Coming to America

Finally, I have GOOD NEWS to post!! I decided NOT post on Monday as I had nothing good to say, at all!! Suffice it to say, the Embassy did NOT have what it needed come Monday and basically sent me packing saying, "Well, go fix it". They were useless and of no help to me - aren't Embassy's supposed to be HELPFUL and not the ones causing the stress?? Believe me, if I had ANY control of it, or any knowledge of how to fix it, it would have already been done. It took some doing on the parts of many back in the US on my behalf. My sister, Regan even had to call the Congressman to get their assistance with this ludacris problem. In the end, it has all paid off!! The Embassy had what they needed today, and I now have what I NEED to bring Maia to America!

The next best news of the day is that there were (are) seats on TONIGHT'S flight out of Almaty. Therefore, we are leaving in about 10 hours or so!! WOW!! If this all goes as it is now planned, it will be an incredible day for our history books! It's just such a blessing to have Maia's paperwork to now enter the US. The 'funny' thing that happened with the flights, however was that they booked us to DAlles, not DUlles. Luckily, I noticed this and got them to re-book us to Virginia and not Texas... Texas is closer than Kazakhstan, but not close enough! I was stuck in DAlles last year, and frankly, don't want to be there again either. Thank goodness I caught this problem before we got to Frankfurt.

We are doing well - substantially better now, I must admit. We had a bad day yesterday and just couldn't believe how dumb the 'problem' was that was keeping us here. I expected issues with the Eastern European style government of Kazakhstan (and didn't have a single problem), but when your own government is the one with the problem and they blame you and your agency, who have NOTHING to do with it, and don't try to help at all, that's when things seem totally out of whack. That's when I got mad. (Which doesn't help anything but there wasn't much else to do.) Anyway, a very dissappointing end to a process that had been smooth, and it's only the US Agencies that I have to 'blame'. It's really quite sad.

Anyway - we are thrilled to be coming home. Maia is doing so well and she gets to meet her big brother and her grandpa tomorrow!! We can't wait! I'm not sure how long she'll be 'good' on the flights. She is SO active these days that keeping her in a seat will be quite a joke, but I guess it's only one more 'long' day and we'll be HOME. We'll make it... we can taste it!

We can also taste all those things we've missed... Top on my list right now... Starbucks. Probably hit the first one in the airport.