Puzzled and Perplexed.

I should have figured this out by now. I obviously haven't learned my lesson. We feel so good when we finish a process- it's a great high. In our heads we are thinking "Check!" One step closer to bringing our baby home, we have mastered one of the steps and we feel so good about what we have accomplished. Then Monday comes around and we are thrown into another section of the great notebook/file folder of the adoption. We read the steps over and over and over. Each time we read it, instead of getting clearer it grows a little foggier. (What exactly is a I600-A? Can I go to the Greer office to be finger printed because in the manual it say we need to go to Charleston? Do we hand deliver the documents or make an "e-appointment"? Can I file it now or do I need to wait until the final draft of the home study is submitted?) I could go on and on. I'm sure it's like another language to you- because it is to me and I've read the chapter over and over again.

It kind of reminds me of when we purchased our entertainment center. It came in a box and had "some assembly required" Right. Sure. It really was written in another language. The pictures of which screw went into what piece made things even worse. To this day the glass doors don't match up and you have to press them together before sliding them shut. I don't think the Russian officials will be as forgiving if our doors don't match up at the end of the day. This process calls for perfection- every "i" dotted and every "t" crossed so to speak. It's a lot of pressure. But we'll get it done- one document at a time. Pray for us on Wednesday at 1:00-2:00 we are taking a class on Russian document completion. You know it's bad if there is a class for it.

Please pray for us too about our finances. We've had a slight misunderstanding concerning the allocation of donations- it appears that when someone makes a donation CWA applies the funds directly to a specific part of the adoption in a specific order. Example: If you donate $100 to our account and we need $75 to go towards our "Russian Translation" fee to complete that cost, then $75 is applied to that and then the $25 left over goes into the $2,500 needed for our second set of agency fees. In the grand scheme of things, that's really fine because everything has to be paid in the long run anyway. Unfortunately, what we didn't know is that this order of how things are paid does not include the $800 needed to pay for the balance of our home study, the $910 the goes to USCIS (see I-600A filing) the $225 to DSS for the pre-approval of our home study, or the unknown amount to get our documents approved by the Apossilate once our Dossier is completed. So in essence they "skip over" fees that are due to outside agencies and go onto to fees that are due to CWA and Russia directly unless we ask them to apply the money to those "outside agencies". Would have been good to know like two weeks ago. Kinda like a pecking order I guess. Unfortunately, while we were thinking that we had money in our account to pay these things we need right away, the money that has been donated has already been paid to our second chunk of Russian fees. Which is really great if you think about it, when we can come up with this extra $2,000 needed for the here and now- we'll be ahead of the game. However, it does not meet our basic need of the here and now to essentially get that money to Russia!

Long story short, it's just a big mess right now. So you add the stress of a "new step" to financial difficulties and you have a big fat, head pounding, messy, yucky, confusing cluster of being in a giant maze and not knowing up from down. But other than that it was a great day. :0)