Pink Slip Drama

Hi friends,

Well, we got good news yesterday...Matt went to the embassy with someone from our lawyer´s office and he was able to pick up our pink slip for our final visa appointment. Now for the bad news...our appointment isn´t until the morning of Monday, September 18th which means we won´t be able to pick up his visa until the afternoon of Tuesday, September 19th. Which means we won´t be coming home until Wednesday, September 20th. Turns out that the US Embassy has the luxury of taking off both American and Guatemalan holidays and next Friday is Guatamala´s independence day, so we have to wait until Monday for our appointment.

First came tears of sorrow for having to wait so long to bring him home. Then came tears of frustration because it means we won´t be making the Boise trip as planned that following weekend. Then came tears of anger at how ridiculously difficult it was to get a hold of Alaska Airlines to change our flight home. We had some angels (Matt´s mom and our friends Shannon Kelley & Sarah Fronza) working on our behalf.

When we finally got ahold of someone at Alaska, I cried tears of desperation when they suggested that we fly home going from Guatemala City to Miami to LA to Portland. When I had meltdown on the customer service representative about that itinerary, she said ¨Let me see what else I can find for you.¨ Sure enough, it worked. We will leave Guatemala City at 9:45AM on 9/20 and go through customs at Dallas/Fort Worth but then get back on the same plane to go to Denver where we will connect with an Alaska flight home to Portland. We are scheduled to arrive there just after 7PM that night.

Once we had finalized the plane arrangements, it became clear that I (Sarah) was going to have a mental health episode if I didn´t get a change of scenery. So Matt proposed that we go to Antigua for a week for some vacation and to take some Spanish classes. We will make the arrangements today, but expect to go from Sunday to Sunday, then back into Guatemala City for the visa appointments.

Of course, there was always the possibility of wrestling the immigration bureaocracy for an earlier appointment - not officially possible but in reality, perhaps, maybe, at some point and under some conditions possible - but we decided to enjoy some time with our son in the country of his birth. We had spent the last week tied to our room and our phone while clearing one official hurdle, and did not want to waste more time doing the same when the end result may have been close to the same return date anyway.

The good news about being in the country during this time, in addition to the bonding time it allows us with Mateo, is that we get to accompany him to see the Embassy approved doctor today for his final medical clearance. We will post some pictures tonight or tomorrow from that visit so you can see him interact with a medical provider.

We tried to load some pictures with this blog, but blogger.com is having issues (confounded by trying to do it from this fairly fast (by Guatemalan standards) internet...so we´re off to get some lunch now, and will try to upload some photos a bit later this afternoon.

Love from all THREE of us (it is so fun to write that!!) in Guatemala...Sarah, Matt, Mateo