The Rantings of a Mad Woman....

Well, I received my homestudy today...Hooray! And it only took 5 days to get my "overnight" package...isn't that great?! I received an email from Olga last Wednesday saying that she was overnighting it to me and I would have it by Thursday. When it still had not arrived today, I emailed Olga again (bless her heart) and after some investigating she found out that Fed Ex was holding it at their Madison office because it had the wrong address. WHAT?! So after a somewhat hysterical conversation with the nice FedEx lady ("but that is the right address"..."we were here all weekend"..."I MUST have that package"..."we are adopting and that package contains very important papers".....), she assured me it would be here tomorrow. Oh NO! I have to work tomorrow. I must have that package today. (Now, I know since it is taking 90 days to get the 171 from Atlanta and our paperwork still has not left DHR, I probably could have waited until tomorrow, but it's just the point of the matter). So, I drove myself to Madison and picked it up! I now have my notarized, county certified Homestudy with additional copies of the agency license and agency agreement, in my hot little hands.

OK, so now I get home, pull out the handy-dandy dossier guidebook and begin gathering all my documents that need State Certifications....birth certificate..check; marriage license...check; completed homestudy with attachments...WAIT!! My attachments are not "attached". I have the agency license and the agency agreement, but they are not stapled to the completed homestudy...(Now let me get sidetracked for a moment and talk about staples. "To staple or not to staple, that is the question". My friend Tina and I have spent quite a lot of time discussing this very subject. Tina even emailed our agency and found out that we should wait until every thing is done, then staple the county certification to the back of the document, then the state cert on top and the authentication on top of that....OK, got it....except that the lady at the Morgan county courthouse stapled the county certification on top of the document. I wanted to scream "No, Stop...No staples..", but I thought she might think I was crazy (which I think on a daily basis), so I said nothing. Then I obsessed about it for days.....And today, I get the county certified Homestudy and it is stapled to the top, too....so what should I do with the rest of my documents....staple, not staple...oh lordy, I think I need Prozac)...So, now I've emailed Vonda at our agency to find out what to do about my unattached attachments...As soon as I find out, they are off to Montgomery...(I hope)

Which leads me to wonder whether to drive them down to Montgomery or trust FedEx again and just mail them. Like I said, there's no big rush really, except that I have spent the past 5 months gathering these precious documents and do I really want to risk them sitting in some FedEx office for days again? ....And then I wonder what's up with Atlanta CIS? Why are they taking so long to get those 171's in the mail? And, why do we have to use Atlanta anyway? Why can't we just pick a CIS office that's not that busy and send our papers to them? Can't any CIS person issue a 171? Who decides we have to use Atlanta, anyway? Why does adoption have to be so hard? Don't people realize that we are living in a fog, holding our breath, waiting for this paper or that paper, praying daily that Atlanta will speed up and then China will speed up? Don't they know that we need our Lily and Tina's Kara home now? Don't they even care???

Oh well, I guess I'll wait on Vonda's reply about my attachments and then decide whether to drive down or mail my papers...and then we'll wait some more...I think I need more peanut M&M's......