Update amid confusion

My Little Candy Cane: Early December - 4.5 months

Anxiety Level: slow deep breaths!

Chocolate Consumption: Daily truffle allowance. A friend brought over chocolate chip cookies with her kids. I ate five plus one partially gnawed one left over by one of the kids!

We have received our first official update of the new year. Here, with my running anxiety commentary, is what we know:

• Social Worker report completed...we have social worker report. Whew! This is the piece that has been missing from our file. It did not get done back in October because our Power of Attorney had been misplaced.


• We have PA (Pre Approval from Department of Homeland Security). Double Whew! This has been done since October 29th. When I had a lull in worries, I came back to this. Wondering if the delay had somehow meant that this had to be redone.


• The Dossier is ready to be submitted to PGN as soon as it opens. Great! Wait...what? "as soon as it opens?"


• PGN is closed for 45 days. What!?!?!? I don't know what this means. I hope it means that the PGN which has been closed for about 30 days will open again in 15 days when the Central Authority has registered all cases. But we don't know what this means. My 2am brain worries that we might be in for another 45 day wait. This would mean that we won't get into PGN until March - that's when we initially assumed we'd be bringing him home.


• Our attorney is registering all cases with the Central Authority. This is good. But the turmoil surrounding the CA means that there has been no word that any cases have actually been certified or will be any time soon. The big Catch-22 is that cases not registered by 2/12 will not be grandfathered in. If the CA can't get it's act together by 2/12, none of us will know what is to become of our cases.

And there you have it. This is what we know. Gordon and I are off to a Symphony date tonight. I'm going to try to let the music wash over me and carry my worries away with it. The program is Copland's Applachian Spring, one of my favorites. 2/1: update: I was wrong, it was Tchaikovsky's violin concerto in D maj. The frenetic pace interrupted with occaisonal agnst-filled moments fit my mood perfectly! While relaxing, I'm going to keep reminding myself of two things we do know for certain: 1) Our attorney is reputed to be excellent. 2) The orphanage where Danny lives is probably bar none, one of the finest and most loving places he could be, with the exception of course of our very own home.

Whenever I get too distracted and worried, my Gracie comes up with something to make me laugh. Tonight she did it again. She picked up her little toy ukelele and said, "Mommy, I'm going to sing you a lovely song." Then she launched into a little ditty in her sweet meandering voice. It went something like this: "It's so terrible, about our oranges!" I have no idea what it means, but it was the loveliest song I've heard all day! 2/1 Update: Upon further discussion with Gracie, she feels terrible about her oranges "because I don't want to eat my mango." I'm sure this provides the clarification you were hoping for.