All The Good News

On Sunday night, or rather early Monday morning, I checked my email right before we headed to bed. There was one from my mom telling us a certain paper had arrived in the mail- our APPROVED I-129. For those of you who don't spend your time researching visas, the I-129 is the first step of Alex and my K1 visa. It is the step that takes the longest time and we really didn't expect it to be accepted until around June. This is very very very exciting news except now we're scrambling to get everything else together before our interview at the embassy... which we could have in 4 weeks if we're lucky! That means Alex could be in America in 5, theoretically... which is just insane to think about. It was starting to feel so unreal... so far away... and now, here we are, and it is REALLY happening. Yay! Eeek! 

The second good news I have is that Alex stopped smoking. It was a Valentines Day present to me and he's been SO good! I'm very proud of him, although he's been unusually moody today. I guess I should expect that, though. 

This morning we went for a walk and visited Oleg at his jewelry-making-place. It was this big room in an industrial building with a bunch of guys working at little desks covered in tools and metals and liquids and torches. It was pretty cool, and nice to see jewelry made by hand. In fact, I don't think I want to buy non-hand-made jewelry again. There is so much love put into the handcrafted stuff! Wouldn't it be nice to get a ring from there? :)

Anyway... wish me luck on this visa crap. It is so much work, seriously. And I'm terrified of making one little mistake that will cost us 10 months of wait time.

Oh, and I'm going to be home alone for three days. Alex's grandmother is dying and he needs to go see her in West Ukraine. He hates to do it, but I can certainly survive on my own and I'll probably spend a lot of time with Nastya so I don't go insane. Alex keeps saying that I should make dates with a lot of people-- but no one except Nastya do I feel seriously close with and it would be weird trying to speak Russian without Alex around to bail me out. Poor dear. His grandmother is very important to him-- she's the one who taught him Ukrainian when he spent summers with her. Alex's mom is also really upset that she can't be here to say goodbye to her mother... which reminds me, Happy Birthday Luda! 

Time for some visa research. Woo. Hoo.