Sunshine and Day Dreams

This week was spring break and it has been beautiful. The sun has been shining and the sky is blue. This is not always the case here. Anyway we have been enjoying it. We received notice that our I-800 was approved and now we wait for the NVC (National Visa Center). Hopefully this will not take to long and we will be off to waiting for our Article 5. NaHui's room is complete and thanks to Aunt Suzi who went shopping at Ikea for us, Na Hui has a new down comforter  and duvet with beautiful flowers. I will take a picture soon and post it. My mom is also making a quilt for NaHui that will match great.

After this week school is going to get really busy. We have about 2 months until the end of the year and so it should be none stop from here on out. There is SBA testing, and Pillars of America, and all the other unexpected activities that pop up in the Spring. We have our play and all of the backstage groups, which will be performed May 10th & 11th, then a week later we leave on Odyssey (a week out of town with the class). We will come back with just two more days of school and then we, hopefully, will be leaving for China. It should go by very quickly and hopefully I don't send to much time worrying about the play. The kids pull it off every year, even when I think they won't. Although I generally don't start worrying until about two weeks before the performance so I am starting early this year. It will all be fine, I just have to keep telling myself that. (For those that don't know Zane and Quade are both in my class).

We have done most of the shopping for our trip and I have put together a packing list. So all in all I am ready. Fred and I still need to find all of the kids books that are in storage but I think we are good. I have however been thinking about things to entertain NaHui on the 13hr flight home. She still will not have very much English and that is a long time. I am hoping we will all sleep  most of it but I doubt that will be the case. I pray that NaHui will be comfortable with all of us and not just latched on to one. I hope that she will have started to attach to us and it won't be to traumatic for her. I hope that she can openly grieve and not bottle it up inside. I hope that she will let us comfort her and she will begin to understand that we will always be there for her, that she will never be alone again.

I wonder about NaHui's foster family. She is one of five kids in the house one of two girls. Does she think of her foster mother as her mama? and her foster father as her baba (Mandarin for father)? She has been living in a foster family since she was 3 yrs old. Has it been the same foster family? Were there always five kids? have some left and others added? There are just some many questions that I do not know the answers too. Maybe one day we will and maybe we won't but we will make do with what we do know and go from there. I pray that she is looking at our pictures and coming to the place where she can except us as her mama, baba and gege (times 2). NaHui we love you so much already.

I-800 and Chinese Visas

Well we finally got our updated home study and sent off the I-800A, Supplement 3 and the I-800 to the USCIS. The I-800A, Supplement 3 was to let the USCIS know that Fred had changed jobs and the I-800 is basically identifying the child who we want to make a US citizen. Fred talked with the USCIS yesterday and things are coming along. Our officer said that our I-800 should be in the mail and on its way back to us by Wednesday, March 21st, fingers crossed, God willing and the creek don't rise. The next step is the NVC (National Visa Center). Basically they enter the information in to the computer and then email it to the US Embassy in Guongzhou, China for final approval. Once the info has been emailed we will be sent notification which needs to be sent to Holt. This step takes about a week. Holt will then combine the NVC notification, our LOA and the DS-230 together to send to the Holt rep in China, who will hand delivery our packet to the US Embassy. This is the Article 5. This is the final approval of NaHui's visa. This will take two weeks. Once we have our Article 5, China will issue TA (travel approval). So anyway we are getting closer. We are hoping to travel with the June 8th group. Holt has scheduled two travel groups a month so if we want to travel at the beginning of June it must be then. We received an email the other day from Holt saying that the orphanage would remind NaHui's kindergarten teacher to teacher her some English words to help her express her needs. Which doesn't sound like much but it means she knows she is being adopted and makes it seem so much more real to me. After so long it is hard to believe that we are only a couple months away now. We have purchased all the clothes we need for NaHui in China and a couple toys. We have also been purchasing (with Grandma Sherry's help) the gifts we will need for the orphanage director, the aunties, and a few other people in China. We are probably taking more medications; cold medicine, diarrhea medicine, eye drops, antihistamines, etc. than we would ever take at home but we were told that we should take them with us (because you can't by them in China) so we are. It is a crazy concept, we are told to pack light but don't forget to take all this stuff with you.

Anyway I have also been filling out our visa applications. Most of the app was been pretty easy until I got to the section on the boys app where it said " if minor, than parents can sign" What does this mean. Do I sign my name or the boys name. I will make a phone call to the courier that we are using on Monday and have my question answered. Visa applications must be walked in, they do not except mail, so we must use a courier service. The good part is that the courier will look over the documents before and after to make sure that they are correct. So hopefully there will not be to much mailing back and forth. I'll let you know how it goes.

We have sent two letters to NaHui so far but I need to send another this week. We have some letters from the kids in NaHui's Class (next year) that we are going to send as well. I submitted NaHui's application for the lottery for school for next years last week also. It was weird filling out information on a person I haven't met yet but already feels like one of the family. I also need to get her an Alaska Airline mileage number so she can start earning miles on her way back from China.

As the time gets closer we will post more often. It is hard to post when you are just waiting and don't know anything new.