China here we come!!

Yesterday, after waiting for 97 long days we received our travel approval to bring Paul home. Over the weekend we had what I called a "sign" that our TA was on our way. I was feeling pretty down about the wait since we had really hoped to have TA almost a month ago. On Saturday we decided to go to the Chinese buffet. Natalie opened her fortune cookie. On the "learn Chinese" side of the fortune her word was "Di Di" which means little brother. I thought it was cool that Natalie choose that cookie since she is going to China with us and will be the first of the kids to meet her "Di Di."

As of now our travel plans are still tentative. The adoption agency has to confirm some of our appointments in China yet. It sounds like we will leave Dec. 1st and return Dec. 14 th. If these dates hold true I'm guessing that we will meet Paul on Dec. 4th. Natalie will celebrate her 6th birthday while we are in China. I told her that we would try to find a cake on her birthday ( Dec. 6th).

I looks like we will be traveling with just 3 other families, who are also adopting special needs kids. Wow, that's a big difference from our group when we adopted Audrey. Our agency had 39 families in China for that trip and we spent the whole 14 days with 8 of those families. The way it will probably work is that we will sight see in Beijing with the 3 families and then we will all go our separate ways to meet our children in their province capitol's. Then the last 5 days or so of the trip we will all meet up in Guangzhou where the US consulate is to finalize our paperwork. This is all guessing on my part. I'm sure we will have more information as the days go by. Two of the three families actually live fairly close to us....Indiana and Michigan.

The most important news is that we will finally get to meet this little guy who has absolutely stole our hearts.

Alison