The FedEx Saga

We're still here...in Texas...at our home...Continental Flight CO32 left without us this afternoon.

We've been waiting on that home study "addendum" our judge requested to get back to our house. The weather has been absolutely crazy in Texas. It all started Monday, January 31 when our home study agency FedEx'd it to us. It didn't arrive until Thursday! Dallas was shut down with their ice storm. I race to FedEx Thursday afternoon and overnight it to Austin to our courier to get apostilled. It doesn't get to the courier until late Monday afternoon--too late to get it to the Secretary of State's office. Austin was having their ice storm. Our courier dropped it off at FedEx on Tuesday morning, and all things well it should have been here Wednesday morning, just in time for us to head to the airport. Enter our blizzard. I could tell by the tracking that it wasn't going to be at our house by 10:30am, so I called to get it held at the FedEx office to pick up. We were thinking the worse case scenario would be we would have to go ahead to the airport and get checked in, and a brave friend of our would go to FedEx, pick it up, and hand deliver it to us at the airport before we boarded. The FedEx truck actually made it to town this morning, but there were snow drifts in the parking lot, and the truck could not be unloaded. It was sitting in the street until the snow could be moved. We asked if they could just get on the truck and get our little envelope. No. Can you at least try to get the truck into the parking lot? No.

Could we at least bring a scanned/faxed copy of it to court? Our agency's Russian office basically said don't come to Russia without the orginal apostilled document. So, we head off this morning at 10:30 to the FedEx office hoping that by the time we got there they'd have the snow removed and we could get our document and still get to the airport on time. No. The snow removal crew was called at 4:00am, but they still hadn't shown up. We saw the truck in the street. So close. We begged. We considered hiring someone to come move the snow for them. At 11:30 we knew we weren't going to make our flight; there was actually a later Contintental flight we could take, but it would only give us 30 minutes to make our connection and we have to change terminals in Houston, so the chances of us missing our flight to Germany was pretty great and we'd still be stuck in the same position we were except without a bed to sleep in tonight. We change our flights tentatively to Friday to arrive in Kras on Sunday now. We go and eat, and stop by FedEx before heading home. Hallelujah! They are moving the snow. It will be approximately 2 hours before they will have our package scanned and ready to be picked up. We head home. I take a nap. I am emotionally drained. Our agency is letting our coordinator in Kras know our new schedule and to see if we can get all our appointments completed on Monday now--the day before court. We should hear something back tonight or in the morning. Fed Ex just called and our package is ready for pick up. We'll head over through the frozen tundra to pick it up before heading to church for tonight.

Part of me is frustrated and the other part of me is thinking, "I have two more days with my girls." I've been doing a lot of crying this week thinking about leaving them. I knew it was going to be difficult; I just didn't really know.

With our new schedule, we are going back through our bags and taking only the bare minimum. We were already planning to wear our clothes 2-3 times before washing--except the underwear--I have to have clean underwear--Doug, well he could go days I'm sure on one pair--but after hauling all the stuff to the car this morning, we're pairing down even more. Our court clothes is what's taking up so much room!!! That and Doug's shoes and baby clothes and baby bottles and baby blanket, and girls' dresses for the orphanage.... (A big huge thank you to all of you who donated!! We are taking nearly 30 dresses to bless the orphanage with!!)