Moments of Frustration...Our Poor Bushes!

Let me start this post by saying we LOVE our social worker. She has been amazing! She is sooo nice and down to earth. We could NOT ask for more...

Now, adoption requires ALOT of patience which is apparently something I need to acquire. When we started this process, our agency told us that it would take about two months to receive our FBI clearances, and it took almost eight weeks to the day to receive them in the mail. I didn't enjoy waiting, but I was expecting the FBI to take that long, and they did. Tommy's and my clearances arrived together on a Friday afternoon. Apparently that was a real blessing because couple's clearances don't always arrive at the same time. We finished turning in our homestudy paperwork about a week later and were told that our social worker would be calling us SOON to schedule our home visit. One day went by...two days went by...three days...a week... For some reason I thought that she would call us immediately. After three weeks of waiting, I was a little agitated to say the least. At last our sweet social worker did call. We were apparently third in line for a home visit, and as they say, the rest is history (see "Progress Update"). Why was I able to wait EIGHT weeks for our clearances but couldn't wait a mere THREE weeks for our home study visit? Well, I guess the Lord only knows.

One afternoon during our three week wait, we decided to take our frustrations out on the bushes in the back yard. Our azalea bushes were more like azalea trees, and Tommy and I had been talking about replacing them for quite some time. We wanted to save money by doing it ourselves. So that afternoon when we got home from work, Tommy went to town with the chain saw. It only took a day for Tommy to cut them down and for me to hall the GINORMOUS branches to the front curb, and it only took us a couple of weeks to figure out that we could not dig up the stumps ourselves and call a tree service to do it for us! (In the meantime, our social worker came and did our home visit.) Once the stumps were gone and the dirt was tilled up, we began to plant. We finished planting our new (much smaller) bushes the other weekend, and I have included some picture of our handiwork below. We love the new bed, but it was much more work than we anticipated. So, my advice to you is to think twice before you take your frustrations out on your bushes!