The day you were ours

One year ago today we spent a hot, exhausting, frustrating day at a little court building in Kigali. The goal of the day was to meet with a judge, declare our desire to adopt Avivah, present our paperwork, and await his ruling. However, since we were down to just one full day left in Rwanda and needed to apply for and receive several more pieces of paperwork before hopping on our plane the following night, we had high hopes that our court process would move quickly. We couldn't apply for the other paperwork without Avivah being present, and we couldn't take her out of the orphanage without our court ruling. So, as any go-get-em, impatient children of the microwave generation would do, we arrived at court ten minutes before we'd been told office hours would begin and willed the process to go at lightning speed (yeah, yeah...we should have known better by then). Little did we know that in a place where most people walk to work, the early morning downpour meant "business hours" would just have to wait. And wait. 

Shortly before lunch we were finally able to see the judge and declare our intention to adopt. To our great relief, he graciously agreed to deliver his ruling that afternoon. Unfortunately, between waiting for our meeting and then the scheduled ruling, we realized that we were going to miss morning and afternoon visiting hours at the orphanage. We comforted ourselves with the anticipation of rushing to the orphanage after our ruling and being able to take our daughter with us for a couple of hours while we did more paper chasing.

Unfortunately, the ruling ended up taking nearly two hours, as there were several cases being considered that day. By the time we had our court documents in hand, we had realized that not only were we not going to be able to apply for other paperwork that day, we weren't even going to be able to see Avivah. That was probably the hardest thing about the day for me, since we'd only ever had a few hours with her, and our last visit had ended with her screaming and reaching for everyone but us. I was so eager to see my little girl again, and it broke my heart that we were physically so close to her yet unable to spend time together.

But. Avivah was ours. As we returned to our hotel that night, drained by the day and worn down from two weeks of overcoming roadblocks, we held onto the knowledge that it was finally official. Avivah was legally our daughter!

I don't have a picture to share from our day at court, so I'll share one from the following evening, when we finally experienced the joy of taking Avivah back to our hotel, giving her a bath, and dressing her in the clothes that had been sitting in our suitcase for two weeks! What a fun moment that was for Mommy.

Happy Adoption Day, Avivah Ingabire McLennan!