the details

Here are the details of what happened last week and what we know about the next steps:

Thursday, February 26th, was the 100th day we had been waiting on our LOC. I had spent the morning staring at my new blog design and trying to think of it as a special gift to enjoy on a day that I really just wanted to cry. The girls had homeschool club that afternoon and dance in the evening. I had things to keep me busy which was good. After dinner, I took the girls to dance and Andy took Nathan out for some boy time (which I recall involved cookies at Paradise Bakery!). I had intended on dropping off the girls at dance but got to talking to a few friends instead. They were asking about Caleb and I was literally talking about him when my cell phone rang. I will add that for the last month whenever the phone rang, my heart would race and I would think, "maybe it's THE call...". It never was. It was generally Andy calling and I would try and hide my disappointment so as not to make him think that I didn't want to talk to him! This night it was 7:00 and I figured it was Andy calling. This is what I saw...

Eeeeekkk! It was a long distance number! Our adoption agency is in Oregon so I thought, "MAYBE?!!!" And as soon as I heard, "this is so and so from All God's Children", my mind turned to mush. I do recall the lady telling me a lot of things about a lot of new paperwork steps that needed to be done asap and all I could think was, "Please just save this all for later and tell Andy b/c I have no idea what you're talking about and I know I won't remember a thing you tell me." The only other thing that I really cared to know at that moment was if there was another certain family that had gotten their LOC too. You see, I have been emailing another All God's Children adopting mom for several months. We ended up both sending our dossiers to China about the same time. We have spent months emailing back and forth about our frustrations with waiting on our approval from CIS and wondering when our Log In Date with China would be and how hard it was to spend Christmas without our sons home and how we were both becoming emotionally drained waiting on our LOCs. This family had been waiting three more weeks than we had and I really was hoping that they had gotten their LOC too. And, YES!, they had. I was so excited for us and for them. And, believe me, if you know anything about this whole process you know that it is not coincidence that we both received our LOCs on the same day. It was a small detail that made things clear to me that God IS in control of every date and approval in this process. And as hard as it is for me to understand why He hasn't allowed us to get to China quicker, I do know that He loves Caleb more than we do and has his best interest in His heart too.

This was the original call that our agency made to our home...

Of course, no one was home to answer it. Thank goodness for cell phones!

And now we are waiting AGAIN on another approval on yet another gov't form. Crazy as it sounds to us, even though we have two official approvals from China (PA and LOC) and one approval from the US and clearances from state and federal fingerprinting, we have to send all of our "official letters of approval" to our gov't again so that we can be approved for the final time...sort of...to go to China. Our papers arrived in Chicago Thursday and we are expecting to get approval within 10 days to 2 weeks. With our track record, it will likely be 2+weeks. Not to be a pessimist, but I'm just saying... And then, this is where I'm a bit unsure, I think that we send all of newest approvals back to China and wait on our Travel Approval from China. That is when we're really, really, REALLY close, folks! We should be there within 2-3 weeks after we get our Travel Approval.

So, as you can see, we have a lot of things to wait on still. But we are closer than ever and every day brings us closer to Caleb. And at least we know what season we'll be in China. The HOT season. At this point, I don't care if it IS 300 degrees. I'm just ready to get there! And it is seeming a bit more real. Our agency is arranging for a conference call sometime in the next week or so with us and the other families that are close to traveling to China to discuss all the details of traveling. FINALLY! Travel talk!!