Just

Tuesday was a crr-azy day.

Have you ever heard the expression, "Just adopt and you'll get pregnant?" Ha! My friends Karen and Bob have been trying to adopt a boy from Russia for well over a year. First there were accreditation problems with Russia for many U.S. adoption agencies. Now their agency has been re-accredited and they are back in the process. They live in Houston and have had to drive to Austin several times just to get apostille seals from the Secretary of State office. They drive in on a Wednesday afternoon, get the documents to the Sec. of State on Thursday morning and make the 4 hours drive back to Houston. There are certain documents that they have had to send multiple times, sometimes just to change one or two words in the document. On Tuesday LB and I took the docs to the Sec. of State for them.

That part of our journey was not hard. The agency sent the papers to us overnight and God answered our prayer that they would arrive before we took BB to preschool. I was quite proud of myself for having everything together for BB's school day, having the papers in the car, and having two little boys loaded up in time to get to school almost at the time we are supposed to arrive. Notice though, I didn't say I had everything together and in the car for BB's school day. We were almost there when I realized I had forgotten his diapers, change of clothes, and lunch. So I added "trip to the grocery store" to my to-do list for the day.

LB and I went to the state building and signed in and got the apostille for the documents in no time. Forgetting to sign out, we trotted back to the minivan to go to the grocery store. I called Randy to let him know that if tragedy struck at the Secretary of State building and a list floated out that showed LB and I were still in the building, that we were not in the building. We then spent about 30 minutes in the grocery store, ending up with a gourmet meal for BB since Central Market was the closest place to the school and there are no lunchables there as far as I saw. Since LB was being such a trooper, I got him a balloon. It flew away.

The next stop was FedEx/Kinkos to copy the docs and send them overnight back to the agency. I forgot to take the staple out of the paperwork and the papers got jammed in the machine. I tried to stay cool. I was on a very important errand, and in my mind the machine ate a page of the document packet and it would be my fault that this young man would not be adopted by my friends. I called Bob and verified the pages, and it turns out I did not have a machine that ate paper. Hooray. Bye-bye documents, see you in Russia.

"Just adopt and get pregnant" doesn't work. Sorry. Sometimes the two events follow each other, but there is no causality there.

That afternoon after picking BB up from preschool and eating his lunch myself, I took the boys with me to vote. I did a straight ticket, which was super fast, and voted on some props that my friend Andee and I discussed while LB was sleeping in the car in a parking space near the Secretary of State building (which has moved, by the way). LB got a big taste of government that day. We then went to the park, I tried to keep BB and his cast off of the play equipment, I got bit by an ant three times, and we went home.

What a day!