A Good Week

Some pretty exciting things happened this week.  

1.  My husband and I got to spend a few days away in the beautiful city of Charleston celebrating our second anniversary.  This first half of the 2011 has gotten a little crazy for us; with Brian in seminary part-time and a student pastor full-time while I've been working two part-time jobs with crazy hours.  Getting some "quality time" with one another has been tough and we knew it would be going into January.   So we were both really excited to get away for a few days.

Our hotel concierge was awesome.  He sat with us for an hour and helped us plan out our trip. One idea he gave us was a list he had created of the top 20 places to take photographs in the historic district of Charleston.

So what did these two Type-A personalities proceed to do?  That's right.  We found everyone last one of them.  It took us two days, but we did it.  The concierge told us no one had ever cared that much about finding all of the locations.  That's because he'd never met the Words. We're competitors. Sure, no one was competing against us, but that didn't matter. We had the Word family name at stake.

I learned this trip that my husband really does not like fancy-schmancy restaurants where the menu replaces words like "cheese" with "Gruyere."  Give him a good ol' burger and fries and he's good.

This week reminded me that time away for us is so healthy and necessary.  We were very thankful for the ability to leave town for a few days to relax, unwind, and just get to hang out with one another.  No emails to reply to or phone calls to answer.

We can't let our "quality time" be once a year, though.  Our vacation was a reminder that we need it consistently.  We won't always be able to get a few days away, but "time away" could mean turning off our technology and meeting in a coffee shop for an hour, or spending an entire Saturday or just a night and simply hanging out with one another in our house.  Whether it's an hour, a night, all day- specific time with one another is good for our marriage.  And I would venture to guess that it's needed for your marriage too.  So, if it's something you haven't carved out in your schedule recently, I'd highly recommend it!


2.  As of this past Tuesday, we are Homestudy Approved!!! 

Woohoo!  We have our completed homestudy in hand, almost four months to the day we started the homestudy process.  Next step- sending our homestudy and I600a form to the USCIS. We'll then get an appointment to get biometrically fingerprinted in Birmingham, AL.

From what I've been reading, it's about a two month wait time for this paperwork to be completed, which is basically asking U.S. Immigration to adopt any child from a specific country.   After that- we send our Dossier to our agency and get on the wait list.  Small steps, but we're moving forward!!!