Still Waiting.....Can you hear the crickets in the background?

One of the hardest things about this adoption journey is all the waiting!   Tommy and I are not the most patient people and we like to have a plan and this process has really taught us to be flexible.  The adoption journey is such a leap of faith anyway and there are days where we just need to let go of control :-)   I am on an China adoption forum where adoptive families communicate with each other, support each other and cheer each other on when we move forward with the next step of the process.  We also keep informal statistics so we can track where everyone is in the process.  The hard part is that sometimes you see another family get the next precious document before you when "theroretically" they were later in the timeline than you.  While I am extremely happy for those families, it does make you feel that the train left the station without you and you wonder if you will ever catch the next train.   That happened this week with many families receiving their TA's which is making us even more anxious to get ours.   In the meantime, we still have a lot of preparing and packing.  There are so many items that we need to take care of and I am starting to wonder if we will have room of our clothes.   There is 44 pound luggage weight limit for China domestic flights so Tommy has been planning out who takes what in order to get there with 3 medium suitcases and 3 backpacks.    Everything is laid out in Kelcy's room.  The wait is really taking a toll on Conner too who keeps asking when we are going to China and can we take Kelcy to school when we get back so that he can "prove" he has a little sister :-(.  I think some of his friends are questioning whether he is really going to China.  We do have Kelcy's room ready and really enjoyed decorating a little girl's room.....I am so used to boy stuff so this was a nice change.  I also enjoyed shopping for some clothes this past weekend.  We still have not received an update so I have no idea what size she will be so I bought some 2Ts and 3Ts and will hope that something will fit.   So many cute outfits to chose from! 

Waiting for Travel Authorization - any day now

We are just waiting on the final Travel Authorization from China and we should be getting that any day now.   Once we get the "TA" , it will get busy trying to request the day that we can get an appointment with the American Consulate because that will determine when we actually travel to China and that will allow us to book the airlines and hotels.  Our agency has a travel coordinator who will help us with all the international travel and the china in country travel ....it should be a trains and planes adventure!   We have all had our vaccinations and are now working on the final Typhoid vaccine......unfortunately, Conner has had to deal with some side effects from that vaccine - fever and headache so I feel bad about that - but the Doctor says that the actual virus would be 100x worse!    Conner has been a trooper through all the vaccines and so I have probably let him watch a little too much TV while he recuperates....so much that we are both getting addicted to Phineas and Pherb!  Maybe we can find the Chinese version of the Disney channel when we are there.  Tommy has the suitcases laid out and is waiting for me to start packing....those of you that know me...know that the clothes won't be packed until the day before we leave....I just work better under pressure...which drives him crazy but we have learned each others traveling patterns after 10 years of marriage.

Finally - created the blog page

So I finally had a chance to set up this blog to start documenting all of the things we need to do to get ready for our trip to China and to hopefully update everyone on how our trip is going while we are in China.  I wanted to set this blog up to provide some interesting links to Southeast China and share a little bit about the adoption process so I will do that through some future posts.  Tommy and I have appreciated everyone's support and interest in how things have been going and sometimes we felt like a broken record when we updated you all with " well..we are now waiting for....." .  We can finally say that we are at the tail end of the process and are now officially waiting for our Travel Authorization which should be sent to us by the end of July.  So we are hoping that we travel the first part of August and get back in time for Conner to get back home and adjust to our timezone before he starts school again.  Many of you have asked if Conner is gonig on the trip and he is going to go because he is at an age where he can handle this type of travel, he really wants to go and  this will be part of his life story just as much as it is Kelcy's and we really want him to be a part of it on day one.  So feel free to check in and see how things are going...this is probably the best way for me to update everyone since many of you know that I tend to slack on emails and phone calls :-)