Then she was ours…. sort of...

In the midst of all of this, before our home study update was quite complete, we received the long awaited, long hoped for, letter from China… the Letter Seeking Confirmation! That’s China’s way of saying, we approve you and if you still want this little one, she’s yours. So we signed that glorious document, sent it to Kim at Great Wall and by last Friday it was on it’s way back to China! Officially, Wu Bei Jiao, will be our daughter!!!!! Wait for the thud… ah yes, there it is… the sound of me hitting the floor.  :-) 

Cue Kendra laughing at me while trying not to pass out herself. 

Kendra and I have been in a fog about the news. It doesn’t seem real at all. When we started the blog I was literally sick to my stomach because it just did not seem real. Also because I felt like we weren’t allowed to tell people this news yet! Kim at Great Wall assured me that it was officially ok for us to post blogs, ask for more pics of her, write to her, send her care packages! We can send her things! Amazing. Just amazing.

So Christy is getting our final paperwork together, certifying a handful of copies and then we get to send that all to …. sigh…. our government. The I800a. It goes to our immigration department, well, it goes to their p.o. box. Then someone there sends us a letter that they received our form. Then it goes somewhere else and someone there reviews everything… if they like us, and all the grammar is correct, and the spelling is right, and the form is just exactly how they like it, and it’s the second blue moon of the year of the comet, they will approve us and send it all back to us stamped approved. Then we file the I800, get an appointment to get yet another set of digital fingerprints and then Kim can get us the appointment with the Consulate and get our dates…. deep breath…. 

to travel to China!!!!

How long does all that take? Good question. We don’t know! Once the paperwork goes to immigration they can take anywhere from 30 to 90 days to review and approve us. If they find a problem and we have to fix or change anything, it will take even longer. Kim and Christy went over the paperwork a dozen or more times to make sure there were no problems so we are pretty confident that everything is on par. So honestly we could travel anywhere from (the highly optimistic) April to September! Basically, we’re back to waiting. Now however, we need to focus on the house, finances, learning Mandarin, thinking about how we can learn to make her favorite meals, reading more on attachment issues, and for me, just understanding what a 4yr old will even look like waddling around in our home every day! So this is a very different kind of waiting. In fact we suspect that no matter how long it takes before we eventually travel, it will seem like the time raced by!