Introducing Xiu Fu Hao
Soon to be
Rachel Victoria CN Hanna
Born 9.21.05
Xiushan SWI, Chongqing

The Call" , Yes, The Stork Finally Landed !!!

At approximately 12:20 today we received the call and I knew it was coming because I had just checked our AHH June DTC yahoo group a few minutes before and there was a referral posted from someone receiving referrals with us. By the time I actually received "The Call" I had already had a good cry, the shakes, heart palpitations and you know, all those referral day jitters. I actually worried that our coordinator would think I was insensitive since I had run out of emotions by the time he finally called ! It was nice to be halfway calm and collected during the call though so I could think to ask alot of questions. I had a very nice well organized referral question list in front of me with blanks under each question and ended up writing everything down on post-its and hardly looked at the list, go figure lol .... I actually videotaped the moment I realized we were about to receive the call and knew where Rachel was from and the actual call, but I will have to do some serious editing before I can share any of those moments ;-) The most amazing fact that we learned from the referral call is that our 2nd daughters orphanage is probably not more than 50 miles south of our first daughters and they are both in the Chongqing Municipality ! God has been so good to us, much better than we deserve. When we were in Chongqing in 2004 adopting Audrey I traveled to Qianjiang which is where Audrey's orphanage is so I have been very close to where our Rachel is now and it's a comfort to know what it is like so close to her. It's such beautiful country there with very large mountains, huge Gorges, and rivers that seem to go on forever. Every since we adopted our Audrey, I have yearned to return to Chongqing and especially to where Audrey is from (210 miles east of Chongqing city in rural china). It may be impossible but myself and one of my travelmates are going to try to coerce our agency into letting us visit the orphanage. This may not happen though because Rachels orphanage is probably 10-12 hours from Chongqing City where we will be staying. I will post more on this subject as we find out if we will be able to go. Lastly, and definitely least, I just want to say that Rachel's referral day will unfortunately be remembered as "the day after the air conditioning died". Actually the airconditioning died yesterday but the repairman showed up approximately 30 minutes after I received " The Call". It was pretty humorous though because here I am trying to make calls and getting calls about our referral, I'm sweating like crazy, trying to communicate with our very sweet repairman who sports a rather heavy hispanic accent and learning about the ins and outs of our heating and air system. Anyway, it turns out that we need a whole new unit which will be 2500.00 thank you very much ! Yikes. The fact that all this occurred on referral day definitely took a little of the sting out of it though.

We should receive Rachel's referral package via Fed-ex sometime tomorrow morning so I'll be sharing more then.