Waiting on FedEx

Well, the wife went to work, took the baby to get dropped off, and I'm waiting for the Fedex person. The agency said it would be here today, but they didn't give me the tracking number. If its not here by lunch I will probably login to work and look at the system and find out where it is myself, the few privileges of working for the company. After all the paperwork, we thought we were pretty much done, but now I get these "Travel packets" and I see that we have lots of paperwork to do again. It seems to mostly be easy stuff, print and sign this form type papers and get them notarized. That we can handle, still, just a bunch of little things that we might miss or forget. Hopefully I will have the LOA and the I800 stuff sent off today, and CCAI will get it all tomorrow. I'd like to get all the other papers signed and sent off to them as well, but I'm not sure that we will have time. Most of the additional paperwork does not appear to be as time sensitive, says we have "5-7 days to complete". That will keep us busy for the rest of the week, but after that we will be back to "waiting", which each stage puts us closer to Mei-mei, and each stage we feel sicker/more excited than the previous stage. The agency has said 9-12 weeks to travel. 9 weeks out would be ~October 13th, and 12 weeks would be ~November 3rd-ish. The problem with October is they have some events that go on, where the Consulate is closed. Oct 1-5 is the Autumn Festival, and then Columbus day is the 12th, and at the end of the month there is a HUGE trade show, the China Mining and Coal Expo to be exact, who would want to miss that, its huge. The trade show is at the end of the month, and apparently agencies don't like to schedule things during that timeframe because of prices going up for everything. So, its kind of a toss up, even if our paperwork is done really quickly, we may not have a slot to fall into for October, at this point we are shooting for early November. We will be in Disney Oct 22-29, so that should be a good way to spend the last few days/weeks with the baby boy before we head off toe China. Well, the Fedex guy just dropped off the LOA, I'm going to open this thing and see what the big deal is, :)

We got LOA!!!

Wow, we got our LOA email today, and it will be at the house via Fedex tomorrow!!!!! We can't believe it, we are super excited. I was telling the wife this morning while driving in that I was going to stop obsessing on the LOA and just decide that we will be traveling in Nov/Dec. I was going to cut back on the OCD ritual of all my adoption forums and sites to try and be less anxious and stressed out about this. 63 days from our LOI is amazing, they average LOA is "2-5 months", so we are 2 months and 3 days into it, basically as fast as we could have expected to get it. Now I'm going to go throw-up, :)

2nd care package and getting anxious!

We sent off our 2nd care package last week. Its packed with all the pictures Ying will need! Everyone this kid will meet is in our little book. A few other little toys/lovey items as well. With the help of our Nai-Nai(our official Chinese Grandmother)the wife wrote a nice letter in Mandarin/Pinyin for the foster group. Man is it expensive to send from the US to China. The post office was 55 bucks to ship, no tracking, and 2-3 weeks to get there on average. So much for 'NEW flat rate boxes'. We figured it would be quicker to Fedex it, but they don't have delivery service in Henan. We ended up fedex'ing it to Ann at Red Thread and having her send it via express mail, that should get it to her in about a week, and at least we know it got to China. We've heard some people mailing packages off and having them basically disappear as far as they know, because the child doesn't have any of the items, and they have no pictures or evidence they were ever received.

We are now into the 50-ish days waiting. This is not very long honestly. It has actually flown by for us, BUT we have entered into a window that we could start seeing the LOA. 70-90 days seem to be a fairly popular number for "days waiting for LOA", but they start to come in around the 50s for some folks. So now I'm becoming obsessive with checking the adoption forums to see if others are getting LOA yet. Very few have come in these last 2 weeks. I'm not sure if thats good or not, maybe that means a big wave will roll through this week or next. I am extremely jealous when I see people getting LOA, and start looking up their LID/LOI/PA stats to see how we compare. August is going to be slow I feel, nothing but summer and doing things around the house. Vacations start in September, and another in October, so we will have 2 months worth of back-to-back "things to look forward to".

We have a Mandarin class every Friday. It used to be a little more intense before the baby, but since we started taking a kid it turns into half class and half Nai-Nai/Matt playing. The 2 year old has good tone, and knows a decent number of words, mainly the ones we force upon him, "please", "jump", "open". We learned alot of baby words when we were pregnant(she was pregnant, I was just nervous). We have several sheets worth of words and phrases we used/planned to use with him. Its just now hitting us that a 2 year old Chinese child will have a pretty decent vocabulary, so now we are trying to get together a list of the basics to review, hoping to make the transition, and the language barrier, much much easier. We don't foresee too many problems, we have the eat/sleep/hurt/potty stuff down, it will be the odd things that catch us. Well, thats all for now, hope to post more soon!

