"I have my ruling..."

"...Your application has been accepted...good luck." And those were the words that closed one chapter of what has become a very, very long book. I cannot describe to you in words what this means. Our hearts are free now. We are free to embrace our DAUGHTER. She is ours. She is as much ours as Boe, Mac, and Leia. We have four children. We have a 13, 11, 9 and 9 month old. We have two boys and two girls. We are a trans-racial family and boy do we feel that here while carrying around this African princess. "What are they doing with her" is what we feel the looks are communicating constantly. Not in a bad way, but a confused or "that's interesting" kind of way.

We went early this morning (6 a.m.) back to Kampala to hear from the judge and Mac wanted to go with us - this was incredibly sweet. Mac has been worried that we would be disapprooved. His little heart has been afraid that we would walk right up to the line and be rejected and so he has asked several times, "what will we do if he disapprooves us?" So, he wanted to wake up early and go with us and hear it for himself. After the ruling his smile was the widest and brightest that I have ever seen it - I will never forget his pride and his love that radiated from him and the tears that filled his eyes as he called her "sister." Oh...the joy. Again I ask the question: "What exaclty are we sacrificing and giving up and who is this for again?"

Now we wait to get her Ugandan passport and then we can begin the application process to get her US Visa - this is where the hold up could be, so our prayers are still that we travel home together on June 9th.

There is a lot of action going on around here and we are packing up one place, putting our stuff in storage, and getting ready to travel 10 hours to the other side of the Country in the morning with Claudia and her four girls to see some of the native animals of Africa (you know dogs, cats, worms, etc - the usual Africa stuff). GSF is getting ready to welcome a team of teens from Ireland and getting ready to start school and so there is a frenzy happening around us. We are in the process of waiting now and are just praying that we will get the passport on Tuesday so that we can go to the US Embasssy on Wednesday. You could pray for that and also continue to pray for our dear friends at 5:14 who lost a mom, a siter, a sister-n-law, and a friend this week.