Containers and Visas and Paperwork! Oh My!

Let’s be honest: not every day is fun and games and trips to Poland. Sometimes you gotta have an admin day. You know the days I’m talking about. Pay the bills. Run some errands. Or like us, wake up in a panic because your kids accidentally read your email on the iPad and you missed an email dated 2 days ago from the container company telling you to send a pile of a paperwork or they’ll start charging you a small fortune to store your stuff at the port! You know, one of those kind of days.

Honestly, it was a stressful morning trying to pull together a ton of documents from powers of attorney to foreign police documentation to get our container released at the port in Germany. The last thing we wanted was to be charged a daily rate for storage at the port. By God’s grace, we have lots of support here with Josiah Venture and everyone is chipping to help. If I’ve understood the emails correctly, I believe we have everything in place and paid for to clear customs this week and maybe, just maybe, we’ll have a date of arrival for our container in Czech!

Along with our container paperwork, I spent a lot of time today working through the documents we’ll need next week at the embassy. Our long-term visa appointment is at 9am on Tuesday (July 8). Obviously, when you’re applying for a 2 year visa there’s a lot that goes into setting that up. With that, I took my first trip into the Josiah Venture offices (pictured above). This is a place that I’ll be spending a lot of time with the communications team, but I just really needed a printer and scanner today to get everything in order. We’ll be getting our visa photos tomorrow with a Czech girl who is helping us so I’m sure that’ll be a fun little outing.

This photo (above) is of a little brick archway/window next to the Josiah Venture offices. I just thought it looked cool so I grabbed a shot of it.

Today marked a bit of a milestone for the kids. Both Titus and Avery woke up around 5am (still too early, but much better than 1-3am), took normal naps, and even woke up from their naps on their own! This might seem trivial, but it’s been a challenge to get our kids on a normal schedule with such bad jet lag. We have had to wake them up so they don’t sleep too much during the day. In general the kids have been happier today and that’s why I wanted to post a photo of Avery playing with her lunch. She loves her chicken hot dogs and now she has found it entertaining to put the pieces on her fingers. It’s a joy for all of us to begin to adjust back to some kind of normal sleep pattern. We’re praising God for these little victories we get, even when it’s just an admin day.