Updated Pictures!!!

We've been watching our e-mail accounts now... day and night... for weeks... waiting for any new pictures of our daughter. 
 
Yesterday, our wait came to an end with an e-mail from Red Thread (the company that put together our care package) that included pictures from the camera we had included for the orphanage workers to use when Mia (Jin Guo) had her little party with her cake. Oh my gosh!! We've been waiting for this!!

AND!!! And... the best part of all this... was seeing more detailed photos of her arm and seeing that her amputation occured BELOW the elbow!! Praise God!! That opens up so many more options with regards to prosthetics in the future.

Anyways, here's our daughter's party photos. We wish there were a thousand photos, but we'll settle for 4 of our little one.
 

 

 

 

Approvals and such...

I guess this blog entry is not as dramatic as others, but I should get used to writing more updates even if we don't have completely earth-shattering news to share.

Now, with that said... we have been seeing steady progress in our quest for approvals and such. We have received our first US approval (I-800a) back earlier this week, which triggers more paperwork. We were able to get the official RA signed this week and mailed back to the offices at AWAA. Our family coordinator has informed us that the document was mailed off to China on Friday (Aug. 17). Also this week, we were able to get our next US form filed (the I-800), which essentially requests the US to grant us approval to bring Jin Guo (Mia) home and to make her a US citizen. From what we've read and heard from others, getting the I-800 filed is the primary event that determines when to expect to travel over to China... which is approx. 10-14 weeks from now. We're hopeful to travel over to China by October or November this year... which seems far off, but in reality, is literally around the corner with school officially starting on Monday for the kiddos.

Anyways, here's a couple of photos from the last week or so:

Adam signing "YES" on the RA stating that we want to adopt Jin Guo as our daughter

 Ginny signing the RA - she wanted in on some of the action :)

This is a photo of the photo album we had put together for Jin Guo

Here is another photo of part of the care package we had sent to her.

  Ryan and Ashlyn can't wait to get their Chinese sister over here.

Boy, things are moving fast!!

August 3, 2012

You know that point in your dreams where you know you're going to wake up? I have to admit... I kinda feel like that is going to happen with us and we'll be right back to where we've been for so long... waiting. But, we have a name and pictures now to put with our waiting, and it has suddenly made it so much harder. I've heard so many adoptive parents say that this phase of the adoption is the hardest since we now know who our little girl is. This week has been phenomenal in that we've not only received updated pictures of Mia Jin Guo (see above), but we've also received the official Chinese approval letter for her adoption!!!!!!! So within the span of 24 days, we've gone from seeing our little girl for the first time in photos, to submitting our official acceptance (EA), to China sending us our pre-approval (PA) and also issuing their official approval (RA). Like I said... it's been almost like a dream. 

Since we are now official in the eyes of the Chinese officials, we are now permitted to send Jin Guo a care package - so if you know my wife Ginny - is JUST up her alley. :) We are sending her a bunch of new clothes, a birthday cake with her birthday coming up this weekend, a red China doll, an Ultraman action figure, a translated letter from us as well as a photo album of all of us and our home. The package should also include a disposable camera for the orphanage workers to take pictures when she receives the package and the cake.

At this point, we are now waiting on the US government to issue the 1st of their approvals (I-800a) - which our family coordinator at America World is hopeful will be within the next week since we've already had an approved I-800a prior to now - coupled with now having received our China approval. Once we get that back, we will then file an I-800 form. Apparently, the little "a" after the form ID makes all the difference. The I-800a is a blanket approval for us to adopt someone from China - the I-800 is the US approval for us to specifically adopt Jin Guo.  

In the meantime, we will do what we can (apply for a passport for Ashlyn, sign and return the RA, and shell out a few $$'s) and continue to wait. We are being told to expect to travel sometime hopefully in October or November - which now seems to be an eternity away.

PA Arrived!!!

July 20, 2012

Let me start off by saying that PA doesn't stand for Papa (my Dad's nickname with the kids). LOL :)

The PA stands for Pre-Approval, which is the first official notice from the China Centre of Adoption Affairs offices that they've received our EA (electronic application) for our daughter and have approved us to go to the next stages. This is a fairly standard approval that comes in typically 2-3 weeks after a family submits their EA... ours came in 9 days!! Woohoo!! Praise God!!

The next two stages of approvals that we are awaiting are:

• Referral Acceptance (RA) - this is China's official approval for us to adopt our daughter. This is the big approval that has been building for us for years!! Back during the spring and summer of 2008, Ginny and I spent countless hours chasing down all sorts of documents - getting official copies of documents - getting those copies notarized - getting those notarized copies certified from the Sec. of State from Texas - and then finally getting those certified copies officially authenticated by the nice folks down at the Chinese consulate in downtown Houston.
• Travel Approvals (TA) - this is the final set of approvals that we will need before traveling to China. This is when we find out our travel itinerary and our official travel dates.

Generally, the RA comes about 3-8 weeks after a family submits their EA, so we are anxiously waiting for ours to come in hopefully the next week or two!! But since we've officially cleared the first approval level, we felt that we could finally share a little bit about our Chinese daughter.

Her name is 金果 or Jin Guo (pronounced Jingwa), and she is almost 7 years old. Several of our Chinese friends and colleagues have told me that her name translates to mean "Golden Fruit" or meaning precious! She has been in the orphanage now for almost 2 years. She is from Guiyang City in the providence of Guizhou, which is in the southwestern part of China. Her official referral picture is shown here on the right. As you can tell - we fell in love right away :)

Our first entry - better late than never

July 16, 2012

This is our first post to a blog that we created several years ago when we first started our journey to bring our Chinese daughter home. I guess what's weird about this is that now we do have something to post about.

After we had Austin, which was a another journey itself, both Ginny and I came to the same conclusion: we wanted an older child that would fit in with our family. Since we had Ryan (10) and Ashlyn (7), we decided we wanted someone who would fit in between Ashlyn and Austin's ages. We had also decided before that we would consider an adoption through the waiting child program since the timeframe for bringing home a little girl via the traditional "healthy child" track was increasing every month. When we began this journey, the wait time from log in date to referral was about 34 months. Today, it's over 60 months and increasing each month. Using one of the online calculators for China adoptions based on log in date, we would have expected a referral sometime in the middle of 2019!!

So, back to our story... Back a week ago Friday (July 6), I received a phone call from our family coordinator at America World Adoption (our agency). She said that she had found a recent referral file that mostly matched our requests. I agreed to look over the file with Ginny and to try to find some doctor within the United States to review her medical information over the weekend. By the time Monday arrived, we were so anxious to lay claim to her file on the shared referral system. This meant that we had 72 hours to do all the doctor checks, make a decision, and file all the necessary electronic paperwork in order for us to accept the referral.

We're so happy to say that last week Wednesday (July 11), we did just that, and thus started the process of bringing our daughter Mia home.

The next step in this phase is to await China's approval of our acceptance of the referral (also called the PA or pre-approval). This comes approximately 2 weeks after we submit the EA (electronic acceptance). After that, we will receive the official approval (RA - referral approval), which then starts the process of obtaining the necessary approvals for travel over to China, which will likely be sometime in the late fall (October/November). Once we obtain our PA and RA, we will post some more information regarding Mia and her background.