Candied Jalapenos

Almost forget. We have Candied Jalapenos again so if you are interested in getting a jar, phone, email, or just come by. We made them in larger jars this time so they are $10. We will also be doing a fund raiser at the Goldtown Nickelodeon on April 28th. If you didn't know Fred was in a movie. The fund raiser will be the showing of the movie "Little Red Book"as well as including a silent auction. Candied Jalapenos will also be available. So anyway this is the "Little Red Fund Raiser" I will post more info as things become finalized. Hope to see many of you there.

They are wonderful!

Quick Update

Okay time for a quick update. We are waiting on our Article 5 which should be picked up from the US consulate in Guangzhou sometime next week. This is the last step before China will issue our travel approval. We also received our Chinese visas today, so we are ready to go on that end.

 We received an update on Na Hui last week. She has been receiving our letters and is happy about being adopted. We will get one more update on her before we travel. We are still hoping to be in the June 8th group, meaning we will be leaving Juneau on May 31st. We are planning on stopping in Portland on our way to Beijing. Believe it or not it is on the way. We are also hoping to fly back in to Portland so if you are in that area and want to meet Na Hui, we will allow enough time to come out of the secure area for folks to meet her before we continue on home.
The boys are starting to get excited about having a sister. They have been doing a little shopping.

Never fear, we didn't buy them, but it sure was fun playing with them in the store. Okay I will report more when we get our Article 5.

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.

How do you know?

So other than filling out the visa forms, I am finished with the paper work for this part of the journey. What does that mean you might ask? Well that means that the I-800A, Supplement 3 paper work has been completed. This includes the updated home study that indicates that Fred has changed jobs and we are notifying the USCIS to let them know. Then there was the I-800 which is also to the USCIS that tells the US gov’t that this is the girl that is going to become our daughter. But this is the question that people ask, “How did you know it was to be this girl?”

Before we were matched, I wondered the same thing. I asked folks how they knew and I always got the same response, “You just do”.  I have heard people say that there are 2 major turning points in the adoption process, when you get the match and when you get your child. These are the moments when you can first put a face to the love you have already started to develop for this child that will become part of your family (being matched) and then on what is called “Gotcha Day”, when you meet your child for the first time. The real thing, what they sound like and feel like and what they think, likes, dislikes, who they are. Well we are not there yet, so I can’t talk about that step YET, but when we get there I will, but I can talk about this mysterious “You just know” concept. If you don’t know, before we were matched we decided that it was getting very difficult to continue talking about this girl we were adopting without giving her a name. We didn’t feel that we could really name here before we at least knew something about her, but we needed to call her something because it was awkward calling her “the girl” or “the daughter” or “the sister”. So Quade decided that we should call her Scottie. He wanted Bob at first, but that name has already been taken by a little boy we know. Anyway everyone agreed and we started calling this faceless child we already loved Scottie. So anyway, for me at least, the longer we were in process and closer to getting our dossier finished, the more desperate I became to put a face with our daughter. I looked at every listing of children I could find, even if it was with a different agency. I joined advocacy  forums, anything and everything I could find because I knew our daughter, our Scottie, was out there and I needed to find her and strangely enough I knew in my heart when I did find her I would know. So I looked and I looked and I asked for files and every time it just wasn’t her. All those other girls were someone else’s daughter and I hoped they would find them soon. I was always checking my email just in case there was a message letting me know that someone (our agency) thought they had found her. Until December 2^nd in the middle of math class, all the big events happen in the middle of math class, but that is another story. I got an email from our agency, there were also several from Fred asking why I was not answering my phone or his texts and why I was not paying attention because we had a potential match. Moments after reading that we had an email, Fred walked in, because he could not wait any longer for me to pay attention. We stood at my computer, opened the email, and yes, just like everyone had said, we just knew. I have to admit Fred had already looked and he already knew. It did not take me but a moment to catch up, that was our daughter in those pictures and she was found. Those are the moments of faith, that no matter what the special needs, she was the one. So to wrap this up, knowing when your match is right is just like the Thermos, it keeps the hot stuff hot and the cold stuff cold. “How do it know? It just does.”

When you get an LOA for your birthday

Just a sample of how much paper work we (Danya) have generated.

Dayna's Birthday present an LOA

I have started several posts, as of late, but have not finished any of them. 

I had the post about how I have learned about trust and faith and having to wait and wait and wait.  i know the people taking care of Na Hui have been doing so for the last 6 years and I am sure they have been doing a fine job.  But now we are waiting for travel and it just starts to seem like they may not be doing as good of a job now.  I now it sounds goofy, but you really do start to think some strange things when you wait.  I need to read "Oh the places you'll go" again.

There was the post about bureaucracy being bureaucracy, no matter what country or what language is being spoken.  This would have to do with our experience's with the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco.  Most of them good and several just made us scratch our heads.   (Don't even get us started on passports for Canada.)

The post about the hormonal changes that take place in adoption, it may be even worse than the changes that take place with the biological mother.  I wont give Dayna too much grief over this and she is getting better here in the 4th Trimester.  Heck I have even been nesting.  We were at Fred Meyers and I saw the cutest little dress with the most precious pattern and the bodice was just darling.  I had to to have it, not for myself, for Na Hui.    

So I should get to this posts actual point.  On Monday the 20th when we were at Walmart looking for a carry-on for me to take to China we revived the call we have been waiting for.  We received our LOA from China.  ( Note LOA is our approval from China to adopt)  The average from the pool of people we sampled for LOA's was 66 days.  We made it in 62 days. 

So here we are on Wednesday night with our Fed-X package from Holt with the actual LOA from China and a pile of papers to be filled out, signed, notarized, copied and mailed back to Holt. 

We  had to do an updated home study after I quit my job and we are waiting for it to come back.  We should have it by the first of next week.  When we receive this we will send it off to the USCIS (United states citizen's and immigration service) with our I-800.  This is the official document allowing Na Hui to become a US citizen.  

In the mean time we are getting our Visa Applications in order.  Aunt Mary is coming with us to China and she is getting her hands soiled by the reams of paper work now as well. 

So. keep checking back each week my friends your sure to get a smile from seven stranded castaways here on Gilligan's Isle.