Kind of a wild night. I think we had been asleep for about an hour when the call came in for a birth in Makati. Deborah spent an hour on the phone talking Tiferes through contractions and then decided we better go down there to support her.

We asked one of the careworkers at the little children's home, Len-Len, to stay with Aubrey and Auden while I drove Deborah to the home.

Just as we were ready to leave, we got a call from the birthing home, Shiphrah Bahay Paanakan, that there was a transport to a nearby hospital. A mother we have known for a long time, accompanied by her probably 13 year-old daughter we delivered, had blood pressure that was too high to deliver safely with us. That took a little while to arrange, and then we dropped them off in Pasig on our way to Makati.

I hurried home after leaving Deborah at Yosi and Teferis,' because especially if Auden had woken when he didn't know we were gone, that would not have been very smooth. Fortunately, he was still asleep.

I studied for an hour 'cause I was too wound up to sleep, and when I went to bed at 4, Auden woke up. When I told him where Deborah was he said, "I want my mom back right now!" I was still getting that sorted out at 4:30 when my alarm went off to take Camille to the embassy for her visa interview.

Both the boys were awake now, so I could hardly leave them without trauma. I loaded them into the back of the Crosswind and made a bed for them. They thought it was great fun, and we headed off down the road again. The streets start getting pretty blurry when you have traveled them more than once in the same night.

Camille has been matched to a Filipino heritage family in California for 9 months now. It has taken that long for the government to process her immigration. But the interview is the last hurdle, so her family will be here on the 20th.

The boys actually slept quite well in their impromptu camper, but when I got home I was exhausted. I told them I was going to go to bed and asked them to play quietly. They gave me about an hour.

Deborah, though, wasn't quite so lucky. Tiferes had a hard time of it and ended up delivering cesarean section in the hospital three exhausting nights later. She and Yosi have a healthy little girl though.