Have TA now, waiting on Consulate Appointment !

Our agency received our TA yesterday and requested our consulate appointment. Now we just wait and it can take up to 5 business days for the consulate to give us a date. Can you say excruciating wait ;-) Our first choice was 6/23 which could put us leaving for China 6/11, yikes ! Our 2nd choice was the week of 6/30 which is fine too, but of course we just want to bring our little guy home asap. I can't believe we are so close to being a family of 5. I'm posting some pics from the last week of the girls, these will be some of the last we will have with only them ;-)

Audrey's first graduation

Audrey isn't even 5 yet and she's had her first graduation from Preschool ! I kept making fun of the fact that her preschool was having a graduation ceremony but in the end I loved it ;-) The staff there did an amazing job and I was almost in tears by the end. Here are a few pics from the Ceremony. By the way, I wish I had video, but I was a bad mama and forgot the camcorder !

Updated Spring 2008 slideshow

I deleted the last slideshow because I updated it with new pics from April and May. So about half the pictures you may have already seen, but there are quite a few new ones and I really liked this Martina Mcbride song ;-)

Waiting for TA and Travel Plans

I'm here to tell ya, this is going to be one interesting trip ! I'm already going nuts trying to decide everything about our trip and our TA hasn't even arrived yet ;-) We should receive our TA in a couple of weeks if they arrive in the usual amount of time. Since the Olympics are right around the corner and we've already been to Beijing twice, we are opting to fly into Shanghai this time. Shanghai is also alot closer to Hangzhou where we will be adopting Paul Lei. Since our adoption agency's travel agency (BOIT) doesn't have a representative in Shanghai, we had to hire a guide. As luck would have it, we have been blessed to find a private guide who knows our son's orphanage director. We found this person through another family who has adopted from our son's orphanage in 2005. Long story short, we are hiring this Chinese guide to come to Shanghai and take us siteseeing, then he will ride with us by bus to Taizhou (4 hour trip to our sons hometown and orphanage). We will be able to site see in Taizhou and visit our son at the orphanage. Then, the orphanage director has suggested that we ride by bus with her and our new son up to Hangzhou (4hour drive) to carry out the adoption at the civil affairs bureau. Never did I imagine we would get to meet our son at his orphanage and ride to the main city with him and the director. We are really excited that we are going to have such a personal experience spending time with Paul and his caregivers.

We have LSC/LOA for Paul Lei !!!!!!!!!

We have our final confirmation that Lei is ours ! This is our "letter seeking confirmation" from CCAA. We should receive our TA in about 3-4 weeks and hopefully travel mid to late June. We are excited beyond belief and running around crazy trying to prepare. We didn't receive the call until 8:40 pm Friday night so we were really shocked. We just can't wait to meet our new son !