I found this image after my very crazy last few days, and I found it most calming. I think I need something like this that's very big to hang in my office!

Let's go back a few days to Wednesday. I spent 5 1/2 hours in the morning cleaning the house for Thanksgiving. Just as I was finishing, I realized that the kids were upstairs pretty much undoing all of my work. Then, the doorbell rang.

It was a FedEx package I've been waiting on of a product my dad and I are developing. The product had a few "issues" in my opinion, but while I was discussing those concerns with my dad over the phone, I had to cut the call short because my contractors pulled up.

The contractors had come over to discuss the process for demolishing 1/4 of the garage and making it into the baby's room. Now, I could have made this demolition process easier (and more expensive) had I put someone in charge of general contracting. But because easy isn't fun (and it's too expensive) I decided to be that general contractor myself. So, I'm coordinating a general build-the-walls-and-drywall-them-all guy, a plumber, an AC guy, an electrician, a guy to pour cement, and a stucco guy. So 2 of those folks were here and they were trying to figure out when each of the OTHER guys needed to come. It was all going so well. Until the build-the-walls-and-drywall-them guy commented that he wanted to tear out drywall this Sunday. As in tomorrow.

As my eyes widened (I wasn't prepared to start until after Dec. 5th), the UPS truck pulls up. Now, this was, I knew, a very important package from our agency with our Guatemalan dossier in it and our new Ethiopian dossier packet. We planned to transfer a large number of the Guatemala documents to the Ethiopian dossier.

I had a call 20 minutes later with our case manager. But then I heard the phone ring and something told me to answer it.

I told the guys to hold on with their can-I-demolish-in-4-days discussion, and ran inside to get the phone. It was our case manager wanting to hold our call a few minutes early since she was leaving early for the holiday.

I told the guys in the garage to figure it out and just let me know when the drywall would start coming down. (I still don't know if anyone's coming tomorrow!)

I took my call with our case manager, during which I emptied the contents of the package they'd sent. I found myself a bit confused because while all of the copies of our Guatemalan dossier were there, none of the originals were. I asked her about this, she asked me to hold, and she came back commenting that she thought it was possible that they had been sent, you guessed it, to Guatemala.

Now, we're hoping that they are in Guatemala but have not been authenticated yet. If they've been authenticated, we must start all over. But hopefully that's not the case and they can simply be mailed back.

Okay, that was exhausting. To live it AND to write it! But we'll know more on Monday.

We got a bunch of forms notarized today, dropped our new medical forms off with our doctor, and got some pictures developed for our package.

We're getting there!