Roller Coaster Ride

Any of you who have been on an adoption journey know that it is a roller coaster ride. However, the last few weeks have been especially crazy.

First, in my last entry, I mistakenly called it our second yard sale weekend. It was our third. How time flies when you're having fun! As I began to prepare for this one. A snake got in the garage. I got him out, but he wouldn't go far. Every time we opened the garage door, one of us had to watch him to make sure he didn't go in again. At the end of our sale on Saturday, as we were cleaning up, we looked and saw he had gotten caught in a glue trap (a triangular tunnel with a sticky floor for catching mice.) On a second look there was an awful lot of snake coming out both ends. I said, "I TOLD you I thought I saw two snakes that first time!" When Tim took them back into the woods to attempt to let them go, he opened the trap and found that there were FIVE snakes! Yikes! Oh, and this was our best yard sale so far this year. Yea!

On Memorial Day, we started the day by finding one more (but much bigger) snake caught in a new glue trap in the same corner of our garage. Yuck! By the end of the day I was in the emergency room. See, I had been feeling my heart skip a beat and was really tiring out by evening. After a nap in the afternoon, my left arm was kind of numb. I was scared enough to go to the ER. We spent the rest of the evening there. They found nothing at all wrong with my heart but did find that I had a touch of pneumonia! Go figure. That would explain my tiredness. So I went home with a prescription for that and followed up with my regular doc a couple of days later. She prescribed 8 hours of sleep a night for the heart skipping. With kids, that's difficult, but I'm working hard to sleep more. ; )

This was followed by a quick 2-night trip to my mom's. As we returned on Friday, Tim had to get things together for an RA campout at church. A little too much kickball with the boys, and he had re-injured his left knee (which he first hurt last year but never had it looked at so it's been hurting off and on ever since...MEN!). On Saturday, he came home and was putting things back into our storage shed and -- possibly because of his sore knee -- he fell out of the shed and hurt his foot. When a huge knot came up on top of his foot, we decided it was time for his trip to the ER fearing he had broken it. We've been to the ER once in 1997 and once in 2006. Now we had been twice in one week!! Turns out he had a sprained left knee and a sprained right foot. Even with crutches, that made for some interesting and slow walking. But, we were very thankful nothing was broken.

A few days later, I found out that my granny (last living grandparent I have) was just diagnosed with breast cancer. Please say a prayer for her as she is facing surgery.

Next, a good thing. We got our I-800A approved. Yea! That left only my FBI clearance letter before our dossier would be ready to "officialize" and send in. Remember how that was rejected after 8 weeks of waiting? Well, 9 weeks after submitting my fingerprints again, I was rejected AGAIN! Makes me wonder how they can ever use fingerprints to catch a criminal.

If I do my prints a third time (and btw they want more money for the third time...how convenient), then by the time we hear from them again, Tim's letter will have expired! This is where I need another prayer from you. Our agency is going to talk with the Bulgarian officials, explain the problem, and see if we can prove my lack of criminal history another way. After all, I had to be FBI cleared for our home study and again for our I-800A. Pray that they will let us resolve this now so we can get our dossier sent in.