Category: Adoption

I’m lying here next to my new sleeping daughter. Today was amazing. She is amazing. This morning we met our rep, Michael, to go to the bank to exchange some money, get all of our paperwork together, and prepare for meeting Aili. After that we had about an hour and a half in our room…

Today, after a two hour train ride, we arrived in Guangzhou. Aili’s orphanage is in Gaozhou, which is about a four hour car ride from here. This is Guangdong province. The civil affairs office for Guangdong is here in Guangzhou, so all adoptions from orphanages in Guangdong happen here. When we arrived at the train…

We had a full day in Hong Kong today. All of us were wide eyed and awake at 6am. After hanging out in the room for awhile and Sam hitting the hotel gym, we got out and found a Starbucks. Then we spent some time exploring the city. HK is a very busy city, and…

Well, both flights went just about as well as they possibly could’ve. I got hypnotized a few weeks ago for my fear of flying. I believed it worked! Plus, the flights were so smooth! My kind of flying! We arrived in Hong Kong at about 11:30am local time. That is 10:30pm Atlanta time. We got…

We are on the plane, and have been in flight for a little over 10 hours. Now most of you know that I am not a relaxed flyer. Thank God this flight has been nice and smooth so far. Hold on, I’ve gotta look for some wood. Hopefully a hard back book will do 🙂…

It’s about 12:30pm. We fly out a little after midnight tonight. I can’t believe the day has finally come. It won’t be long now and Aili will be with us. This journey has been sooooo long and we are sooooo ready! I will post as much as I can while we’re there. Stay tuned 🙂

We did decide to take Raleigh with us. We only reconsidered that decision for about a day. But we know in our hearts she should be with us. She needs to see where her sister is from. She needs to understand the situation as clearly as possible. That couldn’t happen if she stayed here. She’s…

So much has happened! We did get the TA call last Friday. Five minutes before 3pm! Boy had I given up hope. But we still had to request CA, so we still didn’t know when we could get on the plane. Last weekend was hard. I wanted so badly to book flights and rooms and…

We have been told that the wait for TA (Travel Approval)  is 1-2 weeks. Last month I saw some people get TAs in 7 days. Last week, Wednesday, our agency told us we showed in the system as TA. This was great news! But we can’t request a CA appointment (Consulate Appointment – the last…

Of course the Article 5 drop off didn’t go smoothly. This is adoption; very few things do. We happened to be the guinea pigs with our agency for the DS 260. So instead of us being dropped off on 10/8, it actually happened on 10/17. Now those of you not in the adoption process or…