I really think that the final weeks waiting to travel post-allocation are far more difficult than the years waiting for approval and allocation.
You learn to fill the long waits with other things – keeping busy to minimise the pain of not knowing if or when.
In contrast, the shorter waits take over your life – consuming you with anxious expectation, making it impossible to focus on anything else that might still need to be done outside of the tunnel-vision our life has become.
The guilt of neglecting other important things eats away at you, but you feel completely helpless to do anything about it while the unknown continues to haunt us.
The busy activity of paperwork and trip preparation is done.
All we have left is to wait and stare at one of the multiple copies of the picture we have scattered around the house.
It’s getting very difficult now.
We grimly cling to the expectation of holding our baby daughter soon, but soon can never be soon enough.
Even Andres feels it – every time we talk about going somewhere, he asks “are we going to Colombia now?”.
He also suffers from being our substitute hug target – receiving probably two or three times more hugs than usual.
But he doesn’t seem to mind too much and gladly reciprocates, which really helps us cope.
He’s going to be a fantastic big brother.
We are thankful that our families have been able to travel to stay with us and help us through this period.
We dread being alone next week to ponder the question I get asked by Leanne a dozen times each day: when will we get to see our daughter and hold her in our arms?
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