Friday, September 30, 2011

More Showers!!

Our awesome friends from both our workplaces gave us showers this week. We are blessed!!

Cake from Paige's shower
Kyle with panda finger puppets!
Gift Table from Paige's shower
Awesome gift from Paige's shower.
There were lots of great
other gifts too!
Balloons from Kyle's shower!
Cake from Kyle's shower!

Plans finalized and flights booked!!

We now have our itinerary for our trip to China. Here is our schedule...

October 7: Fly out of Nashville
October 8: Arrive in Beijing China at almost midnight!
October 9: Sightseeing- Great Wall of China
October 10: Sightseeing- Forbidden City/ Fly to Guanzhou China (Guangdong Province)
October 11: THE DAY WE GET AUDREY/ legal process
October 12:
October 13:
October 14: Orphange Visit (tentative)
October 15:
October 16:
October 17: Obtain legal documents
October 18: Medical exam for Audrey
October 19:
October 20: Consulate Appointment (this is the appointment that was changed which is why we are leaving later
October 21: Obtain Visa/ Possibly stay the night in Hong Kong
October 22: Fly out of Hong Kong- RETURN HOME!

I think we will do some sightseeing on the days where there is nothing scheduled or maybe just hanging out with Audrey.

It looks like we are flying for 2 straight days when we go and in a way we are. China is 13 hours ahead of our time here so you have to take that into account. However, on the way home we leave China on October 22 and we get home on October 22. Anyway, we are glad to have the schedule and the flights booked. We are on our way now!

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Roller Coaster

Well the adoption roller coaster is still going, but I think it is about to stop! Sorry to everybody for telling you we were leaving Tuesday October 4, but it appears we are not leaving then now. The final word is that we have to be in China on October 9 which means we will leave Nashville either October 7 or October 8. I could explain why our date was pushed back on here, but it is an extremely long story so I won't. The easy way to say it is that the officials in China moved the date of one of our important appointments while we are in China which results in us having to leave later. We are a little disappointed, but it is just 4 days later and we are still getting Audrey! I guess we have more time to pack now!

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

We are going to China!!

As the title says, it looks like we are going to China on October 4! That is one week from today!! There is a lot we have done and still a lot to do. We got our Visas back with no problem. We made a huge Wal-Mart trip last weekend for our trip. We also have 2 showers at each of our workplaces this week!

Today has been a big day! We got a copy of our Travel Approval from China today which is what we have been waiting on. The original is supposed to be in our hands tomorrow. We have plane tickets on hold right now, but we cannot purchase them yet. It is a little confusing, but since we were placed with the group we are going to be with a little late, the agency has to make sure that they have room for us in the Consulate appointment on October 17. I am assuming that if they cannot fit us in then that we may have to stay an extra day or two which is why we can't book plane tickets yet. Don't worry we barely understand this ourselves!
We are excited! We are on our way Audrey!

Shower!!

Our wonderful church hosted us a shower on September 18. It was a huge blessing to us. The support of our church during our wait has been awesome. Thanks HHC! 

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Time For An Update!

I looked back at our blog and realized we have not updated it lately! Well, as you can see we got our referral for Audrey at the end of August! She is from Huazhou City which is in the Guangdong Province of China. Where she is at is in the south part of China somewhere between Guangzhou and Hanoi Vietnam. The orphanage she is in right now actually has a website at http://www.orphanage.org/asia/china/huazhou/index.html

After getting her referral we had to accept the referral. We pretty much had already accepted it after seeing her, but basically that means we had to check a box saying we accept her and send it back to China. Before doing that we had to wait to get the translated medical information about her and then have a doctor look at her medical information just to make sure. Here are some quotes from her paperwork from China about her personality...

"She has a quiet personality, likes to play with staff, smiles a lot. She loves caretakers and smiles beautifully when playing with them". Favorite toy "bell toys"- not sure what that is? On one of our other papers it has checked that she "laughs aloud, is quiet, fond of listening to music, having a ready smile". I know that's not much, but that is all we have.

She sounds very sweet and I'm sure she will be the best behaved baby in the world! The doctor that looked at her medical information was very positive overall and she said she saw no reason why we should not accept our referral. So I sent our acceptance/confirmation letter back to China a couple of weeks ago. 

Last weekend we received ESTIMATED travel dates of leaving October 4 and coming back October 19! Wow, that's soon! We will do it, but we have a lot to do between now and then. After hearing that we started on getting our Visa stuff prepared which I did over the weekend and yesterday. I got all that in the mail yesterday afternoon. Basically you have to send a bunch of stuff to a company who walks your information to the China Embassy in Washington DC. Once the Visas are done they send it all back to you. We used the company The Assistant Stork to do this for us.

Well, I guess that is it for now. We are waiting for our official travel approval from China and I'm sure there is other things we will be doing in the coming days. Oh yea, our wonderful church is throwing us a baby shower this next Sunday night which will be a huge blessing! We will keep you posted!!