Life is always entertaining

So people read my blog. Other people. Like, people I don't know. I guess I knew that. But now I KNOW that. Maybe I should make an effort to be more articulate and spell correctly. Check for typos... :)

Adoption. For those of you who haven't travelled this road, or been down it lately, and to China in particular, there is a bundle of Mystery Paper Work known as an I-800 A correct homestudy, that we are trying to create. We already have a homestudy, but it accidentally fell into a beaurocratic void when the US and China became Hague treaty nations and suddenly new, undefined requirements were necessary for homestudies, and nobody knew exactly what they were. Our homestudy was sent off to the USCIS like...a week....before everybody got the word on what was required for the I-800 A. And it wasn't what was in our homestudy. That was back in June.

It took three months for us to get the word we knew was coming, that our homestudy had to be amended to meet Hague standards. And now we're frantically trying to get it up to par, as the new improved version has to be back with the USCIS within 45 days or we start over. (we have about 20 days to go...)

Emails and phone calls are going back and forth between me, our homestudy social worker, a Hague accredited social worker, and the USCIS adjudicator who has our case file, to tweak the homestudy into the magically correct format with exactly absolutely perfect wording so that we will pass inspection and move on to step two, sending documents to China. I know that this is all happening to protect the child we are adopting, and I keep thinking of her over there in China, waiting. She waits in foster care, we wait in the beaurocratic loop.

She is getting dancing lessons. She asked for chocolate and other sweets. She likes getting email from her sisters here in CA. We are lucky we are able to communicate with her like this...it is extremely rare to have any contact with a child being adopted from China. But we also hear the plea to come get her soon. She has been waiting so long. She wants parents. She wants a family.

We will be patient, but urgently so if that is possible. We have to get this stuff done, and get that little girl home.

I am, in the meantime, gutting and putting a bathroom back together. The chain of events that let to that was typical for our family.

We live in the woods. There are wood rats. They, when they can, make homes under our house. I periodically have to go out and block entrances, and remove rats (not pleasant for either rat or human). As I was inspecting the area under the house for rats a few weeks ago, someone flushed the toilet upstairs. And Lo, large amounts of water came cascading down, two feet from my head. Upstairs, in the bathroom in question, there was no sign of a leak. Upon pulling the toilet, we found that all leaking was going UNDER THE FLOOR TILE and had ruined the subflooring. ARGH. So pulled out all the tile and subflooring. Pulled out the beautiful wainscoting, and had to scrap that as it got damaged during removal. Put new stuff in. Retiled. Bought a new vanity, too, but that's another story. And am now wallpapering the bathroom. So...from woodrats to wallpapering. I am busy. And...after three weeks of under house silence, I am hearing woodrats again, so will make another journey under the house to figure out how they're getting in, and what I have to do to get rid of them this time.

This is fall break time for our school kids. But the 15 year old is doing driver ed this week, so not much of a vacation for her. I'm supposed to be fitting costumes for a huge renaissance era musical production/dinner, but have been trying get the bathroom operable before having people in my house for fitting. I was supposed to take a CLEP test today, but NO TIME, so maybe next week.

The sun is shining. I planted some nice perennials in my garden yesterday and did some weeding. I'm going to take a walk this afternoon and enjoy the fall weather. And life is pretty good!