Nothing new

Here is a pic of the care package that we sent a couple weeks ago. It was delivered 6/24, pretty nice little package. We used Red Thread, Ann, the lady who sent the package, was very helpful. We got a nice little generic letter put in as well. We may use the service again, but the wife has put together a package of our own that we will mail this weekend. Ann at Red Thread said that she found out little girl is in Beijing now, and is no longer in Henan, which is good, because we couldn't Fedex anything to her there as they don't service the particular area. I thought maybe it would be easy to get the updated mailing address from someone as opposed to having it sent to the Henan address and them sending it to the Beijing address, but that is not the case. I guess they don't want you to have any direct contact with the orphanage or foster home, and I can see why, I'm sure some people wouldn't be far from calling or showing up to see their kid, heh. So with all that said, we have to USPS it to her, which is fine, I'll support the Postal Service, my dad and sister work there, and they do business with Fedex. The wife has put together a nice package to send over, she even wrote out a letter, in actual Mandarin, giving some more detailed info on us and how we can't wait etc etc. She put together two good sized photo flip books too with Mandarin/pinyin/English translated captions of all the people, looks very good.

We have also started to actually prepare for her arrival. We bought a double stroller this week. We are picking colors, and themes, which is apparently looking like a Disney princess "Happily ever after" theme, seems appropriate. My mom, aunt, and wife are excited about the decorating aspect of it. Several family and friends had asked about a baby shower, and after some back and forth we decided that we will have one before we go get her, that way we can get some cute clothes/toys and be ready when she gets here. We still need to look at 2 more car seats, an additional one for each car. Thanks goodness for craigslist and freecycle sites!

2 year old Matt has officially switched over to calling the "extra room" the "mei mei's room"<"mei mei" is little sister in Chinese>, as well as some of the toys that the wife has pulled out, he refers to as "mei mei's toys", which he wants to take out of the bags/boxes and play with. This weekend we are going to start disassembling mei mei's room to empty it out and get it ready to clean and paint. Its currently a fake bedroom with a bed, chair, and tv that nobody ever uses. Might as well go ahead and empty all that out and prep it for its now intended use.

We have been waiting for about 1 month now, REALLY waiting anyways. Average is 90 days, so we hope to see something in a couple of months. Hopefully sooner, but not likely.

Insane

Our social worker called today apologizing that she hadn't sent us the homestudy addendum we needed 2.5 weeks ago. She had it done and will mail it out on Monday, and she was very sorry!


Oh yea, she sent us one 2 weeks ago, I didn't tell her. I still needed a 2nd copy anyways, so it all worked out, :)


Other than that, nothing new, just waiting now for LOA.

More of the same

We got our home study update in the mail last week, surprisingly. We were not worried about getting it real quick, we figured she would have it to us by the time we would be ready to travel. We also sent a care package to the baby/orphanage. We used a service in China, www.redthredchina.com , the lady that runs it, Ann, was very helpful. She did call and get us some updated sizes, and pics! Unfortunately the pics were the same ones we already had, :( The care package included a disposable camera, so I'm hoping we will get some new pics anyways. We have no idea if they will use the camera, and if they do, if they will send it to us, or if they will just give it to us when we get there.

Sooooo now we are still waiting. We have a trip to St. Louis in July, and a trip to Atlanta in September, and then Disney World in October. And somewhere in there, hopefully before November, we will be going to China. We're hoping the China trip doesn't overlap any of these other trips, but if our agency calls and tells us a date, we are going!

Waiting is no fun

We sent a care package to the baby and foster home a few days ago. We are hoping to get some more updated photos and information on her, mainly sizes, so we can buy some clothes.

Also, our home study update, should have been done last week, but our social worker "lost it". Now, usually I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but every single thing our social worker has had to do, gets messed up. She lost the initial home study and had to re-interview us. Then we needed it updated due to a typo, one sentence was wrong. That took 2 months. So even though I typed out the new update, and all she had to do was print it and sign it, making it as easy as possible for her, she still screwed that up. SO, if you want to know the name of a service/social worker in the area that is really knowledgeable and nice, but extremely slow and forgetful, let me know, I can get you her info, :(

We are also still working on a name for the kid, not sure how that is going to go yet. We are fairly certain we will keep the "Ying" portion as her middle name, but no idea on the first name as of yet. We're taking suggestions of course!