More Preparations

Thursday and Friday 02 and 03 April

Thursday started out pretty reasonable. Ange took the dogs to the kennel and proceeded up to Maryland. This would allow a couple of days for Cerri to get into "staying with grandparents" mode, and Ange could pick up the large quantity of crisp unwrinkled cash that we had requested from the credit union. Everything was going well, and then the nasty surprise hit. Thursday afternoon we were told that some Orenburg administrator was not happy with the Minnesota apostilles after all -- We had to redo the ENTIRE dossier to bring with us, or else the trip is canceled. Holy !

Ange got this information just as she was driving up to her parents' house. I was just leaving work, en route to meet her there. Ange called my cell phone & told me to get over to the agency's local office in Silver Spring. My father-in-law was able to watch Cerri, so Ange could meet me there as well. The local agency office was able to re-print everything, and we got it all signed & re-notarized on site. (They have a Virginia notary at the office.) It was like 5:45 when we left the office, but we managed to rebuild all of Part One dossier requirements. All we needed was the apostilles. That can be done while-you-wait in Richmond, but it was 130 miles from the house in Maryland (about 3 hours' drive). So on Friday, Ange's dad & brother were able to tag-team babysitting Cerri for the day. Ange left the house at the same time as me (around 5:30) in a heroic effort to get the apostilles completed & ready to go for the following day. Her hope was to be headed AWAY from WDC by the time rush hour really kicked in. It worked, and she even made it back in time to get to the credit union that afternoon as planned.

Well The last week at work was very hectic trying to get everything accomplished before I left, and our evenings were very busy as well. One thing we wanted to do was make cerri a DVD with us reading her bedtime stories. Well we had never tried to actually convert video from our camera to our computer previously. It is not a pure digital camera but has small tapes. So we recorded us reading a story to her every night for a week so that if she missed us too much she would have this DVD. We struggled with it a bit on Wednesday and again on Friday evening without success. Finally, on Saturday morning, we were able to use my father-in-law's DVD recorder to transfer the film to DVD. It was still running as we headed to the airport, but we left instructions with them on how to finalize it. They did not end up using it, and they also didn't give her the gifts that we had bought & wrapped for her. But she knew that we had done those things for her, and we did manage to call her at least for a couple of minutes every day. She knew we were thinking of her.