And suddenly, things started to happen very fast...

We've had a difficult few days trying to sort out visas (the entire
casework team at the Home Office was down with Swine Flu). We wrote
many strongly worded emails, and made some strongly worded phone
calls, and finally got good news yesterday that they were being
processed. We picked them up this morning and then went across the
road to the Ethiopian Airlines office, where our skills at wording
things strongly turned out to be needed even more urgently.

We were told that we wouldn't be able to change our flights to any
date earlier than Wednesday, which would have meant that Mum was at
risk of missing her connecting flight to Australia on Thursday.
Fortunately, John has a very impressive ability to sit in a chair and
not move until someone does something helpful, and after 1 1/2 hours
of this we were told that we could fly tonight. I think they did this
just to guarantee we wouldn't come back tomorrow.

Anyway, this means that we are flying tonight! After weeks of not much
happening, we're about to go. We're going to miss lots of things about
Addis, but not the being-new-parents-in-a-hotel-room part. We'd
probably better go and finish the packing...

My laptop has died (am typing this at an internet cafe) hence no
photos, again. Will post more when we come home, I promise. The babies
are hardly recognisable - Project Chubby is definitely off to a flying
start.

Missing everyone, looking forward to seeing friends and family soon

lots of love

John and Caroline