First, thank you ALL for all your supportive and uplifting comments. Last
week was one hard week.

We still don't have any firm solutions for anything. My Mom has a tentative
surgery date and we have a tentative idea of when we will be heading out of
the country. One fun thing is that I learned that because I was the
petitioner on the 171H that I now need to travel at least for a portion of
the trip. I was very upset to potentially be gone for part of my Mom's
surgery and/or recovery but I'm trying to put my energy into getting ready
and not really think about it. We just have to do what we have to do. It
looks like, at this point, I will be able to make my Mom's surgery so that
is good news. I think we will be heading to Vietnam shortly thereafter,
though.

So now I'm in a holding pattern. My Mom is hoping to get her surgery date
bumped up sooner and we can't really buy tickets until we get more firm
travel news and make sure we have secured visas. So now we sit.

I've decided that I am going to just pack everything I can (thanks to
freezing Midwestern autumns, this won't be a problem, even for clothing!)
and do as much as I can now since once my Mom goes into surgery, all my time
will be spent focusing on that. I thought I should start with some lists and
I just get overwhelmed and can't think of a good way to organize them. I
bought some travel books last night and that did not help. It cracks me up
that in the same breath they say that people should pack light, they go on
to list off 25 drugs and first aid items that are necessities. Plus no one
really takes into consideration that you might be traveling with kids. Maybe
this isn't such a big deal.

Meanwhile I'm trying to get my blog ready for travel. I am sending this post
via email to see how easy that is and next will be researching soft phones
and mobile connections. I think at least one of our cell phones is
International so we might be able to use that to post to the blog too.

I am sure you all will soon get sick to death of my ramblings about packing
and organizing. It helps me to try to type it all out. Or at least it
distracts me! haha