The List is Shrinking

I am finally breathing a little bit normally.............Luke's visa came back today, travel approvals arrived by FedEx today, I have a suitcase and a carry on both half packed, all kinds of stuff in zip lock bags and piles, we paid for our entire adoption travel package, and I purchased my last few big items for the basement.  There is still quite a list but I can see it diminishing.  

Seven days from now we will be sitting on a plane to Beijing!

Exhaustion

I am exhausted.  We leave in 7 days and I still feel like I have so much to do, the list never seems to end.  I will be out of town this weekend for a women's retreat which I help with, so that extra stress isn't helping.  Hopefully when I am there I will get to relax after everything gets underway and spend some time by myself which I desperately need.  Trying to get ready for us to go to China is busy enough, but then adding in all instructions and plans for Logan and Jenna as they are here with grandparents for two weeks, getting ready to go out of town for the weekend, dealing with our basement which is being finished, and just normal life like actually doing laundry and driving kids to school.............it is overwhelming.  Some days I feel good and some are bad.  Well I guess either way I only have 7 more days to feel either way and then we need to leave it all behind and go get our little girl.  I am getting more anxious than ever to see her and hold her.  I got two pictures yesterday, one shows her scar after heart surgery back in December, and the other is a cute one of her kind of smiling.  That poor girl needs her mommy!!!

 



 


 



 

Countdown to China.....13 days!

I can hardly believe that we are leaving for China in just under two weeks!  We got our travel dates confirmed on Tuesday and now things are moving ahead full force.  Our travel agency is working on our itinerary today and we will hopefully have it soon.  Since we travel so much throughout China, there are a lot of arrangements that need to be made for in country flights and hotels.  Fortunately Holt has a great agency they use for this and this agency specializes in adoption travel so I feel very well taken care of.  Here is the email I received on Tuesday with the confirmation of our dates.  I cannot tell you how great it felt to see this.  

  
I had a shower last week with all of my friends who wanted to bless us and help prepare for Natalie's arrival.  This is so helpful as we start thinking about packing.  

Now, how to pack light? 

Travel Approval Arrived!

Holt notified us that our travel approval arrived today!  We are so relieved and excited, this was the final document we were waiting for.  Our travel dates are still not confirmed until a few things are verified in China, and we were told that we should know for sure in about a week.  We have already booked our flights (which they tell you not to do until dates are confirmed) but we have good options for changing if we need to.  

We are probably leaving in 21 days!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Good and Bad

Luke's passport has arrived!  This is a relief....but of course now we have to wait for his visa.  In order to apply for the visa, we need to have an invitation letter from China stating that we have reason to come there to finalize an adoption.  We already went through this when we applied for our visas, but since we're adding Luke now we need to do it again for him.  The problem is that the people in China who will process this letter for us are already on vacation for the Chinese New Year.  This holiday is really messing things up for us right now!  Once they get back into the office and get us this letter, we will send the visa application to a courier in Washington who will take it to the Embassy and apply for the visa.  This shouldn't take more than 2 weeks and as of now we are just under 4 weeks from departure (hopefully).  It looks like we will be OK on this but of course it is one more thing to stress about until the visa actually arrives.  

Natalie's package that I sent, with a blanket, stuffed animal and disposable cameras was delivered to her orphanage yesterday.  Yay!

We are still awaiting our official travel approval which is also being held up due to the holiday.  AS SOON as this arrives, Holt will apply for our appointments in China and request permission from Natalie's province for us to come and if all goes well we can finalize our trip dates.  I am hoping for TA to come by the 20th because that should leave us 2 weeks to get the arrangements made and most likely we could pull it off.  Any later than that and we are really pushing it to try to leave on March 6th.  Please pray for that TA to come!!

 

 

Moving Along

Well we finally got our update on Natalie after a month of waiting.  They sent lots of new pictures and current measurements, as well as some shocking information that she had a heart surgery back in the beginning of December.  It was not an open heart surgery, but just hearing the words heart and surgery together sounds awful.  I realize I have never really mentioned Natalie's medical condition, I don't know why....I don't really think about it because it doesn't concern me.  She was born with a PDA (Patent Ductus Arteriosis) which means that there was a vessel in her heart that didn't shut completely after birth and therefore her blood flow is affected.  It is something that needs to be fixed at some point, but if there are no symptoms then it can wait for awhile, even years.  We knew that we may need to have a procedure done here to close that vessel off and I was told that it may be done without even having surgery.  Anyway, this could become a long story and I am beyond tired...so I will write more on it later.  For now, we know that she had a surgery called a PDA Ligation and I think that an incision was made on her left side between two of her ribs, and then the surgeon closed the opening of her vessel where the ductus was.  She recovered well, is doing well, and I am just even more ready to go and get her.  Here she is.  She really is a girl, I can't wait to actually let her hair grow out because they keep shaving it in the orphanage!