We’re going to China! Well…I guess you already knew that but now we have a date.

Our agency emailed us with the news on Friday. We didn’t see the email until late Saturday evening so good thing it wasn’t an emergency.

The plan is for us to fly to China on Friday, September 14 and return home on Thursday, September 27. We’re being squeezed in during this time period because no adoption agencies send families to China in October for a couple of reasons:

First, October 1 is National Day in China. National Day is the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In 2000, this holiday was stretched from 3 days to a full 7 days to make a “golden week”. Pretty much everyone in the country has that week off.

Second, there is a ginormous trade show held in Guangzhou the last 2 weeks of October every year. Also, the U.S. Consulate is located in Guangzhou and all adoptions are finalized in a ceremony there. Due to the trade show, no hotel rooms will be available for adoptive families.

I’m off to order some tickets!

Carmi returned our Letter of Acceptance to the adoption agency this morning. When they receive it (tomorrow), they’ll immediately forward it to China and we begin our wait for Travel Approval.

It’s amazing to think how critical that one little check mark is.

One of the families in our agency received TA only 14 days after returning their LOA so…we best be putting our packing lists together.

We have received some most excellent news.

Our case manager called Carmi and told her that our Letter of Acceptance arrived from China this morning for Karys’ adoption!

The LOA will be forwarded to us which we’ll receive tomorrow. Basically we’ll just check a box that says YES we want to adopt Karys (duh). Once it’s returned to China, we’ll wait for Travel Approval.

The process seems to be right on schedule and we should travel around mid-September.

The “package” is now in Ohio as of 4:30 am EST…

Update: The package is with the courier in Charleston as of 8:39 am EST.

Update: The package was delivered and signed for at 11:03 am EST. 

Another package was sent from Beijing to our agency and is now sitting in Los Angeles.

Hoo boy…here we go again…

Update: The package left LA at 6:45 pm EST.

Well we missed again.

As I mentioned in the previous post, one family received their travel approval and another family received their LOA. Once more, the family who received their LOA was logged in AFTER us.

Two more packages arrived at our agency yesterday from China. I know this because one of our friends received a call this morning from our agency with their travel approval.