A little more gas in the Patience Tank

Tonight, I'm dining alone. I don't understand why Bryan isn't interested in my delicious black bean soup with lime-tahini swirl and cilantro. And  you probably don't understand why, at my age, I still have a pesky 7-year-old inside me that wants to crack a joke about my dinner and the title of my post tonight. (Get it?)

Only I won't because it would embarrass Bryan and my sisters. Probably my brothers, too, although it  shouldn't. The soup really is excellent; is that tooting my own horn? Not really. It's so easy, you can't mess it up. It's not quite as good as the carrot soup with lemon-tahini and crisped chickpeas that I made the other day, but they are both good for you.

But you don't read this for recipes. Or immature puns.

Tuesday night, our long-suffering agency sent me the paperwork they did have. I began to fill out the paperwork and quickly ran into some roadblocks: "What does this question mean? Which name do I put there?"

Tonight, our agency called and helped me fill them out.

We still don't have everything, but we will send these forms to our agency tomorrow. Once they receive the last paperwork from Poland, they will send them to USCIS for us. We think this will speed up the process a bit. So hopefully they will send everything to USCIS next week.

As long as we don't run into any major problems, we should have our approval back in four weeks. Once we have the approval, our contact in Poland can get our preliminary visas and schedule our court dates. Then we will be buying flights and renting an apartment.

We are now thinking it will be mid-March (at the earliest) before we leave.

I found out that the kids will not attend school any more once we're there. I didn't know if they would remain in school during the day and stay with us at night. So, it will be up to us to entertain two active kids all day long. Fortunately, the city we'll be staying in looks really interesting (nice architecture, parks, etc.), so we shouldn't run out of things to do.

Another positive note: Our agency told me that the kids pick up tons of English during those 6 weeks. Whatever else this may be, it will be a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

In fact, it already has been.