.  This year has definitely been one of learning for all of us, perhaps even more for me than for the kids.  The younger school-age kids were mainly going through an ABeka curriculum, while our oldest, our adopted 15 year old, joined with a local homeschool group called Classical Conversations, or CC for short.  The way the group works is that they meet together as a class every Friday under a specific tutor.  The tutor is hired by CC as a contractor, so they actually have to go through an approval process and are paid by the organization unlike many homeschool co-ops where parents just offer to teach classes either in exchange for participation in other classes or for a small fee that they charge on their own.  Another difference with CC is that they have their own curriculum.  If you know anything about different theories of education, you may have heard of the classical model (as opposed to the traditional model employed in most schools).  For an excellent essay on classical education, check out The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers.  If you’re going to follow a classical education process, then you aren’t going to be using the same curricula that you would see in your typical schools.  Classical Conversations makes the whole curriculum thing a little easier by putting out their own materials so you don’t have to do as much shopping around to pick your books.  They also have a large section of recommended materials in their catalog if you want to get extras to supplement the basics that everyone needs.  This is the system into which we stepped when we signed our eldest up for CC last year, and it’s this system that has led to my recent, significant self-realization.

One of the major differences between classical education and traditional education is the focus of the former on rhetoric and logic.  Students actually go through logic classes in which they learn how to detect fallacies and how to frame their own statements logically.  They learn the art of debate and how to apply their understanding of logic to a persuasive argument.  This idea of logic becomes a thread that is woven through every other area of their education, showing itself in math, science, history, theology, Latin (yes, Latin!), etc.

So what, you may be asking, does this have to do with me?  Well, somewhere along the way, I had the sudden, startling realization that there’s actually a very good reason I’ve done so well in a variety of subjects but never bothered to master any of them.  My gift doesn’t lie in any one compartment of traditional education; my gift is in logic!  It makes perfect sense!  I love seeing how things fit together, and I’ve always pushed to understand the “why” of a particular piece of knowledge so that I could understand it better.  Throughout my schooling, I could find something logical in just about every subject which is why I enjoyed them all.  I think the reason I disliked French so much, and wouldn’t enjoy most languages, really, is because they truly defy logic.  Latin is an exception as far as languages go; I think you’d be hard pressed to find a language more logical than Latin.

Where does this realization put me?  Well, for now I’m doing the only thing I could think to do.  All of our children are enrolled in CC for next year, and I’ve applied to be a tutor in their program at either the middle school or high school level.  I mean, I’d love to go out and tackle a PhD in logic.  UC Berkeley has a program that’s supposed to be excellent.  Unfortunately, there would be two mitigating factors to pursuing this most excellent degree: I don’t think it’s a distance program and I believe they would actually want payment for the classes.  My husband also reminds me that going for a PhD while caring for eight children, the youngest of whom is an infant, might be a tad daunting.  So for now I think the most I can do as far as learning more is to continue with independent research and reading.  That’s ok for now.  Maybe I can go farther than that some day.

But to finally understand a bit of myself that didn’t make sense to me before!  I don’t know if I can fully express quite what this understanding means to me.  For a long time, I’ve felt rather stupid though my grades in school would say otherwise.  I couldn’t figure out why it was I didn’t seem to have an aptitude for a specific subject like so many of my friends had.  To finally be able to point to something and say, “Here lies my talent!” is an amazingly freeing feeling.  Does that make sense at all?  It should.  It’s logical.

It’s taken me longer than I like to post this, but I hope most of you will understand why once you’ve read the whole thing. As most of you know, our two new daughters will be arriving home with Daddy tomorrow morning. Yay! Now for further news…

When we started this adoption process, Joel and I talked about someday having another biological child once the girls were here and settled. We thought it would be nice to have one more baby, and it might also help our family bond a bit over the common experience. But I wasn’t absolutely sure I wanted to go that route. My pregnancies have gotten progressively harder each time, and I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to go through another one. But seeing as we wanted to get the girls home and settled which would mean having them here for a year or so, and then with the fact that it usually takes us a year or so to conceive once we start trying, I figured I had plenty of time to put off thinking about it.

And God laughed.

Baby H will most likely make an appearance in late September or early October.

Now to explain why we’ve waited so long to announce. As I’ve said, this news was a surprise to us. We weren’t trying for it this time, and since we usually have a little trouble conceiving we were doubly surprised to find out we were expecting again. When we did learn of the situation, we discussed it for a while to figure out how to handle it given our current adoption. We finally made a decision which may very well irritate our agency when they find out, but which we felt at the time was appropriate: we would hold off on telling them at least until after the first trimester. I’ve lost two babies to miscarriage, one of them quite late in the first trimester, and I simply couldn’t deal with the idea of our adoption being delayed and then losing a baby on top of that. Remember, we weren’t sure how old the Ethiopian court would say Liya was, and we were afraid they might decide she was too old to adopt out. The longer we waited, the more real that danger became. By alerting the agency to the pregnancy at that point, I risked losing both our older girl we were trying to adopt and the baby I was now carrying. It was a risk I wasn’t willing to take.

