Three Times A Mom

You ought to see my spreadsheet. As you may or may not know, I’m a CPA (or rather, a mostly-retired, technically “inactive” CPA), so organizing my life in Excel comes very naturally. For months and months now I’ve been tracking every little bit of info I can get my hands on about the timing of other families through this adoption process (about 70 of them at this point – and that only includes those who participate in our agency’s on-line forum). Did you know that Excel can calculate dates? Of course, our agency tries very hard to drill into our heads the fact that we really shouldn’t compare timelines. But when you’re this emotionally involved in a process (a child!) over which you have ZERO control, you are reduced to prayer and analysis. It’s embarrassing how many times I have manipulated the dates trying to figure out just when we’ll be picking up our precious girl. Add to that the complications of a wedding we’re trying to work around, my parents’ vacation plans, and my teaching schedule, and we’re looking at a very small window of “ideal” travel time. At this point, the very best case scenerio (based on past experience) would have us traveling the first week of April, while the worst case scenerio (based on past experience, plus a few weeks of extra delays for Tet) would put us on a plane the last week of May. I refuse to even think about the fact that our agency insists families should plan on a 3-6 month wait from log-in date to travel. 6 months means August, and that I just couldn’t bear. We have a lot of godly people praying for early April, so let’s hope that’s God’s will!

"The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much" - James 5:16