Unsinkable

Molly's in a panic…

I, on the other hand,  am unreasonably calm, with bouts of anxiety. The trouble is that the bouts of anxiety hit right around 10:30, when I should be wrapping up my work and heading for bed. Those who know me know that I'm a bit of a late night guy already, but this is getting bad. Usually, if I'm up late, I'm working on something. These days, I'm just up, unable to really concentrate, unable to sleep. Eventually, exhaustion takes me, and I stumble off to bed. 

On the up side, I'm getting a chance to watch some of the excellent movies in our collection. I'm also spending a fair amount of time running through some of the major points we'll hit once we leave for ET. I share a trait/outlook/behavior, though I am a bit less compulsive about it, with one of my very best friends (Jemiah): Scenario-vision™. Essentially, this involves running through as many possible ways for a given situation to play out, and evaluating them where possible. There are two keys to successfully using Scenario-vision™:

1. Objectivity: Step-back and try to make sure that you are seeing as many possibilities as possible; Even those you'd prefer not to consider. This is particularly difficult and important when dealing with elements beyond your control
2. Modularity: Consider each scenario and a collection of smaller interrelated sub-scenarios

(more…)

And counting down until we pick up our new daughter.  Things are coming along, we finalized the plane tickets and itinerary (with some back-and-forth with credit card companies over charges for plane tickets coming from Ethiopia.)  We're flying out of Milwaukee to Chicago to Dulles to Addis Ababa, leaving at 11:14 am Saturday July 29, arriving Sunday July 30th in Addis around 6:30 pm.  It will be a long couple days on planes (and probably longer even when we have a toddler on the plane coming home with us!)  And my ticket alone cost 7x as much as my first car.  Not that the Chevette could have gotten me to Addis Ababa – though it was a magical car in its own right.

 Anyway, I digress…  This is a crazy situation for me.  I am someone who has panicked travel dreams (I forgot to pack, I left my bags in the car, etc) over the smallest of trips.  This is a HUGE trip – I've been to Africa before, but then I was just schlepping myself around and I didn't have to worry about anything else.  There's a lot of emotion tied up in this, the more excited I get, the more I sort of feel like hyperventilating.   Needless to say, I haven't been sleeping so well.  I'm not sure if it's the huge life change looming on the horizon or the oral Typhoid vaccine we have to take over the course of the week.  That is affecting me profoundly.  Both because it is sort of making me sick physically (within the expected side effects warning I received), and because one of Rose's birth parents died from Typhoid, which I won't get because I had the $80 to spend on the pills.  That makes me emotionally sick.  I mean, hopefully we have educated ourselves about the tremendous disparities between America and developing nations, but to think that for $80 Rose might not be an orphan is sort of another thing entirely.

Yikes, it's that kind of thinking that is keeping me up at night!

 Sorry, don't want to keep you up…  Back to my neuroses, which you can hopefully laugh at and sleep soundly.

So, I made Charles get our suitcases out of the attic.  Ostensibly, because we broke one of the leg-things off one of them and I wanted to see how big the ones we had left were.  But its making me nuts to look at them because I want to start packing them SO BADLY!  That would be just a tad bit insane.  So I cleaned out the medicine cabinet after work today to inventory the adult and baby meds we need to take with us in case of emergency.   Tomorrow I take D to the doctor and I'll have to ask them to prescribe some meds for Rose for us to bring with in case she has an ear infection or scabies or something.

 Well, THAT'S a pleasant thought!   

WE GOT OUR TRAVEL DATE!  Leaving July 29th.  Nineteen days to pick up Rose!

Less good news-airfare is significantly (thousands) more than it was just a few months ago.  So, its a bit of an unanticipated expense, on the same day we just shelled out big money for our first round of shots (more Monday), but I know it will all be worth it when we have Rose home on August 5th.

Current dilemma- it's quite a bit cheaper to stay longer and fly Lufthansa through Germany than fly direct from the U.S. via Ethiopian Air.  But we don't really want to stay longer than we have to because its that much longer Dillon will be here without us, also it would mean moving from the Care Center (since we're actually staying at the orphanage where Rose is) because you can only stay there a week.  

But we have to book-flight availability is dwindling as we speak… 

Our insurance totally sucks.  Over $6 grand in co-payments for our family for the year and no, of course, they don't cover any travel-related vaccinations.  Of any kind.  No exceptions.  Not even adoption.  Blah.  Jerks.

 Just another plug for single-payer health insurance for everyone.  Check out www.wisconsinhealthproject.org for one option.  But I'd be on board with anything at this point.   Suggestions?