Travel Approval!!!!!!

We received our travel approval today!!!  Now we have a decision to make.  We must decide if we want to try and travel July 29 with a couple of families or travel August 26 with a travel group and a doctor.  We are leaning towards the August 26 dates for several reasons.

1.  CAWLI is sending a doctor with the travel group.
2.  We will have more time to notify work of us taking leave.
3.  It will also give me some more time to stock up on vacation time so that I can spend a little more time at home with my little girl.
4.  There are more seats available on the plane and we can sit together on the way over and on the way back (whereas, there are so few for the July dates and the odds of us being together on the plane are slim)
5.  Save one whole month of Day Care

If we leave on July 29, we will get to China sooner and we will have our daughter sooner.  Even though that is a wonderful incentive, there are too many practical reasons to wait until August.


We have waited this long, one more month will fly by very fast, I'm sure!!
(see below for a timeline of our process thus far)



7/1/09 Application to CAWLI

7/7/09 Intake Meeting with CAWLI

8/29/09 First Home Study Visit

9/3/09 Trip to meet CAWLI staff

9/17/09 Second Home Study Visit

9/21/09 Completed Heart of the Matters Parenting Training

10/15/09 Final Home Study Visit

10/28/09 Approved Home Study Report

11/20/09 Submitted paperwork to USCIS

12/8/09 REFERRAL DAY

12/23/09 Preapproval from China

1/6/10 Fingerprinting for USCIS and First Care Package Sent

1/28/10 USCIS I-800A Approval

2/1/10 Dossier to China (DTC)

2/10/10 Log In Date (LID)

3/24/10 Second Care Package Sent

4/20/10 Letter of Acceptance (LOA)

5/7/10 Third Care Package Sent

6/7/10 USCIS I-800 Approval

6/11/10 National Visa Center (NVC) Notification

6/18/10 Paperwork to US Consulate in China

7/13/10 NVC Approval (Article 5)

7/19/10 Travel Approval

Happy Birthday!!

Today is my 31^st birthday.  I have been doing a lot of reflection this month since it has been a little over 1 year since we started the adoption process.  We are very excited about traveling to China to pick up our daughter.  Last night I had a dream that Saiya and I went on a cruise together.  I think it’s strange that my dreams about Saiya have gone from us traveling to pick her up, traveling in China with her, traveling home with her, and now about things we might do together as a family.  I dream about her a lot!  I hope that she knows we are waiting anxiously for her and that we will be there very soon to bring her home.  We still have our fingers crossed that we will be traveling on the 29^th, but we are prepared just in case we don’t get our travel approval in time.

Still packing and re-packing.  Anything to help pass the time and hold back the madness that is the “hurry-up and wait” process of adoption.  I pulled out some really cute dresses for Saiya to wear while we are in China.  I even think i have one planned for her Visa Appointments in GuongZhou.  :)  She is going to look so cute in the clothes we are bringing!  Of course, Cherokee wanted to help!

Travel Decisions

So as it stands right now, the other families who were supposed to be traveling in late August don’t want to wait that long. Now CAWLI is trying to put together a group to go to China on July 29-Aug14. I seriously don’t think that we are going to receive our Travel Approval in the next week, but we will see. If we do, then we will be going in the July 29th group. If not, then we will be going sometime in August, even if we have to travel to China without a travel group. Heading over there by ourselves is not really what we want to do as it costs slightly more because we have to pay for things like transportation and guides by ourselves rather than share the cost with other families. Keep your fingers crossed that we get our Travel Approval VERY soon!!

We got a picture of some of the children in the orphanage. Our daughter looks so tiny! We might have to rethink the items we packed. I’m not sure if we packed a lot of 4’s or 3’s for Saiya. I will have to repack her bag… again. Haha!!

NVC Approval!!!

We received our National Visa Center approval today. This means that in about three weeks we will receive our Travel Approval and then its off to CHINA! It is cutting it very close to the time when we wanted to travel. Therefore, we are going to plan on traveling in the next CAWLI group that leaves August 26 and returns September 11. This will give us enough time to plan international plane tickets and have some breathing room between the arrival of the Travel Approval and the actual date of travel. We would rather have more solid dates and enough to time book airline tickets than only have a few days to plan it all out. It is heartbreaking to have to wait that long, but we hope the time will go by faster now that we have target dates and such. In the late August group, the agency will also be sending a physician to go with us in the event new parents get panicky about sniffles.

