Still Waiting...

I'm still sitting here, trying really, really hard to be patient (see my previous blog entry). Our dossier is technically still sitting on the desk of someone at the Ministry for Education in Kazakhstan, but I find myself wondering where it is, really... is it in a file somewhere? Literally on a desk? Collecting dust? Is someone's coffee cup sitting on top of it? Did the people who evaluated it like our photos? Did we look acceptable? (Someone told us that some of the officials like books in the photos, and we took some of the photos of ourselves in front of our whole WALL of bookshelves... we are total book packrats! I hope that makes us look smart! :^)



I had a total "light bulb moment" the other day, when I realized that the next phone call we get from our agency will be telling us what region we'll be traveling to... and the only reason we'll be assigned to a region is because there's a child there that fits with what we requested in our dossier (under 18 months, boy or girl). So that means that when the phone call comes, the Kaz officials have technically identified a child for us. (To those of you waiting on Kaz adoptions, this may seem like a "No DUH!!!" moment... but I don't know why the reality of this hadn't sunk in until last week.) Russell and I grew up in the military... I sort of felt like we were awaiting our next "orders"... the Kaz government was telling us which "duty station" to report to. But really, it's all centered around a child... an actual child. Hopefully, OUR child.

So despite my strong attempts to be patient, and despite all the lovely stuff I wrote in my previous blog entry (which I still stand by!!!), I'm still obsessively counting the days and wondering when The Call will come in. I'm also obsessively counting days that would come AFTER the phone call comes in. I'm hoping that we travel in December or early January. If we push it much further than that, then my maternity leave runs out and I'll have to come right back to teaching full time immediately after we come home with the kiddo. Sigh.... so I'm still wrestling with moments during the day when I want to SCREAM! (Is it okay to admit this, after my previous gratitude post? :^)

Russell and I have been joking about this. We've decided to start a list:

You Know You've Been Waiting for THE CALL for Too Long When:

1. The phone rings and your heart lurches. (We live on a college campus, and the phones here have a special ring that signals an off-campus, long-distance call coming in... my heart definitely lurches for those rings...)
2. Your spouse calls you while you're at work, and you answer the phone with "What??? What have you heard?" (At which point your spouse apologizes because they're just calling to talk about what we should fix for dinner....)
3. People in your office pop by while you're in the middle of grading papers or something and say "Have you heard anything?" and you have to pause and figure out what they're talking about... because a) if you HAD heard anything about the adoption, you probably would have run screaming down the halls about it by this point and wouldn't be calmly sitting at your desk grading papers, and b) they might be referring to something else entirely, and if you respond with adoption-related stuff, they'll think that yet again, you are obsessing about the adoption (which, of course, would probably be right).
4. You're counting the days since your last phone call to your social worker, asking about the progress of your dossier, since you put yourself on a schedule: "I will only call Jeff once every two weeks... I swear!"
5. You find yourself admitting to the world (via a public blog) all the insane things you're doing and the weird thoughts running through your head while you're waiting for The Call.

Thanks to all of you who've been emailing with supportive ideas and comments! I'm sure you could add your own items to our list!