Friday, June 09, 2006

Traffic

Well it certainly is getting hot here in the big "O" but you won't hear me complaining about it. It looks like it will be another hectic summer though as the calendar is filling up very quickly - no wonder our summers go so fast!

The CCAA (china center of adoption affairs) has finished reviewing all dossiers that were logged in in September (mine was the end of November). Unfortunately, referrals have only been sent for dossiers logged in through June 15th - so there is a 3.5 month lag time between review and referral - if that remains the same - our referral won't come until November with travel 4-8 weeks after - there are rumors though that this will slow down even further. This of course has a domino affect since paperwork starts expiring - which means additional $ (ain't cheap) to get everything updated again! What'cha gonna do?

Chloe has really been focused (obsessively) on her "time" lately. In particular; wasting her time. For example, during the week she does not like having to run errands (store, etc) after I pick her up from daycare because she knows her bedtime and knows that my errands are cutting into her "play time" at home. She has told me consistently "Mommy, you are wasting my time!".

One night after I picked her up, I had to run to Home Depot or Menards for something (she has said "Mommy, our favorite store is Home Depot! RIGHT???"). Anyway, we are sitting at a traffic light:
M - "Geez, this is taking forever!"
C - "This is traffic Mommy"
M- "Yep, this is definitely traffic"
C- "Mommy, this traffic is wasting my time".
M- "yep, traffic wastes everyones time".
We were sitting in a left turn lane and had cars to the right of us waiting to go straight. Chloe rolled down her window and yelled at the lady sitting in the car to our right:
C- YOUR TRAFFIC IS WASTING MY TIME!!!!!
I about pee-ed my pants while trying not to laugh. I looked over at the lady and she was giving me this really funny look (she did have her window down and Chloe was not quiet about her disappointment) - The lady was probably thinking that she couldn't believe she was experiencing ROAD RAGE from a five year old.

We had a garage sale at moms last weekend - sold a lot of dads stuff, including his red truck which we all wanted but couldn't afford to buy. It was bittersweet as mom is closer to getting her house cleaned out so she is more ready to move/close quickly once the house gets sold but sad because it was primarily all of dad's stuff.

I got audited by the IRS this week - yet another minor stress one has to go through in a demographic society:-( It was ok, I owed some $ but it could have been much worse. I asked the woman how I was chosen and she stated that there is an automatic rating calculation of some sort that applies a rating to each individual part of your tax return and depending on the resulting number it sends a red flag to the powers that be that something isn't right - in my case, it was my adoption expenses and moving expense for my move to Omaha. She also said that the IRS will just pull returns as a means to train new IRS employees - she admitted that she had just started working there last October so I can only assume that I was a "training" example - Well, I'm certainly glad I could help our government with that!

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