life goes on

T-minus two weeks and counting. Next week is the last week before finals. Then it's finals week. Then it's the beginning of summer vacation. 8)

Life's been pretty busy this past week. Early last week, Tina and I spent a few hours at Babies-R-Us and Target looking for baby stuff. I've been in baby stores before to shop for little baby gifts, but I usually go straight to the education section, preferring to buy gifts that stimulate the child's mental development.

I never realized that there were so many different kinds of bottles, car seats, playpens, strollers, bath tubs, and breast pumps (both manual and electric)! Being the illegitimate child of mother marketting and father commerical, I usual buy items with flashy packaging and catchy titles. Eddie Bauer carseats in royal blue with fancy gadgets look great! But, this is our child, our tender, and it's all about quality now.

So, for this first go through, we picked items based on the experience of friends and relatives. Later that night, we did more research online to adjust our items, picking items rated favorably by other parents etc.

We've also been running around trying to take care of Tina's immigration status. Although she's living here now, she still doesn't have permanent status. The next step is to file for Adjustment of Status to permanent residence. Well, we rehired our lawyer to handle this because we tried doing it ourselves, only to get confused with all the jargon and additional hoops. It turns out that the US government has got a nice little racket going on here, forcing us to refile and pay for a form that we filed during the first stage of getting Tina here. We also had to get more photos, another medical exam, and more fingerprinting. All in all, we're looking at coughing up another $800 bucks (sans legals fees!)

Another big weight (wait) off my shoulders is that I finally filed my 03 taxes. It's ok though...I had filed for an extension last April 15th.