Our New World

The phone rang this morning:

"Hey, Marty..." says our adoption agency. "We were just wondering if you might want to go to Ethiopia on the 25th."

"Oh, well, I was kind of looking forward to going for the March 11th embassy date but it's ok." And in the meantime I wondering what on earth I am going to do with myself for 6 more weeks.

There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. "I'm actually asking you if you want to go in February."

There was nothing flattering in my response. I was shrieking. I was scaring my children. I was back pedaling so quickly, I couldn't even form a thought. "Really? You want me to go then?"

And on and on it went with me making phone calls to my husband, the travel agency, the adoption agency (again); snapping my fingers at my children to make simultaneous phone calls to friends on another phone because I couldn't bear for them to not know and yet airplane tickets seemed a bit more crucial. (Note to self: just because you've sent a lot of emails to a man named Trent in Utah who works for a travel agency, doesn't mean he is your b.f.f.)

My fight or flight response is amazing. The first thing I did was read a missionary story to Levi. It was about a Canadian missionary who was driving a tractor across a frozen river. In Ontario. In -35 degree weather. He fell through the ice that was really safe and really thick. So did his tractor. I stopped reading the story.

The next thing I did was take Emma to the doctor so he could diagnose not an allergic reaction to her malaria meds but scabies.

The next thing I did was itch.

Then I bought funky rotisserie hotdogs from Target for lunch because I couldn't think of what else to feed my children.

Fiddle lessons followed as did a run 2 times around the block and the boiling of 8 eggs.

It was a very random day and I'm exhausted. It's not really hitting me at all that 2 weeks from today I will be at the JFK Airport. Because it's February 25th. Not March.