Sleepless nights and stressful days

Have you heard of the Social Readjustment Rating Scale? Also known as the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, it's a rating system to determine how much stress you have in your life. Different events like death of your spouse or major change in social habits are weighted on the scale (100 and 15 points, respectively) and you add up all the events in your life over the past year to see how stressed you are. There's an interactive version too, if you don't want to add it up yourself. I projected a bit ahead and included the birth of the baby and having moved plus the other things, which puts me at a moderate to high level of stress. Considering that the last while before all of this, my stress level was probably mild to low, that's a lot of stress.

Right now the move is the thing that has me stressed out the most. There's so much to do in such a short window of time. This is the second night in a week I woke up and wasn't able to go straight back to sleep because my list of things to do kept pushing into my brain. Trying to keep track of everything is pretty tough, but today I'll be making a master list, so hopefully waking up in the middle of the night and thinking, "Don't forget!" will ease off, once I know it's written down as on a to-do list.

Today G. is in Düsseldorf for an appointment at the British embassy. This is one of his major stress points, applying for our resident permits. He had a big thick folder of papers with him, so hopefully everything they need to see is included and therefore we can get the permits glued into our passports this morning and have them straight away. Otherwise, it might take a bit longer, which is what has G stressed out because if they retain his passport, he can't go to the UK until he has it back, which could interfere with work. That's worst case scenario, which I don't think will happen, because we do have all the necessary paperwork for them. None the less, it's a stress until it's ticked off the list.

Not much anyone can do for us at the moment to reduce the stress other than keep their fingers crossed for us (or if you are German, press your thumbs) and wish us luck!