Un/Comfortably Numb

The last week has been unbelieveably stinky. I feel like I'm stuck back in last october / november again, what with the unexpected arrival of bad news, and ... okay, actually, mostly just that. I'm not quite sure how to say these things, or what order to put them in, so I'm just going to type them in the order they happened:

1. J's father was diagnosed with colon c.ancer
2. Due to very recent changes in immigration law, it looks like our adoption might not be able to progress any further until I am granted citizenship. Which will take about 6 months. We found out on Friday.

Okay, so you can probably all imagine what a FANTASTIC weekend was had in the Chapman household. It. Was. Bad. However. The mitigating factors:

• Quite possibly, the c.ancer will be operable. It was found via a routing screening procedure, and there aren't any symptoms yet, so hopefully it is at an early stage. We'll find out early next week. Obviously, we're worried. But J's dad is remarkably calm and cheerful - his attitude has been a real encouragement.
  
• We were always planning for me to get citizenised (yep, that's a word), but as it wasn't required for the adoption (until about ten minutes ago) we were delaying doing the forms and so on until the bulk of the adoption assessment for panel was out of the way. In order to keep my passport, and not need to send it to the home office, I needed to book an appointment to have my documents officially checked and photocopied at a registry office. It takes about 2 months to get one of these appointments. And I happened to finally make mine about two months ago. Which means that my citizenship appointment was TODAY. I'm incredibly thankful for this - it would have been very, very, very hard to wait for this appointment, knowing that I couldn't join the citizenship queue until it was completed. Providentially, I only had to wait for one weekend with that knowledge, and now my forms are in the post, having been stamped by a lovely lady named Beverly.
• Even better, it's possible that my immigration status of 'indefinite leave to remain', which I got about three years ago, might just be enough to make our adoption possible without needing the citizenship. This is a bit fuzzy. Immigration law is... complicated. Obviously. But we're not having our papers pulled until we've at least found out whether this is an option.
• I get to add a new ticker - 'time spent waiting for citizenship'. Hurrah.
  
• Cindy got her referral - baby Olly's coming home
• I have a new name, which is a nice novelty - it's Claudia, by a whisker, and the cat is now Kevin (that was a landslide).
  
• As I had my appointment this morning, and it was in Oxford, I get to take the day off. So I'm going to spend the afternoon here:

and here:

Sadly, you have to pay extra for this:


so I'll have to content myself with the hydrotherapy jet pool, aromatherapy steam room and heated loungers. I think I'll manage.

• I had a very big slice of cake earlier, which made everything feel a lot better
  
• There's only so much of this stuff that can happen before it's almost - almost - funny. I think I'm pretty much there.