Time to go...

...to put on our traveling clothes and head out the door. Time for Tubby Bye-byes.
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Why post this picture now?
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(For those of you who visited last weekend - THIS is what the living room looked like, back in the day, April, 2004, to be exact. And what the Peeper looked like as a 11-month-old. Like today only shorter and rounder and less verbal and non-self-locomotive. Mmm, OK, not much like today.)
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Because it wasn't that long after this picture was taken that we started this whole paperchase. Home studies. Fingerprints. Haunting the Rumor Queen. Meeting others clutched in the same process. Bringing us to this morning, where I'm sitting up, nervous, typing in the darkened house, waiting, just killing time before we can get in the airplane and begin the next part of the next phase of the rest of our lives.
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I'm not going to get all ladybuggery on you, but there's a huge part of me that wants to be able to tell my daughter when I am an old, old man and she a young woman, the two of us travelling together in different directions, that this was the first day of our years of lifelong love. The first step out the door and down the path of our mutual caring and commitment that made all the tears and hurt and pain the bearable cost of life. The first of a long chain of days and years that will bring her footsteps, and the footsteps of her children in turn, to the place where they remember me and their mother, to sit and just say to the bright emptiness: you helped us be who we wanted to be. You were a good man. You're welcome, and thanks.
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All true wealth in life is biological. I hope that today we are on the way to a new and hopeful treasury.
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Goodbye. I'll be here again, inshallah, in two weeks.