Ever sat down to put a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle together? LA and I used to put puzzles together all the time when we first got married. Some of them are even glued together and framed and hanging in a room in our house. We usually pick a puzzle that is a little challenging and has a theme associated to something that we enjoy such as travel, sports, or everyday living.
Being the OCD - Type A personality that I am, I clear off the table so we have plenty of room to spread out. I lay down the puzzle mat so we can roll it up and store it when we are not working the puzzle. I set the box up at just the right angle to be able to reference. I then sort the pieces into outside border pieces and inside pieces. Then methodically start working the outside and work my way inside. After the border is done, I choose an interior section of the puzzle to work on and using the already sorted colors and shapes that LA has worked on slowly make progress.
Sometimes, you get to a particular piece that is vital to move forward and you cannot find it. Or you realize that despite all the preparation and organization prior to piece them together, a piece dropped on the floor that you didn't notice. Or even better, you bought a cheap puzzle and some pieces are missing!
What I am getting at is that we use a logical, well thought out plan as we work the jigsaw puzzle. Like a recent Pittsburgh Steeler themed puzzle we put together, all the pieces go together nicely and within a few man hours of working on it, you see the fruits of your labor. Or there is that one puzzle that is sitting in the green felt roll up puzzle mat for storage that you haven't worked on for a year. Two extremes in the jigsaw puzzle world.
Today's happenings fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. Leaning towards the finished masterpiece side of things.
LA and I started this process of adopting Nastya in August 2010. We have since gathered the pieces of the puzzle one piece at a time, with the helpful guidance of some very knowledgeable and reliable people. We knew going into the process, especially in this part of our journey, just like working the jigsaw, that all the pieces may not be in sight at all times and you may have to work a little harder to find the needed piece or pieces. In the end, you know you will find it and you know that you finish the puzzle, but you experience a bump in the road as you cross that path to successful completion.
Some huge elements came together today and great progress is the overall theme of the day. But now, we are looking for that small piece of the puzzle that is needed to finish up the sections that are already worked on the inside and waiting to join its other friends in the finished project. Unfortuneately, the piece hasn't just fallen on the floor. Fortuneately, its in the box somewhere and we just have to find it.
We are confident we will find it and we are confident that the team helping us find it will prevail. We just have to be patient and wait for the piece to be found.
During this journey, there are many emotions that ebb and flow. I have experienced some very extreme highs and a couple of lows. I don't want to speak for LA, but from what we have talked about and what I have witnessed, she has experiences much of the same. Today we saw portions of the puzzle neatly fitted together and placed as planned; but, we also must wait for the puzzle gods to reveal the next pieces so we can bring home that masterpiece.
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