Chinese Legend of The Red Thread

Well, things are progressing at our house....a little more agency paperwork done, another item for the trip to China purchased, more cleaning and reorganizing in the kid's bedrooms...
It's a slow and steady walk to the finish line and I'm trying to savor every detail, every moment of this preparation!

I have also been reading about the Chinese culture and current etiquette and customs. I have to be careful because when I'm on-line surfing around and reading.... the hours tend to fly by and my daily "to do" list doesn't get any shorter!! One of the things I learned from a dear friend (Linda!) is especially appropriate for an adoptive parent and their new child.

She told me about "The Legend of the Red Thread". There is an ancient Chinese belief which states that when a child is born, an invisible red thread connects that child's soul to all those people - present and in the future - who will play a part in that child's life. As each birthday passes, those threads shorten and tighten, bringing closer those people who are fated to be together. Grace just celebrated her 3rd birthday on April 14th...... and 16 days later, the agency called to ask me if I would be her mother! The red thread that connects her to our family is getting shorter all the time as we prepare for our journey!

Turning the house upside down!!

Wow, one little 3 year old child thousands of miles away has our whole family cleaning, changing and rearranging every room in our house...and she doesn't even know it!! We decided that James should move into the bedroom on the main level of our house (currently we've been using it as an "office") so that Grace could have the bedroom upstairs near Mom and Dad. Well...first that office needed to be dismantled and all items distributed to other rooms throughout the house...which meant moving "stuff" out of those other rooms to make room for more "stuff"! I'm sure you get the picture - now there are piles of "stuff" and excess furniture all over the house in every room! That's where garbage bags start to come in very handy and the idea that "less is more" takes on new meaning. As you all know....once you get started purging, you become obsessed with cleaning out every drawer, cabinet, nook, and cranny...successfully driving your family crazy! Of course I want to get all of this cleaning and rearranging done overnight because the real goal here is to get to the point where I can decorate Grace's new bedroom! We're going with a daffodil yellow and lavender color scheme....and can't wait to get paintbrush in hand to start the job....pictures will follow upon completion!

Where in the world is Grace?

Grace lives in in the Children's Welfare Institute in Yulin City in the province of Shaanxi. If you look on a map, Shaanxi is squished right in the middle of China...but towards the north of the country. The province is bordered by Inner Mongolia and a desert....which blows 18 sandstorms a year into Yulin City! (I bet she'll be glad she's getting away from that!) We recently found out that we won't be going to get her at the orphanage in Yulin City. She will be brought to the capital of the province, Xian, and we will meet her for the first time there.

We received our Letter of Agreement from China this week. It's a very official looking document (looks like a diploma!) written in Chinese and translated to English. Once that document is signed and sent back to China, the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs will start to process our Travel Approval documents!

When we finally go to China we will travel to a port city (we think it will be Bejing). Then the next day we will fly to Xian to get our little girl from the nanny who brings her from the orphanage! We will stay in Xian about a week while China prepares paperwork, visa's, and a passport for Grace. During that time Grace will be with us in our hotel, getting to know her new family! All that week we will be offered tours to take to see the sites of Xian. James is especially excited to see the buried army of terra cotta soldiers! We're told the adoption agency reps in-country will keep us very busy! In researching on-line we discovered there is a HUGE beautiful shopping mall that I'm sure Rachel will want to check out!

Right now we have paperwork to fill out and get notorized, phone calls to the USCIS to make, and a little girls room to prepare! So from the world of Yulin City, China.....little Grace will make a long, long journey to middle America. From a city of 3.5 million.....to Galena, Illinois....and that's where in the world she will grow up!

What's in a name?

We may call our new little girl Grace, but in China they are still calling her by the name the orphanage gave her - Yu Xing Zhang. They told us she was abandoned at birth on the steps of a hospital....and then taken to the orphanage where they gave her this name. Her name can be translated like this: Yu is her surname, Xing means Star and Zhang means an article, chapter or regulation. We're in the process of deciding on a middle name for Grace right now. I don't think "chapter" is at the top of the list.... although she is a brand new chapter for our family...so her Chinese name is totally appropriate!

Mother's Day was extra sweet for me today and thank you all for the good wishes and blessings!

Let the paperwork begin!

Our agency has graciously given us more paperwork to fill out....that will eventually make it's way to China. In the meantime, we wait approximately 3 weeks for the CCAA (China Center of Adoption Affairs) to issue us our "acceptance letter"....a formality really, since our dossier has been approved and sitting in China since November 23, 2006. We will be taking new steps toward our trip to China every so often and I will let you all know where we are in the process right here!

The FUN stuff has begun too! Rachel and I made a pilgrimage to Walmart to purchase our first clothing item for Grace. We've been walking past all those cute little girl outfits for so long...and now we can actually buy something! Rachel picked out a pair of LIttle Mermaid pj's with Ariel and that little yellow fish (how could I forget his name....I must have watched that movie 1,000 times with Rachel???) I bet I'll get to watch it 1,000 more times in the not-too-distant future and then I'll get back to you with the name of the little yellow fish! Anyway...we also couldn't resist getting this cute, cuddly, little Teddy Bear too! (Grace will have multitudes of these once they all come out of storage, but everyone needs one Teddy Bear that's not a hand-me-down!)

Breathe deep!

Time to let the idea that this is finally going to happen sink in! We are really going to travel to China to get a little 3 year old girl to be the 5th member of our family...and we will call her Grace. Her name has been mentioned countless times in our family..."when Grace gets here yadayadayada"...."when we have Grace yadayadayada".....We've bought Chinese chop sticks, baby silverware and Christmas ornaments over the years...while thinking of her. She's been a name without a face for so very long that she's a person we didn't know if we could really ever put a face on.....until now! Now we know who she is and we can start to love her.