Well, we haven't been at this adoption adventure for too long yet, but I would say that the past week has been the most difficult so far. We've been running into a couple of minor obstacles, such as having difficulty getting the medical paperwork we need for the country we are adopting from, but these all seem to be easily resolvable with a little extra effort. Our notification came today from Immigration Services, and it had boxes that were supposed to be checked to tell us what we need to do, but nothing was checked. We are not allowed to call the Immigration office without an appointment, and the letter stated that we should not try to contact them until it has been at least 45 days since they have received everything needed to complete the I-1600 A petition (but without the check boxes we don't even know what more we need.) It cost us $830 to have their office process our application (which is a whopping 2 pages long!), so the stringent requirements NOT to contact the office seem a bit crazy. And I am a bit of an over-jealous rule followe. Maybe Jon can break the rules and e-mail the office...?

But like I said, all the little paperwork things have been pretty minor, and I think we'll get through it all. What has been really hard has been balancing the adoption paperwork demands with the normal craziness of our everyday lives. And it was an abnormally crazy week. Jon started a new aspect of his job, which kept him away from home a lot. My brother came in from RI to visit for the weekend. I had some problems at work, which still have not been resolved and have been stressing me out a bit.

On top of all that, we've been telling a lot more people about the adoption lately. And we've gotten a strange mix of causal support, excitement, and aggressive lines of questioning...each response from different sets of people, of course. And honestly, that's been a bit hard. It is already difficult for us to stay the course and follow through on doing something that we know full well will make our lives much more challenging in many ways, but it has become extremely hard to keep myself on course and defend against concerns from well-meaning people. We didn't get any of this when I was pregnant, just lots of well wishes and cute pink baby outfits! :)

Also, I sent out a kind of anouncement about the adoption to some people via e-mail and facebook. I didn't want to just suddenly have a 5 year old in 3 months with everyone totally confused about how that happened, but it seemed wierd to send out this general announcement. Also, I took the chance to let people know that we could really use any donations to help make getting Katya home a reality. Until today, I wasn' sure if I would mention the money part of it at all to people, but I did, and I feel kind of wierd about it. But the truth is, we really want to save Katya from a horrible future and possibly even death at an institution, and though humbling to make our financial need know, it will be worth it for Katya.

So that's the long and short of it (I'm not really sure if that saying applies here, but I like the way it sounds). Now I am off to do some more paperwork. Fun.