1. Mac and I went to his school's Festa Junina on Saturday. For what "Festa Junina" means, go back in the blog a year and you can learn more than you ever wanted to know from asking a polite question. On Friday night, Mac informed me that he didn't want to go. I told him we were going. He insisted not. I asked why? Turns out he didn't want to dance the quadrilha (Brazilian square dance) or wear the costume (a plaid shirt with a big straw hat). You know what? I didn't really blame him. That didn't sound like too much fun to me either, so I told him he didn't have to dance or wear that funny get-up. So we went to the party and ate fried pastels and churros stuffed with doce de leite and cotton candy. He played more of the fishing game and the beanbag through the clown's mouth and the chicken catapult game that I care to admit. It was completely blissful and we both had a great time.
2. After the Festa Junina, we went with Mac's friend's family to their weekend house. I met Claudia, the friend's mom, at the kindergarten orientation and could tell I liked this woman from the get-go. She was a kindred spirit. We went to their house last year and it's just a big slice of relaxing heaven an hour and 15 minutes outside of Sao Paulo. We got there about 8:30 on Saturday night, and the children played and the adults visited and we all ate and it was lovely. Sunday was a big breakfast and a big lunch with playing in between and afterwards. It was all so nice and relaxing and peaceful until Mac had a total meltdown over giving up a 99-cent lightstick from Wal-Mart. I nearly died from embarrassment. I begged - to no avail; I offered to buy him 10 more lightsticks as soon as our plane touched down next week - to no avail; and finally I threatened. I set my watch to beep in 2 minutes (he'd been crying and sulking in the bedroom for at least 30 minutes by then) and told him if he did not come out when that timer went off, we were getting in a taxi and going back to Sao Paulo and he would regret that decision. Thankfully he came out and acted normal because I'm not totally sure where the nearest taxi stand was. And wouldn't you know- after turning in an Oscar-worthy performance for Most Dramatic Hissy Fit - he gave his friend the stupid lightstick in the car coming home?
3. After not checking email for 2 days, I came home last night to a terrible email from our real estate agent. The inspection was done on our house, and the potential buyers used some crazy inspection person who hyper-inflated the costs for the repairs in the house. For instance, it's very likely that the house will soon need a new boiler (but we were told 6 years ago that the house needed a new boiler and it's still functioning very well). I've never even seen a home inspection where the inspector listed "guesstimate" prices, but this guy did and he said it could cost them $13,000 for a new boiler. I called our plumbing company today to get an estimate and it's a max of $6000. There's a laundry list of repairs as is expected in a 103 year-old house, but when you jack up the repair prices so much, the buyers are understandably freaked out. They've now offered a ridiculously low price that would allow them to cover some of the repairs, but we will not accept that. We're waiting for our real estate agent's contractor to finalize some numbers and then we'll make our counter to their reduced offer. But I told the real estate agent today to get ready to list it to rent. We're in a position where we can make the mortgage payments without giving the house away.
So I was pretty bummed out about this news because we had definitely counted that chicken before it hatched, and then....
4. I was just cleaning up the kitchen after dinner and noticed that a letter had been slipped under the back door. And guess what this letter was??? It's our "Notice of Favorable Determination Concerning Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition" from the US Department of Homeland Security office in Lima, Peru (this stems from my Rio trip on April 2). WOO-HOO!! This is a huge, huge, huge hurdle and I cried when I realized what it was and that they didn't deny us or request more information.
We have to sit tight a little longer before we submit the dossier which is all ready to go and just hanging out with Jimmy now. This portion of the adoption process is the big money portion. And we thought we had the money all figured out, but timing of expected incoming funds hasn't worked in our favor to date. But I know it's going to work in our favor soon and we'll be that much closer to bringing home our son.
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