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!!