Testify!

Yesterday was supposed to be my big day in court. As many of you know, one of the people that used to clean our house took a liking to my fab diamond bracelet and absconded with it. By an amazing twist of fate, I got it back (sometimes I am unbelievably lucky) and they are now prosecuting her for it. Unfortunately, I wasn't the only one, she cleaned a lot of people's houses and liked a lot of their jewelry, too. Well, yesterday was the date set for her trial and I was to go in and testify. (I can't even think that word without hearing a preacher-y voice say it - TESTIFY!) I was pretty excited (and nervous), but when there's a baby involved, planning anything is complicated. Neil had some medical testing yesterday that could not be rescheduled so we had to have someone else watch Sophie. Luckily, Neil's sister, Jen, was kind enough to offer to watch her for the afternoon. This was to be the longest she had been away from both Neil and I.

When I had gotten home from my visit to Aparna's house on Friday, there was a message on the answering machine from the State's Attorney's office regarding the trial. Due to our extremely static-y phone line, I could only understand about every third word (I hate Verizon, I hate Verizon), but the gist of the message seemed to be that he thought the trial would be postponed, either that or he likes peanut butter. It was after hours by the time I got this message, though, so I couldn't call back to get clarification. The trial was scheduled for 1pm on Monday and Jen was planning on coming over around 11:30 to give me plenty of time to get to the courthouse. With no clear idea of what was going on, I didn't want to tell Jen that she was off the hook and then have the trial still be happening.

So, first thing Monday morning I called the State's Attorney office. I wasn't able to talk to my guy, but the legal assistant told me the trial was still a go, so plan on coming in. So, in preparation, I got dressed and squeezed (squoze?) my arse into a pair of pantyhose (blurg). At 11:30 sharp, Jen arrived at our house. As I was closing the door behind her, the phone rings (I swear to god, as good as my luck is, my timing is terrible) and its the State's Attorney calling to tell me that the thief, I mean, defendant, has asked for a postponement because she didn't have a lawyer yet. Now, she'd had several months to make this happen, it's not like they sprung this on her, but clearly she's not the sharpest tool in the box and waited until the last minute. This might be a legal strategy, but what do I know. So, since it wasn't guaranteed that she would get it, they needed me to stay "on call" until 3:30. Fortunately, Jen was able to stay until Neil got home around 2. I finally got a phone call at 4 saying that she had been granted a postponement and the trial is set for July 28th.

The upside to all of this is that Jen and I got to spend several hours playing with Sophie. And Sophie was loving the attention. Jen would hold Sophie over her head and make this sort of dolphin noise and Sophie would just laugh and laugh. Like about a million other moments, I wish that I had caught it on video, but no. These moments are often too fast for me to go get the camera and recreating them almost never works. I should just keep the camera in my pocket at all times. Yeah, because we don't have enough pictures of Sophie - we had to add another network drive on our computer just to accommodate them all. Anyways, two solid hours of playing with Jen and beanie was TIRED. She slept for almost three hours after Jen left. In the end it was almost worth squeezing into pantyhose to have the whole afternoon to myself. Almost.