So, You’ve Got Mail is my favorite movie of all time. I honestly have probably watched it at least 100 times. Actually, when JJ came to pick me up for our first date he showed up at the door with a bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils.
Anyway, I have felt a lot like Kathleen Kelly this week. I haven’t looked exactly like this, but I have had a lot of the same feelings for an email from the state of Arizona. We have been waiting for 6 weeks to hear those three little words: “you’ve got mail.”
For weeks I have been playing this game where I hit that refresh button ready for an email, an update, the O.K., but nothing happens. Nothing until last week. I heard my phone make that email notification ding, quickly opened my gmail app and breathlessly waited for the emails to load. And then, there it was, an email from the state with the words, “Approval Letter” in the subject line. I let out a scream of excitement and JJ came running to see what was up. I couldn’t talk because I was crying so I just handed him my phone. He quickly scrolled through the email and then started crying too.
We spent most of the weekend cleaning, washing bottles, and doing loads of laundry so that we will be as prepared as we can be. Our friends came over for breakfast on Saturday and invited us to go night kayaking. Since we may not have the same freedoms to do that sort of thing once the baby comes we decided to go. Arizona can be absolutely sweltering and sometimes the only “cool” things to do are at night. As we were paddling out towards the middle of the lake I took a minute to look up and try to see a few stars. A breeze picked up and the current started to sway my kayak a bit. I couldn’t help but think about what the rocky year of change it has been for us and the journey we have before us. As Kathleen Kelly aptly put it, ” People are always telling you that change is a good thing. But all they are really saying is that something you didn’t want to happen at all…has happened,” and that has been our year. If it all hadn’t happened, however, then we wouldn’t be here. When you look back on change you almost always see it as a good thing, but when it is happening it’s difficult to see the bigger picture.
In a way we enjoyed the period of anxiously awaiting that approval email. We will probably enjoy patiently waiting for the phone to ring with a DCS worker on the other line. Each of those events will bring changes into our life and in those changes, we want to remember to see the bigger picture.
So here is to another post that somehow turned into being about waiting, and to all of the laundry I need to do before we do get that phone call. 🙂
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