Grrrrrrrr!!!!!!!

Cody picked the title of this post today.  Unfortunately, frustrations have only grown since my last post.  This week the only two families I knew that were still waiting from my court submission group got court dates.  Yep, everyone else from our group that I know of has received a court date but us.  The facebook groups I'm apart of are invaluable but definitely stink in times like these when you feel completely and utterly left out.  It seems as though all our files from our submission group went to different judges and our Judge, for whatever reason, just hasn't scheduled us yet. 

Our agency director put in a call to Korea last night on our behalf again but it's doubtful she learned any valuable information from the Korean partner agency.  Not being her fault, it's just that the Court does not have great communication with the agencies and the agencies are afraid to "push" the Court and ask judges for specific information.  Partly a respect and cultural thing which is hard for us Americans to understand.  We believe we should know what Judge has our case, what they are currently doing with it, what measures they are taking to contact Grant's birthmother (after the agency already attempted contact 3 months ago) and what is the hold up.  But that is just not the way it works in Korea and the social workers are afraid to ask these kind of questions to the Court and do not think it is their place to.  And so, we are expected to sit here patiently, just hearing the words "any day now" which we've been hearing for the last 4 weeks. 

The outcome of the meeting between the agencies and Court last week was semi-successful.  They got rid of the requirement to take the 4 outdated tests that I spoke (no ink blot test!) of in my last blog post but have required families going forward to take one more test in addition to the MMPI-2 that we already took.  So back to the psychologist's office we go on Monday to take the Child Abuse Profile Inventory test, called the CAPI for short.  It's about 175 questions where your answers are "agree, strongly agree, disagree, or strongly disagree."  The test should take no more than a half hour but of course all these tests come with a hefty fee that we did not plan for.

Did I mention our baby Grant's 2nd birthday is this Sunday?!  We really thought we were going to be in Korea for it when we were submitted to Court Feb. 7th.  And then, the unthinkable, a despicable human being murders his South Korean son.  And here we are.  Understandably so, the Courts are scrutinizing our files for longer periods of time and we are running around taking last minute psychological tests.  Not even having a court date yet makes his birthday even harder.  I'm just thankful it is on Easter Sunday so our family will be all together and my parents will be in town.  If his birthday fell on a work day when I'm alone, there is a good chance I would spend most of it in tears.  So, we will focus on making this Easter a fun and special day for Auden, while our dear little boy Grant will be close to our hearts. 

This graphic pretty must sums up our adoption journey and right now I feel like we are paddling.