File Cabled

Today I called the NVC to check the status of our case, and they let me know that it had been cabled to Guangzhou today! One more step down, just a couple left now! I believe what we wait for next is to have our Article 5 document signed. THEN we get to wait for our TA(Travel Arrangements) which is when we actually get to leave. I talked with our agency last week, and asked about travel. Our fingerprints expire 1/31/10, so I wanted to make sure we didn't need to look into renewing them. The agency rep assured me that unless something "crazy" happened we wouldn't need to do that, and we should get our TA dates sometime in late October or early November. I'll give the NVC a day or two, and then I'm going to start emailing the consulate for updates, :)

Happy Birthday Mei Mei!!!

So, yesterday was our xiao Ying's birthday - she is officially 2 years old! We can't wait to bring her home, we have so many people praying that she will be here with us for the holidays. We hope that she had a wonderful birthday, and we hope that it will be her last birthday without a family of her own. If we are lucky, it will be her last holiday without us period!

I800 Approved!

I called earlier in the week and was surprised our I800 hadn't even been delivered to the USCIS office, it had been almost 2 weeks, but I called today to check and they had already processed it and sent it off. Now it goes to the National Visa Center so they can scan it in and send it off to the Consulate in China. Now we wait for a couple other checkpoints so we can get a scheduled travel date!

Sending Off More

We are sending off the last batches of paperwork today....I think. Our Visa applications and passports are in the Fedex envelope now ready to be sent off. We are using a courier service, Dependable Adoption Courier Service, to expedite the visa process. They should be done this week, or early next week, no hurry really, we aren't leaving for a few weeks at earliest. I also got our agency specific paperwork together and have signed and stamped it all. Lastly, we filled out the baby's Visa application to come here. Government forms are borderline insane, especially immigration related forms. There are so many questions, and sooooooooooooo much room for error, they seem designed to make sure you miss a field or mark something incorrectly. I think we are done with all the boring paperwork now, we hope so anyways. We have a few little benchmark dates to hit, but its mainly following the paperwork flow as it goes from agency to agency and gets approved.

We also got a note from our courier service in China! Ann at Red Thread has delivered 3 packages for us, she does an excellent job and we are impressed each time. The last thing we sent off was a "birthday package", cake, some toys, little things like that. We were hoping to get some pictures at the end of the month, after her actual birthday. Many other people get these little birthday party pictures when they send a cake. Some orphanages are strict and won't send anything but pictures of the cake, to basically show that they bought one. Some places take video and pictures of the party/event. We got 2 new pics today, I kind of hate them, :)




I can't stand the haircut. I've seen it before, and I always think its strange. Its definitely a Chinese "thing", some of the parents I've talked with say they do it because it will make the hair grow in better/thicker. I guess we will need to buy her lots of hats for when we get home, it will be cold!

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!