Passport Approved!

(Greg here)
We learned yesterday that Sneha's passport was approved. For whatever reason, VCT is not permitted to go pick it up in person but must wait for it to be mailed. Apparently this passport office is notorious for letting things sit around before mailing them and the passport is not expected to arrive for about 10 days. We are unsure if that is business days or straight days. We are not yet able to make any concrete plans until that passport is in hand. Again, we are not sure exactly why, but it seems to have something to do with verifying the name they put on the passport to ensure that other documentation exactly matches. I can understand that. Our best guess for travel dates is somewhere around the second or third week of March.

It is strange. Now that we are this close, I suddenly feel completely unprepared. The parenting part seems doable, but for some reason the getting prepared for the actual trip seems awfully challenging. We have had suitcases out for awhile, slowly filling them with things that we want to take. There is just so much to prepare. There is a certain quality to myself that when things reach a certain level, I get to feeling pretty jittery inside and bogged down by thoughts that the things won't be accomplished. Then, stupidly, I have a tendency to spin in space rather than forging ahead and knocking things out one at a time. True, soon enough I get to the knocking things out. I generally am a pretty organized guy. But, I despise the time I spend spinning in my head. I can feel that spinning beginning to slowly whirl.

We are hoping that our travel dates easily allow for us to arrive several days ahead of schedule so we can see as much of her area as possible to gather as much of a "history" for her as possible. What we don't want is to have to make a decision between delaying our getting her for a few days to amass the history, or skipping the history to get her absolutely as soon as possible. At quick pass, different readers may come to a quick decision on what they would do. It does take some thought though and careful consideration yields that the decision is not as easy as would first seem whichever side of the fence you sit on. So, we hope the decision is made for us such that we can naturally arrive earlier without us having to make a possible decision to delay getting her for a few days. To take her with us on a history gathering tour is not something we want to do as the potential to arouse unwanted feelings is pretty high.

I tell you...to international business travelers, our fretting must seem a bit ridiculous. But to a guy who has only been west of the Mississippi twice in his lifetime, packing up a family to go to India for two weeks is a bit daunting.