We're going to China!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Our Travel Approval (TA) has arrived, we can official travel to China to bring home our son!!!

We waited four LONG weeks to be able to say that... it was an excruciating wait (which explains my long blogging hiatus). Prior to the TA draught, families were consistently receiving their TAs within two weeks after A5, and several were arriving even faster than that. We NEVER thought we'd wait four weeks for ours... We first got word on Wednesday that our agency had gotten notified that a package of TAs were on there way, and they expected that ours was included in that. Thursday, we got the email that it had ARRIVED!!

They gave us two possible travel dates... one leaving the week of Thanksgiving, and one leaving the week after. The next step after TA is scheduling a Consulate Appt (CA), which is where you complete the US Visa process. The timing of this appt drives the whole timing of the adoption trip. The consulate requires agencies provide 5 possible dates that work for the family and (for children over 2) they only have two days a week appts are available... so our agency needed to be sure that both travel dates would work for our family . Given the draught of TAs that has been plaguing all agencies (not just ours), there's no reason to believe that we wouldn't be able to get a CA which would allow us to leave around Thanksgiving - but it won't be until next week when we know for 100% sure.

So... there's TONS to do, but we are in really good shape to be ready to go by Thanksgiving. I'm definitely more of a "do things at the last minute" type gal anyways. We've got all the important stuff - travel meds, gifts for the officials, clothes for our son, paperwork, my packing list from our last trip - we just need to get stuff actually INTO our bags. Given that I traveled with one bag last time, I feel like I've hit the jackpot having Adam with me and each of us having a huge rolling duffel.

I'd like to give a quick shout out to the fellow members of my travel group... it looks like there are at least 7 of us who will be together in the Henan province, and then we'll probably meet up with several more families in Guangzhou. This is going to be such a different experience than last time, when we were alone in Leah's province and had only one other family from our agency in GZ. I'm looking forward to sharing this adoption journey with all of you!

(I'm also going to miss having my sister and my mother with me... that was such a special trip, and I'm so thankful to have had you along last time. Love you both, and thank you so much for taking care of the munchkins this time around so Adam have this experience, too)