"How Angelina of You"

I mentioned in the previous post that I'm entering a very busy period.  It's busy in ways good, bad, and ambiguous.  In the obviously-bad department, among other things, my mother is dying by inches.  In the ambiguous (and exhausting and frustrating, but also hopeful) department, my son has finally, after almost a year of evaluations by different school, medical, and psychological entities, gotten an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis, which is opening up a whole new world for all of us, about which I'll write more later (the frustrating aspect being that lately I've had to spend most of my free time on the phone, a hated instrument for me, trying to advocate for and coordinate his services; the exhausting aspect being that it's, well, exhausting to parent a small child on the spectrum).

In the good-but-still-ambiguous department -- ambiguous because it's overwhelming, even maddening -- is the adoption process for Baby Jude.  I'm up to my neck in paperwork, and what arcane paperwork it is.  I'm still trying to get vital records from the great city of New York; my husband, it turns out, will have to be background-checked in Ireland as well as the United States; we have to have our home study entirely rewritten to reflect how we will become a multi-cultural family (which, in some ways, we already are); and we have to spend hours online being trained for compliance with Hague adoption standards. 

This video, however, is a bright spot in my week (sorry, I couldn't embed it; you'll need to click the link to watch).  My understanding is that it provides a frighteningly, if hilariously, accurate depiction of one standard adoption conversation.  (It's never too soon to be prepared.)