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Sharon Nix, Tom's wonderful assistant and a great friend to our family, has agreed to post our blog entries while we're in China.  Access to blogging is... shall we say... limited in China, but email is available.  So we will email Sharon our blog entries and pictures while we're traveling, and she will post them for us. 

Sharon wanted to do a practice post, so here's a recent photo of the boys just for fun.  :)

More great news from China!

Okay, how cute is THIS?

This picture was taken less than two weeks ago.  Ellie had her palate repaired on May 30th.  We weren't sure whether it would be done before we brought her home, but it's great to have that behind her and it should make the introduction of new foods a little easier.  She will almost certainly need more surgeries as she grows, but other than the possibility of ear tubes there shouldn't be anything in the immediate future now that her palate is repaired.  And what a smile!!!

Ellie's updated growth report states that she can walk, say "mama", and - perhaps most importantly - she can understand what is being said to her.  That is a huge relief, because hearing issues related to excess fluid are common among children with cleft palate who have not been evaluated for ear tubes.  Hopefully now that her palate is repaired she will have an easier time learning to say new words.  But the fact that her receptive language skills appear to be normal is excellent news.

Our agency is busy finalizing our travel plans.  We now have contact information for the families who are traveling with us, so I imagine over the next week or so there will be a flurry of emails as we begin getting to know each other.  We'll have a conference call later this week so that our agency can give advice about the trip and answer any questions we have.

We will probably meet Ellie two weeks from today!
   

I am not tech-savvy.

As you can probably tell from the very basic design of this blog.  But if you follow this link, you should be able to create a Google profile that will enable you to sign in and post comments.  I haven't noticed an increase in the amount of spam email I've received since creating my own Google profile. 

We will be updating our blog throughout our trip to China, and while we won't have access directly to the site to see your comments, we will receive email updates containing the text of your posts.  Which will be great, because we won't actually be able to see our blog so it will be good to know that what we're posting is somewhat coherent and at least mildly interesting, in spite of our jet lag.      

Who says the U.S. government can't be efficient?

Okay, well, it's actually our agency that's super efficient - but the U.S. Consulate deserves some credit for confirming our appointment in less than a day!  We have a consulate appointment on July 18th - which means we will leave Atlanta around July 8th and can return on July 20th!  We haven't booked anything yet, but based on the timing it looks like we will be able to take advantage of the recently-reinstated, non-stop, Shanghai-to-Atlanta Delta flight for our trip home.  Hallelujah!  

We've had people ask why it takes about 2 weeks to complete the adoption trip.  Why can't we just pick up Ellie and come home?  Well, the adoption itself is completed in Ellie's home province, Henan.  Zhengzhou is the capital of Henan, and that is where we'll meet Ellie - but we need to begin our trip in Beijing, in order for our agency to accomodate flights from various places in the U.S.  Our stay in Zhengzhou involves receiving Ellie (an event often referred to as "Gotcha Day"), finalizing the adoption (could be the same day or the next day), then waiting for Ellie's passport to be ready.  All of that takes about a week.  Then we travel to Guangzhou, where Ellie will have a medical exam at the consulate, followed the next business day by our official "consulate appointment" (during which we will take the oath of citizenship on Ellie's behalf).  The next day, her visa will be ready.  We can fly home the day after we pick up Ellie's visa. 

 

It's official!

Our agency received our travel approval yesterday!  They have already requested our consulate appointment, according to the travel options we were given yesterday morning.  With that information sent, we should hear back from the consulate Monday or Tuesday of next week - at which point we'll know for sure when we're traveling and finally be able to book our flights.  We may be leaving two weeks from tomorrow, and meeting Ellie just a few days after that!

We also have a terrific opportunity to help the Hope Foundation, the charity that has cared for Ellie since last summer and provided her with expert surgical care and lots of TLC.  There is a woman named Rebecca who lives in Tennessee and is the U.S. contact for the Hope Foundation.  She has some medical supplies that need to be sent to China, and it is far more economical (and secure) to have travelers bring them over as baggage than to ship them.  So once we're certain of our travel plans, Rebecca will ship us a couple of suitcases full of much-needed medical supplies, and a Hope staff member will meet us at the airport in Beijing to pick them up and take them to the Hope Healing Home.  We wish we could visit the Healing Home in person, but since we are traveling with a group (and probably not spending that much time in Beijing), it seems unlikely that we'll be able to do that.  But we're very pleased to have a chance to help them in a tangible way.               

Getting warmer...

Got an email this morning from our agency - they believe the Chinese Center for Children's Welfare and Adoption has mailed some travel approvals, and based on the date our Article 5 was submitted they expect that ours is one of them!  Hopefully we will know for sure tomorrow - the suspense is killing us! - but in the meantime, our agency has given us some possible travel dates so that they can be ready to request our consulate appointment just as soon as they have our travel approval in their hands...

We might leave around July 6-8 and return around July 20-23.  Or, if our agency is unable to get consulate appointments that will work for those travel dates, we would leave around July 13-15 and return home around July 27-30.   

So for now, the uncertainty remains, but our agency is so professional we have to believe there's an awfully good chance our travel approval will arrive in the next couple of days or else they wouldn't have suggested otherwise.  We won't truly know our itinerary until our consulate appointment is confirmed and we can book our flights.  If our travel approval arrives at our agency's office tomorrow or Monday, we could have a confirmed consulate appointment by the middle of next week.  Then the real craziness begins. 

It's almost hard to believe that it's actually going to happen.  In less than a month!

Any day now...

We've entered the third week of our wait for travel approval, so we could receive an email from our agency any day letting us know that it's arrived and that we can request our consulate appointment.  Once the consulate appointment is requested it is usually confirmed within a day or two, and then the trip itinerary is planned around that date.  Things seem to be back to normal following the Chinese holiday a couple of weeks ago, but I have to admit that this part of the wait has been particularly hard.  We know we're leaving soon, but we don't know when.  We haven't been able to get any updates on Ellie.  The logistics of planning a trip to China, being away from the boys for two weeks, and preparing to take custody of a toddler with a medical condition who has never laid eyes on us... it all feels a little overwhelming at times.  But we're enjoying the summer, and it's going by fast.  This is Patrick's last week of camp, and this one's a full-day camp - so things are blessedly quiet around here while Samuel naps.  It would be much more enjoyable if it weren't so nerve-wracking.   

Ellie is 17 months old today.  I hope this is the last milestone she passes without us.