We probably would have told them when I entered the second trimester, but as God worked it out, our court date ended up being assigned earlier than expected and my first trimester led us right up to it. Once the court date had happened, the girls were legally ours. Technically, we could have announced then, but we chose to be paranoid. We’ve heard of some strange things happening in adoptions, even after the court date, so we decided at that point that we would wait until the girls were on the plane on their way here before we made any official announcement. 🙂 They’re on the plane now, so here’s the news! 🙂

A short summary of my condition so far: everything seems to be going ok. We had a scare around 15 weeks when I randomly started bleeding, but it didn’t last long and an ultrasound showed that all was well. I did have a really incredibly rotten first trimester (some of my facebook friends may remember that I suddenly disappeared for a little more than a month) where I couldn’t move for being sick. I couldn’t even use my laptop because the warmth and the sound of the fan made me more nauseous. It was crazy. Once that passed, I had a lot of energy trouble, partly because I had been stuck in bed for at least a month. It’s only been in the last few weeks that I’ve felt mostly back to normal, and even now I tend to have good days and bad days. That’s somewhat expected, though. We’re praying at this point that my disk injury in my lower back won’t act up like it did in my last pregnancy as I got bigger. So far it hasn’t been too bad, so maybe it’ll be ok this time. Prayers are appreciated.

And there you have it! Three new children for the Fouse family in the year 2009. Wow. Certainly not our plan, but it must be in the plan of the One who knows better than us. I’m trying to rest in that. (From five to eight! Ack!) Forgive us for not announcing sooner! I hope all of you understand (including our agency when they find out!). 🙂

Ok, so those of you going through Ethiopian adoptions right now will understand the full magnitude of this miracle.  Let me try to spell it out for everyone else…

There are two judges who hear all of the adoption cases in Ethiopia.  Because the adoption laws in the country have changed a bit recently (requiring different paperwork than before, etc.), the judges have had to request more paperwork on several of the adoption hearings that have come through, which has increased a backlog in the cases.  In addition, there are now 40 some (?) agencies working in Ethiopia, so there are a lot of court date requests going in.  The wait time for a court date has been steadily increasing since at least last fall.  As of last week, we were informed that court dates were being assigned 10 to 12 weeks out, so whenever we were told of a court date, it would most likely be 10 to 12 weeks from the date we were notified.

It was odd, though.  Back in… oh… January, I think, Joel felt very strongly that the Lord was telling him we’d adopt in March.  I’ll be honest.  I doubted even then.  I thought maybe he just had an optimistic feeling.  But I told people that, as unlikely as it seemed, when he got strong feelings about these sorts of things they tended to pan out.  As the weeks went by, I grew quite certain that the feeling he had was his own and not of the Lord after all.  Joel still held onto that March word until just in the past week or so when he started thinking maybe he was wrong after all.

We got an email today.  With absolutely no known reason, we were assigned a court date of March 25th.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have prayed and prayed and asked others to pray for a miracle in the process to speed it up, but I never really had faith that God would do it.  Oh, I knew He could, but I questioned why I was important enough to warrant this particular intervention when so many other families would like to speed things up as well.  Well, I don’t pretend to understand His reasons and they’re probably more complex and far-reaching than I’ll ever know, but I am humbled and in awe of the way He has consistently moved this particular adoption along and helped us to bring these girls home.  All glory be to Him!

If this court date is successful, we believe travel will be in the beginning of May.  This would be another answer to prayer since Joel would be able to go over and come back before airfare costs go up in June.  Please continue to pray with us that the court date will be successful and that we’ll be able to bring our new daughters home soon!  Oh, and stick in a prayer for the necessary travel funds while you’re at it.  I have absolutely no doubt that God can take care of them just fine. 😉

This’ll be brief because… well… you know, life.

Our dossier should be in Ethiopia now.  Yay!  We don’t know how long it’ll take for them to assign us a court date, but when they do set the date it’ll be about 10 to 12 weeks away.  We don’t travel for the court date; we travel for the embassy date which usually happens about 5 weeks after the court date.  We’re praying that things might speed up a bit (as are all of the other adoptive families in process), so we’ll see what happens.  We did hear that one of the judges in Ethiopia is now hearing only adoption cases and is hearing them five days a week, which might help a bit.  Apparently a lot of court cases are being postponed because the judges decide they need more paperwork which is one reason the cases are getting so backed up.  Things will even out eventually.  We’re just praying it’ll happen sooner rather than later. 🙂

In the meantime, you can pray with us that God will bring in the necessary travel funds.  We don’t know exactly how much it will be yet because airfare changes based on the time of the year, but we can be sure it’ll be more than a couple thousand dollars since that’s about how much it is for one round-trip ticket.  Joel’s going without me this time, so that’ll save some money, and he’ll stay at a guest home which is cheaper than a hotel.  So the main costs will be the plane tickets – one round trip for him and two one-way for our girls.  God has provided so much already that we have complete faith that this last little bit will be there when needed as well.

I’ll update as soon as I can when we find out our court date.  Thanks again for praying us through our journey!