Also, the weather in Hong Kong will hopefully be a little more mild in the beginning of September than in the middle of July.  Now we will have to re-think clothes in the event we need a jacket or long pants...  Back to Packing!!!

News from the CAWLI Group in China

Today we heard from one of the families who traveled to China on Thursday. One of the families traveled to Ningxia to the same orphanage where Saiya is! We sent pictures of Saiya to them with the hope that they might be able to give us some news of our daughter. Here is what they had to say:

>>>>

“I saw your girls today! They look good and seem happy. I recognized them right
away. We went to the Children's Welfare Institute to get Matteah at about
9-9:30am this morning after a trip to the bank.

I had a group photo taken with your girls today. I will send it to you later.
Our girls are all friends and are together all the time per the staff. They
appear happy and healthy. The staff truly cares for them. I was able to take
pictures outside the children's home and in the entrance with our girls and
staff. We did not tour the orphanage today and I was told I could not take
pictures/videos inside the orphanage. We feel Matteah was prepared well. She
cried about 5 minutes. The girls said good bye to her before they left to go
outside to play.

Make a list of questions to ask about each of your girls. I did and received
additional information on how she came to the orphanage. Information that was
NOT in her referral documents.”
>>>>

We are so happy that they were able to see Saiya and that she is doing well! We really can’t wait to travel to China to pick her up. Chris kept asking me if she was sad that we were not there to pick her up as well. It broke my heart. But I’m sure she is well taken care of and I’m glad that she has friends who will also be coming home to the USA. We will do our best to make sure that they can see each other once they are all home.

Hopefully, we only have about three and a half weeks before we leave for China.

3 Weeks for this… 3 Weeks for that…

So we are hoping that we get our National Visa Center approval sometime this week. If we do, it would be roughly three weeks since we submitted our paperwork to the US Consulate in China. After we receive the NVC approval, it is again, roughly three weeks before we will hear anything about our Travel Approval. After that, we were told that the local province needs about 10 days lead time in order to get all the paperwork together. So as it stands right now, we are looking at traveling about the first week of August.

There is one other Ningxia family who was supposed to travel in this week’s group, but their Travel approval did not arrive yet, so we are thinking we might end up traveling with them at the end of this month or the beginning of August. I can imagine how frustrated they must feel.



Things that help to pass the time:

Packing!! You might not think so, but “test” packing our bags so that we can weigh everything and make sure we are under 44 pounds really helps. I actually had to go out and buy a scale becuase we didn't own one.  So there was alot of "weigh me" then "weigh me + bag" in order to figure out whether we were ok weight-wise.  Saiya’s bag had to be unpacked and redistributed so that we could fit all of our clothes and still be underweight. At first try, Chris’s bag weighed about 60 pounds!! Needless to say, we had to rethink some of the things we were taking and do some creative packing.

Yard Work!! We have been slowly tearing out the palmetto palms in our back yard in order to make room for a deck. When I’m not working on the weekends, we have been cutting, trimming, and hauling those out of our yard. It really helps keep our minds off of the intense “hurry up and wait” that this process has become.

Shopping!! We have been shopping like crazy for clothes for the trip to China. I realized that it has been years since I actually went “shopping” for clothes. Yeah, I might buy one or two items here and there, but I have not been “shopping” in forever!! So we have been clothes shopping for shorts, light t-shirts, and other things to take with us to China.


That’s about it for now, we are still very excited and anxious to get going! We are ready to bring our little girl home!!

Happy Independence Day!

Today is one of the most important holidays in the United States.  The day we celebrate our Independence.  It's days like these that we really think about all the things we are going to get to introduce little Saiya to.  American Holidays are one of them!  There is so much to teach her.  Chris is very excited that we will get to teach her all about American BBQ!  Haha!  He's always thinking about food!

We are really hoping that we will be traveling to China in the next CAWLI group at the end of the month. 

Happy Independence Day!!