Homestudy Saga Contines...

So, this is the weekend we had originally planned months ago to do the homestudy. It has come and will soon be gone, but with no homestudy. After the laborious attempts to book a ticket for this weekend we rescheduled for one month from this weekend. The prices were half and with more than a month's notice we could probably get it scheduled. As we learned previously, the HS guy had to book his own ticket. Great, he showed us the price and itinerary he found and we agreed on it. Or so we thought. We hadn't heard anything from him so we sent him a quick e-mail to let him know that we re-sent the child abuse clearances requests to him (all 3 that he supposedly submitted were never heard from, the 1 that we submitted was responded to... hmmm) and asking if he had booked his ticket. His response was a list of itineraries-- that resembled NOTHING like we had agreed on. Suddenly he wanted to only come on weekdays (fine, but why have we been planning since January for him to come on a weekend?) and the prices were triple the price of the ticket we had talked about and higher than the original weekend tickets (which is one of the reasons we changed our dates in the first place). Also, he had originally said he needed 3 days with us. Fine, but now he was planning to only come for 24 hours. Sure, we're happy not to pay for 3 nights in a hotel, but why suddenly will it take only 1 day? I painstakingly composed an e-mail (and checked by my husband, who has more tact than I) quoting e-mails from HIM that outlined what he was going to do and requesing that we would like to go with the original plan as stated in HIS e-mails (rather than switching to this itinerary that he pulled out of who knows where-- ok, I didn't say that).

Are we being unreasonable? First, he says he wants to come for 3 days, Thurs-Saturday. Great, Friday/Sat is our weekend. Then he says, hey, I'll go to a nearby country too on Saturday! Sure, we'd share on flight expenses with the other family, but why should we lose him on our only 100% free day when we started the plans in the first place. And, why will suddenly what was supposed to take 3 days take under 2 now? Ok, so he scraps the plan to travel to an other country and we try to buy the tickets. That was a no-go (see previous post) and he finds an itinerary that is a great time/price. We agree that due to the April difficulties we'll do this in May with the agreed price/itinerary. Suddenly he changes all of the above and we are starting from ground zero again. Every time we think we have an agreement, it turns out we don't. At this point, I'm not sure even if we could arrange a schedule for him to fly out here we would want him to come. We don't trust him, since he seems to forget everything we agree on. And, I don't think he's a great fan of us either since we don't get overly excited about his random changes of course. He's supposed to recommend us to China, not sure if he can do that right now.

He says he's willing to recommend other HS person to help up. I think we might have to do that. I'm hoping that my research was incomplete and that there actually are more people than I thought who can do this. We'll see.

Truly in God's hands. Nothing more we can do at this point.