Another step!!

Many of you have asked me if we've heard any more from China....and do we know yet when we are going???? Here's the latest.....

Believe it or not, after 4 years of waiting, we've actually been holding up the process a bit at this point! Once you get the child "referral" (all the info about YOUR child), and all the zillions of pieces of paper are signed, notorized, and sent to the agency.....the agency issues a Lettter of Intent (to adopt). When this letter is documented in China, the Chinese Center of Adoption Affairs (CCAA) in Beijing sends a Letter of Acceptance to our agency in Colorado. The agency sends this all important letter on to us . We sign this LOA, as it is called by the ever present assortment of acronyms.... send it back to our agency..... and they send it back to China. I actually explained those steps in an earlier blog entry, but this is a refresher course in case you weren't paying attention!! (Don't worry, there's no quiz at the end!)

Once that LOA arrives in China, the CCAA will send your travel orders within 2-4 weeks. Once you have those travel orders....things really start happening fast! The travel department at our agency contacts the U.S. Consulate's office in Guangzhou (a city in southern China) to make an appointment for us. At this appointment we present the child and make it "official" that we are going to take her out of China with us as our daughter! Once that Consulate appointment is scheduled...arrangments such as flights and hotels are made at lightning speed and we will be on our way to China within weeks!

So....now that I've taken a short story and made it a long one.......our family could not travel until August, so we asked the agency to hold onto the LOA. We didn't want it returned to China right away because we needed to slow down the process by about a month. (Rachel is in a play at UWP that ends Aug. 8th so our target date to travel is any day after that!)

Our agency emailed me yesterday with the news that we are going ahead with the next step! They feel it's time to return our LOA to China..... so their staff in Beijing will be delivering our LOA to the CCAA office this week! That means that between 2 and 4 weeks from now - we will know when our travel date is !! Then I can officially kick it into high gear and attempt to finish all the projects on my "List of things to do before we go to China"! We can then start the count-down to the exact date when we will hold our new little daughter for the first time.....the end result we've all been waiting for!!!