What I should be doing...

What I should be doing is planning school for the next two weeks. What I should be doing is rotating, folding and putting away laundry which has piled up from our trip to the beach. What I should be doing is dusting, wiping or cleaning something. What I should be doing... is anything but blogging. But I am, so there you go.

Tony's parents and brother flew in last Thursday to spend some time with us before he leaves to go across the big pond. We rented a beach house on Ocean Isle and spend Friday - Monday at the beach. It was a really wonderful weekend, though I blinked and it was over. I ran my last really hard, long run before my race next month-- 22 miles up and down the island. The best part about running at the beach is laying in the water after the run!! I had my best recovery ever-- duh. I ran 22 miles, walked straight out to the ocean and sat down in the waves. Then after stretching and re-fueling, I spent the rest of the day sitting, laying and playing on the sand or in the water. No coming home and doing laundry, vacuuming, running kids to games, practices, etc. Just resting. It was good. :)

The other thing that was fun was having my middle child teach me how to "skin board". My brother-in-law rented a skin board from the local surf shop and taught Isaac what it is all about. He, in-turn taught me and we had fun. I'm NOT good at skin boarding, but that is okay. It was just fun to have Isaac teach me something new :). We also all had fun riding the waves on our boogie boards-- another new experience for me. Tony tried to teach me that one. I caught a couple good ones. Also very fun.

Wyatt enjoyed spending time talking all things military with Grandpa. On the way home we stopped by the USS North Carolina and took a tour. We have been on this great battleship before, but it was all new to Tony's parents. His dad is a HUGE military history guru, so there was much to discover together.

On the adoption front, there have been some big changes in our agency. The director of the ET program-- who also happens to be our family coordinator-- is moving with her family to Ethiopia to handle our adoptions from that end. So much has to happen once a family gets a referral, in order to make it possible for us to be united with our little ones. It is a complicated, slow process, often met with mess-ups and potholes along the way. Hopefully, by her moving to Addis and working for each family from that end, the entire process from referral to travel will go more smoothly, with less turmoil in between.

The other big news is that that AWAA increased its Ethiopia Program Fees. And here is my sad admission-- I haven't even taken the new fee schedule and compared it side by side to the old schedule. It's not that I don't care. Especially, because I believe that the reasons given were valid and ultimately, I believe that God will provide. Now, having made that "great statement of faith"... here is my confession. All I care about now, is the fact that we are getting closer to referral and now all the sudden, I am getting antsy. This really irritates me, because I was doing so well, for so long and not at all thinking about getting "the call". I assumed it was so far off and things were going so slow, that we wouldn't get the call for many more months. And, I think that is probably still true, but for some reason, after that last referral and the new "estimated" time frames for referral, I am rattled. I know there are lots of people in front of us, but I don't really know how many or what they are requesting. I don't want to spend lots of time on the chat group trying to figure it out, but still... I wonder. I especially wonder if all this will come down the line while Tony is gone. I put in an email to our coordinator asking these "wonderings" and, of course, she didn't respond. She is too busy, and we obviously aren't close enough to the top of the list to warrent a response.

So... I think I had better start finding something else I should be doing, instead of sitting on this computer blogging :)...

Grace and Peace,
Shari