Passports?  Uh-oh.

We were on a roll today until I remembered that the girls' passports only last half as long as ours.  When did they expire?  Oh, a couple of weeks ago.  

Last night, soccer fans celebrated with loud parties in the street until the wee hours, so I was sleeping hard when the lawyer called to tell me we had a problem.  This is the lawyer working on finalizing legal paperwork about our car, which MUST be done before we can actually make this long overdue trip back to the U.S., He'd found the glitch that was making the process take so much longer than anticipated.  It seems that when we first registered our vehicle, many moons ago, the person entering the data into the official notebook wrote the wrong information as our license plate number.  We were all surprised that the police hadn't noticed it in any one of the many traffic stops we've experienced.

After meeting with the lawyer and discussing our options, what seemed like it was going to be a hassle turned out to be quickly fixable. We were soon rolling through and feeling good about finishing the paperwork by the end of July.  Time to buy those tickets!

A few clicks later, I'd secured what I felt like was the best price--certainly the best one I've come across in the months of searching, thank God--and went over all the details seventeen thousand times before taking the plunge.  Buying four international flight tickets is the cost of buying a used car, so clicking that mouse is never something to take lightly.  CLICK.

Then I began to enter in all the peripheral information.  Frequent flyer numbers.  Emergency contact.  Date of birth.  Passport number and expiration.  You can only imagine the moment my heart stopped, when I realized I'd hit the big CLICK minutes before seeing the expiration date on my girls' passports.  Gee whiz.  I almost flung myself out of my chair.

That frantic feeling I'd had earlier in the morning over the car paperwork made its way back as I started hunting down information and making calls.  It turns out that we must renew in person at the embassy in Asuncion, and we must have an appointment (two, to be exact) in advance.  The nice ladies on the phone said there should be no problem getting it all done in time, causing me to once again have feeling in my fingers and toes.  Breathe.  Breathe.  Add a trip to Asuncion to that to-do list for next week.

Now we begin the process of lining up appointments (wanna have us at your church/Sunday School class/civic club/homeschool group/sewing club/youth meeting/family reunion/kitchen table?) and getting our ducks in a row to be gone for two months.  If the Lord continues to clear the way, we will be there from mid-August to mid-October, able to celebrate my birthday with extended family for the first time in 5 years.  Yippee!!