Today we got a call from our adoption agency. Dana told me our Letter of Approval (LOA) came. We have to sign it and return it ASAP. She said travel will be in about four months! That puts us into April - Doug's busiest time of year with taxes. She said we do have some say in the exact date, so we could wait until after April 16 to travel. I was excited to know we could travel a month sooner than we had originally been told, but then I looked at the kids' school calendar and saw that PSSA testing, along with other cyber school testing, will be taking place those two weeks in April! If we push it back until they're done with all of that, we would miss Kendall's grad school graduation. So now I'm wondering how we'll do it. We don't want to make Winn wait for us any longer than he has to. We can't forget our Chinese exchange student who will still be here until the end of May! We will have to find somewhere for him to stay while we're gone for 15 days!
When you start the process of an adoption from China, you're told travel will be anywhere from 10-14 days. It was 14 days for Tessa, but it was 15 days for Jerremy. We never questioned why, that's just the way it was. Well this time we thought we'd only have to be gone 10-12 days because Winn's province is in Guangzhou where all adoptive families have to end up, regardless of what province their child is from. For whatever reason, our agency requires us to fly into Beijing first for a few days to get acclimated to the time difference -- travel around and see all the sights there, like the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, acrobat show, etc. Then you fly to your child's province and spend 5 business days, then fly on to Guangzhou for a week to finalize everything. We thought that since we will be in Guangzhou the whole time, we wouldn't have to be there as long. The travel coordinator for our agency told me that we actually will be in China longer because Winn's province requires us to stay 7 business days instead of 5, but I still don't understand why we have to be gone 15 days. GRRRRR! I need to relax and let God take care of the details. Then my life would be a whole lot less stressful. I wonder at what age I'll learn to do that.
Here are the pictures from Winn's 9th birthday party.
