nothing is ever easy

I woke up this morning at 6:00am. The plan was to get S-lady ready for school and leave for the USCIS office by 7:30. B-man was going to get her out the door at 7:45 and then go to the neighbors and hang out until he left for school at 8:45. Well, S-lady stumbled into the bathroom this morning about 6:30 looking like death. She was not feeling well at all, and she was an emotional wreck. Now what? I didn't want to cancel our appointment again, and I couldn't send her to the neighbors with her being so sick. I finally decided that B-man could just stay home from school for about an hour and tend her while we ran to the USCIS office. It usually goes very fast, so we could get him to school by 10:00 which would be OK. True to Murphy's law, we had some delays at the USCIS office. Our appointment was for 8:30 and we arrived at 8:10am. They called us in right away. The guy asked what we needed. I told him that we were refiling our I-600a. Then I showed him the receipt for our fingerprints that we had taken last November and asked if we could use them. He said "Sure!" "Wow", I thought to myself, "this is going really smoothly. " Then he asked for our payment and I wrote out the check. (You see, I have always brought a money order in the past, but since I wasn't sure if we would have to be fingerprinted or not, I didn't know how much we would have to pay. The USCIS site on the internet said that you could pay with money order or personal check) Well, when the guy saw the check he freaked out and became Mr. Nasty. I couldn't believe it. It was really uncalled for. I told him that the website said that they accepted personal checks. He proceeded to tell me (yell at me more like) that if I really had been in their office before, I would know that they ONLY accepted money orders. It was clearly posted in their reception area and on and on and on. So, we were abruptly excused from the office and told to go find a money order. That would have been OK, but it wasn't even 8:30 yet and there were no banks open until 9:00. We decided to go to breakfast while we waited (which was another comedy of errors-but in the end very delicious). We were finally able to find a branch of our bank and got a money order. Then we had to go back to the office and wait (because now you see, we didn't have an appointment) We sat for what seemed like a very long time. Then they finally called our name. It only took a minute to turn everything in. I guess it turned out OK in the end. We finally got home about 10:45. S missed a lot more work than we had planned. B-man didn't get to school until almost 11:00. But, at least it is done! Whew!