Hong Kong and our flight over

Well we made it. One super long flight done.
Our long Chicago to Hong Kong flight was made much bearable due to the fact that the flight wasn't full. In fact Stefan was able to move to the empty seats in front of us and we each had three seats to sleep on. I got about 5 hours of sleep in one stretch and than 1 hour later. Stefan didn't get as much as I did. We both watched The Hunger Games and really liked it. Well not the part where so many people died. I also watched Mirror, Mirror. It wasn't as good as I thought it would be. Our food was decent. Our supper was a beef stew with mashed potatoes an green beans. We also had a shrimp salad (which I passed on to Stefan) . a roll and ice cream.
Our second meal was served a little before we landed. We had a cheese ziti dish (which neither of us liked), cantalope, honeydew, and pineapple, a roll, and a mango mousse cake
We ended up taking a bus from the airport that dropped us off at the door to our hotel. Our hotel is very nice and overlooks the harbor. We got to Skype with the kids this morning. That is going to make our time away from them much more tolerable.
We are going to meet a couple for breakfast. They are adopting a boy from Beijing. I met Jocelyn through my awesome DTC Spring Facebook group.
After breakfast we plan to go on the Ferry over to Victoria's Peak and then do some shopping.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (posted by Stefan)

It has been a good start to our journey to meet Bailee. We successfully navigated through minor a snag in our ticket reservations at Harrisburg Airport (the airline software wanted information about Bailee). We traveled by van to the airport, took a plane flight to Chicago, where we took a train to our Terminal so that we can catch our next flight... to Hong Kong.

Our flight to Hong Kong leaves at 4:25PM eastern time. We are excited to get to HK, but not for the long flight. We will be in the air for about 14 or 15 hours and will arrive early evening on Friday in HK (early morning in the US on Friday). We'll post our progress once we get our feet back on the ground.

Joy has had a couple of minor "incidents": the strap on one of her Crocs broke, and the strap on her watch also broke.

Hello to pumpkin pie and peachy pie, from your Mama.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Happy First Birthday Sweet Bailee-Boo

We are headed to China

I can't believe I can finally say that. We leave September 6 and fly into Hong Kong. We will head to Guangzhou on September 9. We will get to hold Bailee on September 10. We head back home on September 20.
Here are two new pics we got of Bailee.

New Pictures

A fellow Zhuhai mommy visited the SWI and got these great pics of Bailee.

Next Step Done

We received our 800 approval from immigration yesterday in the mail.   Our approval date was June 28.  We hope to be cabled by the end of the week which is the next step.   We are still on track to leave at the beginning of September.  It would be wonderful to have our Travel Approval in hand by Bailee's birthday on August 18.
We are coming sweet girl!!!!

LOA and What is Next

After 75 days of waiting (not patiently) we got our Letter of Acceptance from China.   We have been approved to be Bailee's parents.   We were blessed to have it come this quickly as many people lately have been waiting over 100 days.   Our wait for LOA with Taylor was 132 days so I guess it evens out.

It arrived at our agency on Wednesday and they overnighted it to us.   We watched for the FedEx man in order to get a picture.   He probably thinks we are very strange.

We signed the LOA and sent it back to our agency.  It arrived there this morning (Friday).

Many people have asked what is next.   Here are the next steps and the approximate dates we should reach them.

1.  Our I-800 immigration paperwork is being sent by our agency to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services  (USCIS) branch of Homeland Securtiy.  The Form I-800 is our Petition to Classify Convention Adoptee as an Immediate Relative. It's our approval from USCIS to adopt the child we were matched with specifically-Bailee.  It should arrive on Monday (6/18). 

Here is what happens next: 
Approximately one week after sending the USCIS Form I-800 and all supporting documents we will receive a Notice of Receipt from the lockbox in Texas. This letter will simply state that our application was received! It will list the date it arrived at the lockbox**** as well as our case number.
After that, our application will be forwarded to the National Benefits Center (NBC) where all I-800 applications are reviewed and approved!!    We should have our approval by July 9.

*****The lockbox is the location where USCIS reviews the Form I-800 application quickly to make sure there aren't any missing pages, unsigned sections of theapplication, etc.. They want to make sure everything is in order before they send the application to the National Benefits Center for approval.

2.  After approving our file, our officer will mail our approval to the National Visa Center by 2nd Day UPS Air. However, the approval isn't always mailed out the same day it's approved, so applications can take up seven days to arrive at NVC. Upon receiving our approval, the National Visa Center (NVC) will enter our information into their computer system.

Within 1-3 business days, the NVC will "cable" (basically emailing/sending electronically) our file to the US Embassy in Guangzhou, China. This is approval of our visa petition.



Upon doing this, the NVC will then mail us a letter stating that our petition has been forwarded to the Embassy.   We hope to be done with this step by July 16.


3.  Once our agency has the NVC letter, they will forward it to their in-China representative. 
The in-China rep will take the NVC letter to the US Embassy in Guangzhou along with our DS-230 application and Parental LOA. The US Embassy only allows representatives to drop off the paperwork on certain days.
The consulate needs to review Bailee's visa application (the DS-230), make sure it meets the qualifications for an immigrant visa, and then signs off that everything is in order for the adoption to be completed. This is called the Article 5 letter. We cannot obtain custody of Bailee until the Article 5 letter is issued!
The consulate takes a standard two weeks to complete this process. If our paperwork is dropped off on a Monday, it will be picked up from the consulate by our agency rep two Mondays later.
Once it's picked up from the consulate, it will be delivered directly to the CCAA for Travel Approval! We hope this step is done by August 6.

4.  Now we wait for China to grant us Travel Approval.   We hope this step can be completed by August 27 however we would love for it to be sooner.

Our prayer is that we can leave for China on either September 6 or 13.   We cannot leave any later than that and still travel in September as all of China celebrates a holiday starting September 30 and ending October 6.   Because we have to do two weeks of appointments in China and we could not do anything that holiday week, we couldn't leave on the 20.   After the holiday and during the whole month of October there is a trade fair in Guangzhou the city where we will be the whole time.   Because of the trade fair the prices for hotels and food almost doubles.   We could still travel then, but it would cost us so much more money.  

We are praying that God would allow us to get our precious baby girl in September.   We ache to hold her in our arms and love on her.

Here are Jordan and Taylor doing the LOA Happy Dance.