And here we go....

It's a little after 9PM. We're getting up early to catch a 5:50AM flight out of Springfield tomorrow morning on the first leg of what will be about 22-24 hours of traveling before we finally reach Beijing. But we're all excited about the trip and what it will mean for our family, so there's no telling how much sleep any of us will get. Just wanted to post this pic to show that we really are taking less this time around (REALLY!).

When you next hear from us, we'll be "reporting" from Beijing.

Time to get REALLY serious.....

It's taken a little bit longer than we would have liked to get this post up here, but.....we now have our travel approval, an appointment at the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, and an "outline" of an itinerary. And it all happened a little faster than we expected.

The details.....

On Friday, August 15, we received notice from our adoption agency that we had approval from the Chinese government to travel to China. We had been told that once we had approval, we would probably travel about 4-6 weeks later. But the agency requested a Consulate appointment on September 15, 16, or 17...and since that appointment is one of the LAST things on the itinerary, it meant we'd  need to leave with only about 2 weeks to get ready.

On Saturday, August 16, we sent (Express Mail) our passports to a courier service to get the visas we need to enter China. (We are supposed to get them back this coming week.)

Then, this past week we worked with our adoption agency, a local travel agent (for flights from Springfield to Beijing and back), and a travel agency in China (for all of the in-China arrangements....hotel rooms, touring, etc.) and the details of our latest Chinese adventure have become a little clearer.

If we get our visas back in time (and we have been assured we will ), we leave Springfield on September 2 and arrive in Beijing on September 3. We get to meet JinXin on September 7 or 8. And we return to Springfield on September 19. We'll get our more detailed itinerary this week.

To say we are excited would be an understatement. In 2 weeks, we will have another beautiful daughter. But first we have to think about packing.

Much Closer Now....

All of a sudden, our latest adoption journey has been put "on the front burner".

We had been waiting for a document to arrive from the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA), called a "Letter Seeking Confirmation". (This document essentially says that the CCAA has reviewed all the papers we sent and everything is good with them.) Our dossier had been "logged in" at the CCAA on 5/20/08 and most familes had been receving their "Letter Seeking Confirmation" somewhere between 2 and 3 months after their dossiers had been accepted. Well...on 7/24/08, our adoption agency received our LSC from the CCAA. It was sent "overnight" to us, we signed it (telling them that we really, really did want to adopt Jin Xin :) and "overnighted" it back.

Now, we wait to get travel approval (usually about 4 weeks) and then we can make official travel plans. So...mid-September is a definite possibility and suddenly we are once again contemplating our international travel "packing lists".

The Days Can't Go Fast Enough

We have no details about this picture. It was sent to us by a woman in China who has access to many of the kids. We are ready to go to China, NOW!!!!!

Simply AMAZING !!!

After only one week from the time our dossier was sent to China, we were notified today that our papers had been "logged in" at the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA). We had been told that it would probably take about 2 weeks, so to say we were pleasantly surprised is an understatement. Our goal had been to reach this point before my birthday (June 12) and so that has been accomplished, too.

Now, just give us permission to go to China and get JinXin!!! (Still on course for September or October.)

Now the REAL Waiting Begins

Yesterday (May 14), we were notified by our agency that our dossier was on it's way (via overnight mail) to the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA). Supposedly, it is currently taking about 2 weeks to get the papers "logged in" once they get to China. So, that is our next milestone to reach. (Our goal was to have this done before June 12, which means we're still "on schedule".)

Then, once we're notified that we've been logged in, we have another wait of 2-3 months to get official approval to adopt. And THEN, we wait another month or so to get permission to travel. That sounds like a long time, but the months between January (when we began this process in earnest) and now have gone very quickly, so hopefully the next 4-5 months will, also.

While We're Waiting

While we're waiting for our papers to get finally sent to China...here are a few pics of Tianjin(found online), where we hope to be visiting SOON.



(This video was created in just a few minutes by using the amazing website "Animoto". For more information, click here.)

Several Steps Closer

It's been a good week in our journey to get JinXin. On Monday, we traveled to Kansas City to visit the regional office of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS). There, we turned in our paperwork (known as an I-600A)and a copy of our completed home study (just finished last week) and had our fingerprints taken. If everything is OK (and it should be), in a few weeks we should receive a form called an I-171H, which is the official approval of the U.S. government for us to adopt a child from a foreign country.

Then, on Wednesday, we sent all of our papers off to the Chinese Consulates to be "authenticated". Steve's Ohio birth certificate had to be sent to the consulate in New York, and all the rest of our documents (generated in Missouri) had to be sent to Chicago. We hope to have all of them back in a couple of weeks, also, with the official seal of the Chinese government attached.

Once we get everything back, we'll send it off to our agency and they'll put it all together in the right way and send it off to China. So, for now we are in another holding pattern, but we feel MUCH closer to our goal than we did a few weeks ago. Yep, it's been a good week.

One Step Closer

Two days ago we received an EMail from our agency notifying us that the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) had given us "pre-approval" to adopt JinXin. This means they have found all of our initial paperwork to be satisfactory, and as long as there are no major problems with the rest of our information, they will allow us to adopt her.

We are very close to having all the necessary papers completed. Once we have our home study done (hopefully in the next week or so), we'll be able to go to the USCIS office in Kansas City to get our federal fingerprints taken, so we can get our country's permission to adopt a foreign citizen.

We'll post again when one of these new "milestones" is reached.

Chapter Three Begins

Our lives have been truly blessed by our two previous adoptions from China. And yet, as time has gone on and our daughters have grown a bit older, both of us have felt that perhaps we still have a little more we want to give. There were all of the usual concerns that had to be addressed...could we afford the adoption?... could we work out the "logistics" of having 3 kids in the house instead of the 2 that everyone was accustomed to?...and could we get the paperwork done and sent to China before June 2008 (when one of us turns 55 and too old to adopt, as far as China is concerned)? As the new year started, we both decided that another adoption trip to China was indeed something that our family could handle (and was, in fact, something all 4 of us were excited about doing), and so we began the whole process once again.

Cathy had found the little girl we hoped to adopt on the waiting child list of an agency called "World Association for Children and Parents" (WACAP) in Seattle, Washington. We were sent a few pictures and a description of her special-needs (her age and some congenital colo-rectal problems that had been repaired with surgery in China), and after some discussions with a local pediatric surgeon, we decided that we could easily handle her medical conditions. So, as quickly as we could, we got together the initial paperwork and in late January, the agency sent it all to China seeking "pre-approval" for us to adopt her.

Because we are working against a time limit of sorts, at the same time we were getting the "pre-approval" paperwork ready, we also started on our home study and getting our dossier together. If everything goes as we hope it will, our homestudy will be done before the end of February. Then, we will be able to take it to Kansas City to get our fingerprints and the necessary Federal papers we need. Hopefully, this will allow us to get our final papers sent to China sometime in April. We don't realistically expect that we will get to travel before Fall (the Beijing Olympics in August will make trips more difficult AND expensive this summer). As we reach the various "milestones" on our journey, we'll be posting the details here, so you can follow our progress.

And here is the goal of all our work.


Her name is Jin Xin. She is 5 years old, and she is currently living at a social welfare institute in Tianjin, a city about an hour southeast of Beijing. We'll post more pictures and more details of the whole process as important things happen. Stay tuned :)