Pick Ourselves Up and Move Forward

First of all, thank you so much for all the emails and comments of support! They really mean a lot. My friends Melissa and Robin came over last night and brought me Ben and Jerry's ice cream, chocolate cake, and Dove dark chocolate candies. They said they couldn't let me have a pity party without the essentials. It still feels like the news yesterday was just a bad dream and I'll wake up from it.

Our agency contacted me at lunch yesterday to let me know the news and when I called them back to get the full story I didn't know if I should laugh or cry. My students were at recess and once I brought them in and was getting them ready to go to music I felt the tears coming on. I called the office and my wonderful admin team took my kiddos to music and told me to go home. My grade level got my class covered for the rest of the afternoon and after I boo hoo'd to them for a little while longer, I left and came home. I was greeted by Bella, who was more than happy to snuggle in bed with me and lick my tears away while I had my pity party. Thank goodness for chocolate labs!

According to our agency, DHL is completely ambivalent to this news and has been absolutely no help at all with the situation. Our agency of course is just sick about it and have been on the phone non-stop with DHL but it has proved futile. DHL is saying that it looks like someone thought money was involved in the envelopes and when they found out there wasn't any inside, they tossed our dossier to the side and now it is lost. There was another dossier in the box along with papers for families that are getting ready to go to court. It stinks that our dossier is gone but at least we aren't waiting for our court date with a baby waiting for us in Russia and are handed this setback. I really feel bad for the families in that position. We are very concerned about the confidential paperwork that is involved being lost. We are thinking we should put an alert on with the credit agencies just in case all the confidential information falls into the wrong hands. Our agency told us that all the money we have to spend on getting everything re-done will be deducted from the agency fees so we aren't paying twice. Fortunately, Texas has the $100 cap on adoption apostilles that we've already met so all the new apostilles that we will have to get will not cost us any additional money. My school secretary notarized all our documents at no charge and I know she'll gladly do all of them over for us. So it doesn't look like redoing the dossier will cost us much financially, just our time. At this point I have NO FAITH in DHL and Ana and Russ have offered to hand carry our dossier to Russia with them when they travel in February. I'm seriously considering this option.

Seven years ago this month, we got our first negative on a home pregnancy test and that just fueled my pity party mentality, like it was another sign that we are not meant to be parents. Poor Randy and Susan. But then I think about my friend Shannon that had to say goodbye to her husband and father of her children yesterday after he was killed in Iraq on Dec 26. Shannon had to see the Westboro church protesters from Kansas stand outside of the funeral home and protest her husband's memorial service and shout terrible things at her and her children; and all of a sudden reality smacks me upside the head. All we lost was paper, yes it was a setback and an inconvenience but at the end of the day, we have our health, the utilities in the house are working, the bills are paid and we have each other. We really can't complain. We'll just pick ourselves up and move forward.