Travel Schedule

Okay the schedule is set. The tickets have been purchased and the reservation made. We are ready to go. Now we just have to wait.
Townsend's room is finished and now we are just waiting on a lamp for the side table,  a picture to be hung, and for my mother to finish his duvet for the bed. The packing has begun and is slowly coming together. Every time we think of something we should take we put it in our suitcase. This means we will need to repack but that is okay. All of Townsend's stuff is packed and we have picked out some toys to take for him. We have a beach ball, a coloring book,  bubbles, a couple of books, stuffed monkey (Scottie is taking her pink stuffed monkey we brought for her in China) and a Captain America action figure to play with Scottie's mermaids, Cinderella, and Elsa.

January 4th - leaving for Portland

January 8th - leave for China

January 9th - arrive in Beijing

January 10th - touring  Mutianyu portion of the Great Wall

January 12th - morning fly to Jinan

                     - afternoon Townsend will arrive at our hotel

January 13th - finalizing the adoption on the china side

January 17th - fly to Guangzhou

January 18th - medical

January 21st - consulate appointment (oath  ceremony)

January 23rd - leaving Guangzhou for Seattle via Seoul

January 24th- arriving in Juneau

We have Travel Approval!

TA!!!!!!!
After 20 days of waiting our Travel Approval finally came. Our agency has submitted our requests for consulate appointments so we should know by tomorrow or Wednesday. At that point we will be able to purchase our plane tickets. We are still hoping that we will be arriving to China on the 10th of January, but we will have to waiting to see.  The plan is that Fred, Scottie and I will be traveling to China to get Townsend and Zane and Quade are staying home with Grandma Sherry. She is so sweet to be flying up to hang with the big boys. Being in high school, it makes it very difficult for them to miss school and we will be gone for 2 weeks. They got to go last time so they have had the opportunity to go to China at least once. Someday we will go back to China for a heritage tour and we will all go. It is going to be hard to be away from them for so long and I know there are going to be things I am going to want to share with them, but we will take lots of pictures and Skype with them regularly.  Okay come on consulate appointments!

Scottie's 8th Birthday

Yesterday was Scottie's 8th birthday. We had an action packed day filled with a small birthday celebration at school, that Dayna and I were able to participate in and then we went to Scottie's favorite restaurant, the dragon inn. When we made it back home we had cake and presents. It was a good day, although somewhat taxing on Scottie as she was asked a lot of questions about China at her celebration at school. Talk about China more often than not makes her uncomfortable. She is getting much better dealing with her emotions and thoughts of China.  

It was fitting that we recived our Article 5 yesterday.  Icing on the cake.  

Waiting for our Article 5

We are now on the last step of the pre-immigration process which means we are waiting on our Article 5. These generally take about 2 weeks so we are hoping ours will be picked up next week some time. Once we have Article 5 China will issue our TA (travel approval). With Scottie, TA took only 7 days so maybe we will be that lucky this time. We are still hoping to travel with the January 3rd group but we wouldn't mind getting our travel approval as soon as possible so that we can buy plain tickets. Our China visas arrived back to us yesterday. We had to send Scottie's China passport in with her US passport so that the Chinese Embassy could cancel her China passport and put the visa into her US passport. We moved Zane down stairs this weekend so that we can get started on Townsend's room, formerly Zane's room. Now Zane and Quade both live down stairs with the boy cave. The boy cave now has a fresh coat of paint and hopefully a more functional layout. By Thanksgiving weekend we hope to be painting Townsend's room. So other than Townsend's room not being ready yet, we are ready to go.

LOA

We are very excited to announce that our Letter of Acceptance (LOA) came today, day 35. What does this mean you might ask. This means that China has given their approval for Townsend to be our son. We now need to finish the US immigration side and then China will give us travel approval (TA).  We are hoping to travel in December or January if everything goes smoothly from here.

Update

We received updated pictures this week and new measurements. He is a little guy, but I'm sure there is a growth spirt in his future. He is wearing about a 4T and just turned 6 yrs old. We are still waiting on our LOA from China and then we can finish the US side of things before we can go get him. Our agency is hoping we can travel before the new year but we will see. Townsend is going to school this year at a neighborhood school and knows he is going to be adopted. I am not sure if they have given him our letter yet or not. Sometimes they wait so that the child doesn't have o wait to long but since he knows tht he is being adopted maybe they did. 

Hopefully this will be our new son

It has been a long run with many turns that we did not expect but we are hoping that this will be our new son. XiuXiu was not our daughter after all but we like to think that maybe we were the cog that helped her return to her bio-family. We were then matched with another boy with albinism but in reality he already had a family for his foster grandparents want to keep him and he wants to be with them. I guess we have been helping clean up the shared list. So now we are matched with a six year old boy,for now we will call Townsend.  I think he is really our son, we will have to wait and see but I think he is. He is beautiful and seems to be full of life. We submitted our letter of intent on August 19th and received PA on August 27th. Now we just wait for LOA.