Visa's and Itinerary

We now have two more very important steps accomplished. We have our tentative itinerary and our travel visa's. For those of you that have never traveled international the visas are a very stressful thing. You need to send your passports and a cashiers check or money order to the embassy of the country you are visiting. Then you simply wait until they send your passport back with a very official looking sticker. It is this kind of paperwork that always causes me to worry and stresses me out. I always seem to think about the worse case scenario. It is not the paperwork that makes me nervous it is the actually mailing and then waiting for it to return that puts me on edge.

I asked Dave to please mail out the visas to the Vietnam embassy. There is a local shipping place we always go to to have our adoption documents mailed. There are usually very precise directions that need to be followed and I have had a few instances where mail facilities have brought me to tears because they tell they are not able to do what I am telling them I need. They do not understand the significance of the papers or how possessive adoptive parents become of their paperwork. So Dave mailed our passports with the prepaid return envelope inside. Then I made him give me the tracking numbers so I could obsessively check the tracking numbers. After several days still nothing on the site I was beginning to panic, ok so I envisioned our passports lost in a ditch somewhere. Finally I asked Dave to please double check the number again just to make sure. After reasuring me it was right several time he gave into my nagging and checked the numbers again. He had to look at it at least three times and then as a fellow co-worker to look at to realize that he had indeed given me the wrong number. he had mistaken a 0 or a O. Thank goodness by the time he figured it out the passports had been received at the embassy. Today Dave safely picked them up at the post office. Yes my husband has the patients of a saint!

As to our itinerary we will reach Ho Chi Minh City late Friday night and then we have free days on Saturday and Sunday. I am sure most of Saturday will be spent triying to get over jetlag. Then Monday is the day!! We will leave the hotel at 7:00am to drive to the orphanage where we will meet Jacob around 8:30. We will be traveling with another family to the orphanage who will also be meeting their son. We will spend about an hour at the orphanage and then we will have our Giving & Receiving ceremony. This is where the actual adoption becomes official and Jacob is ours!! On Tuesday morning we fly to Hanoi where we will spend the remainder of our trip waiting for Jacob's visa and passport to be processed. Please pray for a very smooth transition for Jacob and safe travels for all of us!