Going home sans bébé

The emotional meltdown didn't happen this time. Ahmed went back to Abu Dhabi and I kept it together. Knowing that DIF is finally doing something to move our case forward definitely helps to keep the despair at bay. Also, I have to go back to Abu Dhabi next week. The consequences of letting my residence visa expire and applying for a new one are potentially just too complicated for even us bureaucracy old-hands to consider. Even though I'm feeling horribly guilty and sad about leaving Maya behind with the babysitter for a week, the prospect of having a break back in our real life (ha ha) feels good.
Back in March, when the end of the process was an unguessable date, I plucked 9th September out of thin air to return to Abu Dhabi. I thought I was being generous, and would most likely be bringing that date forward to August, or even July, if lucky. Another sarcastic ha ha.
I decided to keep that original flight (plus side: don't have to pay for changing dates - always look on the bright side of life). But now I have to book return flights back from Abu Dhabi - Mexico City, which is where Maya and I will end this odyssey (at least in Mexico) when we finally get to the point of applying for her passport. So I jumped online to my favourite flight booking website: travelocity or yahoo travel and proceeded to book my flights. Piece of cake. Another sarcastic ha ha. Nine hours, ten automatically cancelled bookings, three heated arguments with several automatons from off-shore call centres, about $100 in phone calls to same call centres, one frustrated argument with Ahmed over Skype, and hopefully not thousands and thousands of dollars of credit bills later...we finally get the flights booked. Actually Ahmed did, bless his patient, resilient socks, as I gave up in anger and frustration and finally went to bed at about 2am.
I would still, however, recommend that website for booking flights. Hint: make sure your billing address is 100% correct, the phone number you put has someone at the end to contact, and you include a ZIP code. UAE doesn't have ZIP codes. Hence our downfall on the ten cancelled bookings... 0000 didn't work. Neither did 90210.