we got a big envelope in the mail today letting us know that our initial inquiry was approved by the placement agency and they’ve invited us to fill out the BIG application. Hooray!  One hurdle down!   The only problem?  The envelope arrived at our house unsealed.  And the big application itself is missing.  And it’s a holiday weekend, so I can’t contact the office until Tuesday.  We could have worked on the application all weekend.  Maybe even have had it FINISHED by Tuesday so that we could mail it in.  But …. nope.     SO FRUSTRATING!!!

This is compounded into a bigger-than-normal deal when you take into account that in order to participate in this particular agency’s program, you must first attend an orientation weekend in San Antonio.  These weekends happen about once every 8 weeks or so.  The next weekend is supposed to be “either the first or second weekend of June.” (and yes, it’s the end of May and you’d think they’d have the date set by now, but not when I called last week.)  We were on a tight schedule already to maybe possibly make it into this orientation, but with this unfortunate glitch, i don’t know how possible that will be after all.  If we miss the June orientation, we likely won’t be able to go to one until … August?  Oh, and the June one was supposed to be a May one but they’ve postponed it because they didn’t have enough childless applicants to reach their quota.  So…. if they are short again in August, it could be September before we can even start!

I realize that I should be practicing patience.  I know that I will need to dig deep into patience reserves many times throughout this process.  But argh.  Grumblegrumblegrrr…

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Okay, J just came upstairs and saw me getting all upset and reminded me that a) this response from them is already at least a week earlier than the minimum they’d quoted on their website (they’d said 2-4 weeks) and b) even if they have to snail mail (not fax) a second copy of the application, we’ll still receive it before we were originally anticipating that it would arrive in the first place.  maybe they need US to fill up their orientation quota and will schedule it in such a way that it will be possible for us to attend?  and if they don’t need us and if the orientation weekend is full, then no matter when we return the paperwork we might not be able to get into the June orientation anyway.  I’m guessing that a lot of their paperwork will be similar to the things we’ve already completed for our homestudy agency, so maybe we can just use the information from those forms to fill out their forms.

I have to trust that God has a plan here.   I have to remind myself that usually, things work out for the best in the end if I just ride along with the current and stop trying to bash my way upstream.  Or at least, if I go along with the current I’m less anxious and less frustrated with the outcomes because I didn’t rage against them for so long.

And if I end up with a lot of waiting time on my hands, there’s always my big secret quilting project.  I’ll tell you all about that once it gets a little closer to being reality instead of just being a germ of an idea in my head.