Hello, Goodbye Atlanta!

Dateline: Wednesday 13 August

We embarked on our trip to Atlanta this morning at 2:30am. We said a very hard goodbye to little Georgia and Nana. I carried a sleepy Cole down to the car still in his PJs and drove 3 hours to the airport in Newport News, Va.

We arrived at the airport early and Delta was able to bump us up from a 7am to 6am flight to Atlanta--good news since a storm front was going through Atlanta and could have delayed us.

Our pal Chris and Cole's best buddy Jay picked us up at the airport. Cole was so glad to see his friend after being away for over a week already. When we arrived home we went into action cleaning up the house for the social worker and finding photographs of Cole and us together inside and outside the house. Cole went over and played with Jay and our neighbor Sarah made a little basket of goodies for us.

Our meeting with the social worker went well. We talked about how we looked forward to introducing Georgia to our friends at home. We also noticed how well Cole was taking to his little sister. She gave us all our paperwork for the agency...all that remained was the FBI check, a DFS child abuse check and report of 911 calls from the last five years from our home. By the end of the meeting and up 12 hours already both Cole and I were hitting the wall.

Cue the Drama...

Immediately after our meeting, I telephoned the FBI to inquire about our fingerprint background check. To my surprise I reached the office in Maryland and told them about our situation. A very nice lady located our prints and had scanned them, but she me told that Merry's prints may not be acceptable. She would try again tomorrow and call us.

We starting packing the Lexus for the trip to our agency Families First. I put the key in the ignition and turned. Nothing. The battery was dead from probably sitting idle the past week. It was 2 o'clock and we had a 3pm at the agency and we had to be at the airport by 5pm.

Exhausted Cole fell asleep in Merry's arms. I called our good neighbor John Kelly and he gave us the keys to his VW Van. Storming up I-75/85, Merry and I kept reciting over and over how we would soon forget all this effort on Georgia's first birthday. Right about this time I got a text from Maggie, who said "even the caterpillar thought it was all over until it turned into a butterfly." Thanks Maggs...that really helped!

We arrived at Families First and I met with Ruth to go over all our paperwork, while Cole slept on Merry's shoulder in the waiting room. After a few rushed faxes--our dog's pet vaccinations and insurance had be resent--we had done everything that we could in Atlanta. Time to return back to Maryland and little baby.

We went back to the house and packed up supplies for Maryland...not knowing how much longer we would be there!