Lent, Personal Progress, and Adoption

I’ve surprised myself at how well I’ve done at not checking in on work after I leave the office.  I can’t say I haven’t been tempted, though — I have.  I did finally give in last night…  we might have a technical person coming out to visit today and I hadn’t heard anything about the timing by the time I left on Friday, so I checked the email subject lines on my Blackberry to see if I had any email about it.  I didn’t read any email, which was good, but I promised I wouldn’t check into anything, so I get a FAIL for yesterday.  All in all, it’s felt pretty good to not be tied to work, although there are moments where I start getting anxious because I don’t know what’s happening or what will be greeting me the next day.  I work with labs in Australia, Canada and Germany, and have customers in Korea — so things actually do happen in the evening and overnight that I need to respond to.

I’ve been keeping on my FlyLady sink shining and “swish & swipe” habits really well!  John even noticed that I’m shining my sink every night and has started putting his dishes on the counter next to it so that it’s still empty and shiny when I wake up.  Today is the 11th work day in a row that I’ve been in the office before 7am, which is another habit that I’d like to keep going because I get so much more done when I can get home at a descent hour.  One thing that I need to do a lot better about is packing lunches.  I get up early, and I lay my clothes out the night before so I can get out as quickly as possible, but I’m not doing so great at lunches.  I can only pack the non-perishible items at night because our lunch bags won’t fit in the refrigerator.  I had wanted to get away from packing leftovers because cooking larger dinner meals means more $$ spent at the grocery store, but I don’t know how good sandwiches would be after sitting in the fridge overnight.  Then I get up in the morning and feel too rushed to make them fresh; so we’re back into the leftovers habit.  Need to break that cycle.

We finally have news on the adoption front, and that news is: no news.  Specifically, the agency hasn’t heard back from Korea about our medical pre-approval, so they are going to check in with them.  But, they are going to send us the homestudy paperwork to start on while we’re waiting.  We can’t submit the homestudy application until we’ve met our weightloss goals (if we can go to Korea), but we can at least start compiling all of the records that we’ll need, so that feels like progress.  We’ve also done a lot of heavy thought and calculating and have decided to pay off the truck and motorcycle early so that we can get rid of those payments and start saving up for the adoption costs.  We had thought about taking an adoption loan (yes, there really is such a thing), but would like to pay in cash if we can make it work.  We’re going to have to work together to really clamp down on the budget, which could be painful. In the end, though, we’ve gotta do what we’ve gotta do.

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