TA!!! Travel Approval!!!!! Yeah!!! We are headed for China!!!

I can't believe it, but we finally got our TA. This is our Travel Appointment or Travel invitation. Our dates are: Arriving in Beijing on March 19th and arriving home on April 1st! We are supposed to hear more from our travel agency by 5pm today with more travel information about our flights. I can't hardly wait.
I hope to post our whole itinerary once we have it. That way you can see what we are doing every day.
Thanks to everyone for all the prayers!
More to come later...

Wooohooo! I-800 approval!

Just found out today that our I-800 was approved. This is what we were waiting for this week! We are so excited. I forwarded the approval to our agency and caseworker and now we just wait to hear our travel dates. We hope to hear something tomorrow or Monday. We are hoping that maybe we could travel 2/27/09 because that is when the next group from Bethany is going, but if not, it will be sometime in March. If it is 2/27/09, we will go into CRAZY mode for sure!!!!! But, we already have some things packed already. Her room is ready, toiletries for her and medicines packed, we just need our clothes and her clothes packed.
Well, let you know when we get our travel dates. Stay tuned.......

Disappointing...

Well, today my emotions went from about top of the world to down in the dumps in less than an hour! I got a call today from our Immigration officer in Missouri, saying that she received our I-800 paperwork today. However, there were 2 missing signed forms from our adoption agency. This whole processing of I-800 is also new to our agency since the government just implemented it in the last few months. But, the Immigration officer said she would call our agency and would see if she could fax to her today. I got off the phone and jumped for joy that it might get approved today. About an hour later, I got an e-mail from our Adoption Agency caseworker saying that they got the forms done and will overnight it today to Immigration. However, the Immigration officer told them that she found out it would have to be the original and it could not be faxed today. Also, she said that even though it would be overnighted, it would not get processed through the initial posting place and get to her for a couple days. Ugggh! I was am frustrated with our government right now. But, I have to keep it in perspective that God has the plan all worked out for us and Hannah! His timing is always perfect! The paperwork is just so tremendous and often I feel that we have repeated forms and paperwork that is already there! Hopefully, more news in a few days........

Wesley turned 4!

We wanted to show some pics of Wesley with his race car cake. His birthday was Friday, the 6th and I can't believe he is 4 now! He helped me decorate his cake and loves race cars or any other thing with wheels!

Her room is ready!

We got Hannah's room ready today and it feels so good to get that done. Wesley was so excited that her bed is in his room! For now, they are going to share a bedroom so Hannah won't feel so alone. She is most likely used to sleeping near people in Foster Care and we want to continue that awhile until she adjusts. Also, we need to finish Wesley's room before we move him into there in a couple months. So, for now they will share a room.
We are praying for good news this week. Praying for the I-800 approval and also for possible Travel dates. Thanks for all the support and prayers you all have given to us. It really helps!
More info later...

More Paperwork sent off!

We sent in our I-800 immigration papers on Saturday. It was a big packet of stuff and we felt like we were repeating from paperwork before. We had to put our homestudy, LOA, I-800A approval, and referral information in the packet, along with the 10 page form for the I-800 and the I-864W. It was think for sure! But, it feels good to have that sent off now. We have been hearing that some people have been getting approval in 3-12 days for this. Once we get that we will hear about our travel dates. We are so excited!!!! We went shopping this weekend to get Hannah's bedroom blankets and found some really cute things at Babies R Us. I could go nuts in that store! We also got lots of our toiletries needed for our trip. More info later....

Update

Well, December 15, 2008 was a big step in the right direction. We received LOA(Letter of Acceptance) from China. What this means is we have been officially approved by China to adopt our daughter. We signed the acceptance letter and overnighted it to the Grand Rapids office.
On 1/23/09, we finally received our I-800A approval through the Immigration Services. Wow! What a relief it is to have that approved. This took 59 days and we were excited about that because recently they were taking over 90 days to complete a couple months ago.
Now we just have to send in our I-800 to Immigration Services to show that we have accepted a child that is an orphan and we will complete the adoption in China, not the United States.
The frustrating thing is, this is a fairly new form for everyone and our adoption agency is learning with it, too. They contacted me today and said that are checking with the Grand Rapids office to make sure they have all the correct forms to attach to the I-800 when we send it in. We have it complete and ready to send in as soon as we get the needed information from them.
We also heard that it takes about 5-12 days to get approval on this form once its sent in! Yeah! At least this doesn't take very long. As soon as we get this, we should get our travel dates. We are still hoping to travel in about a month.