Claire's Readoption

Our cute little princess! 

 

 So Claire is legally ours, has been since we were in China, but we are all given the option to readopt our children in the US.  It will let her have an American birth certificate which will help whenever we have to enroll her for school and that type of thing.  And it was another opportunity to celebrate this little miracle of ours! 

We arrived very early for the ceremony and so the kids had fun playing games in a little room in the courthouse.

 Elizabeth and Ben (along with Laura) and my mom and dad joined us.  The kids got to get out of school early so it was a big party for them!

 Wasting time at the courthouse!

 Claire with Grandma and Grandpa B!

 Our little cutie pie!

 Most of the pictures had the judges desk with his name in it and the courthouse name so I didn't want to post any of that (I don't know why, I'm weird about privacy stuff like that :)  but we did get this picture of all of us swearing to love her and take care of her.

 Here the judge is asking the boys how they like having a sister and if they're going to take care of her. :)

 Afterward they had stuffed animals for all the kids to pick from, along with cookies and juice.  They were thrilled!

 Then we celebrated by going to steak and shake, a dinner of champions!  We love you Claire-Bear!!!

We leave TOMORROW!!!

I can hardly believe I am typing those words, it doesn't really seem real!  We have had a few little hiccups in the last week and a half before travel-I just went to the dr. today, Jackson went yesterday, and Ryan had a health emergency last week (having to do with his eye, nothing life threatening!). But thankfully we are all doing well and Ryan and I are getting ready to travel!  The illnesses have just interferred with cleaning my house so unfortunately my parents are going to be staying at a dirty house.  Luckily they'll love us anyway :).  SO many last minute things to do but I think we are pretty much ready now. 

Our general schedule:
Wed May 1- leave in the am.
Arrive in Tokyo, then fly to Hong Kong.  Arrive Thursday evening their time. 
We'll stay in Hong Kong until Sunday the 5, then take a train to Guangzhou. 
Monday May 6- meet Claire in the afternoon!!!!
Tuesday, May 7- we officially adopt Claire!!!! 
Tuesday May 14-leave Guangzhou to go to Hong Kong
Wednesday, May 15-leave HK and arrive home that same day (due to the time change)!  Too bad it can't really go that fast since we'll be traveling with a 20 month old :). 

Our flight from here to Tokyo is about 12 hours, I've never been on a plane that long in my life! I'm mostly worried about how Claire will do on the airplane so please say lots of prayers for us on May 15! :) 

I'm hoping to blog while we are in China so you can follow along on our trip!   Only 6 days until we can hold our daughter for the first time!! 

Showers for Claire!

We have been so blessed by the support from our family and friends throughout this adoption.  Everyone has been so excited for us, especially as it gets SO MUCH CLOSER!!! 

 

I was so lucky and very grateful to have a few showers thrown to welcome Claire!!

 

The first one was hosted by my mom and sister.  It was BEAUTIFUL.  I wish I had taken a picture of the invitation but I didn't.  I have it saved but time is very very limited now so I'm not going to go back and post it :) 

 

 The shower had a Chinese theme and it was just gorgeous and so much fun.

 The party favors-aren't they perfect?  The chopsticks say "oh happy day!" and, in case you don't know, the cookie is in the shape of China.  Laura made them, aren't they adorable?  There's a heart on them where Claire lives. 

 More beautiful decorations.

 The other table.  My dad served all of the ladies a yummy Chinese lunch!

 The lady of the hour, Claire!!  (I keep calling her Claire Bear so that's what I keep wanting to write! :))

 Me with the hostesses..Elizabeth helped to host too.

 Bad photo but I had to post a picture of the desserts, everyone got their own little cake and there's a chocolate fortune cookie on top!

 I look pretty crazy in all of the present opening pictures but I just had to post a picture of these adorable pink toms!!

 Most of the ladies who attended!

Then my friends from MOPS hosted a beautiful shower for me!!!

 So so cute!  The colors are the colors of Claire's room. :)

 Adorable!!!

 My two wonderful friends who hosted this beautiful shower, Leanne and Summyr!!

 My MOPS friends!

The third shower that I was lucky enough to have was hosted by my wonderful friends Kristen and Shelby, who also happen to be neighbors!  So they had the neighbor ladies over and a few friends from Cooper's school. 

It was such a fun theme, and perfect for a girl...princesses!!!

 I had to post a picture of the gift table because see that quilt on the table?  Kristen made it for Claire!!! Isn't that amazing?  I love it and it matches her room perfectly!

 Almost all the lovely ladies who attended the shower!

 

I'm a table leader at MOPS and at our last leader meeting they had a little shower for me where I received some cute things and diapers!!! I forgot to take pictures, but I didn't want to leave them out! :)

 

As I said, we have been SO blessed with support and I am so so thankful.  You should just see the beautiful things we received at the shower!  I have many pictures but I decided instead of posting millions of pictures of clothes, you'd probably rather see Claire IN them.  And very soon you will!! :)

Travel Approval!!!!

We received our Travel Approval!!!  We received it yesterday, April 9, along with our Visas thank goodness.  That was kind of nerve-wracking-you have to mail in your actual passport so your visa can be put in your passport.  We have that back though so now we're good to go!  We are going to book our tickets tonight or tomorrow, but we think we're going to be traveling May 2-May 15th.  We'll know officially once we book our tickets.   We are so so excited and now I have a million things to do!!! I'm trying to get caught up on my blog so I can blog while in China!  It will be a pretty amazing Mother's Day!! :)

Waiting for Travel Approval!! (and a photo!)

I realized I haven't given you all an update recently!

We finally received a long-awaited update on Claire Wenxia Ann!!  Here she is with the cake we sent her.  Aren't the cakes beautiful in China?  I don't think she knows what to think! :) This is the only picture they sent, so I sure hope she was able to have a piece and enjoy it!  We also had the questions answered that we sent so I am very grateful for that.

 

We are now in the home stretch of our wait!!!  We are on the very last step, which is waiting for our Travel Approval!!!! I can hardly believe it is here.  It could potentially come this week, crazy and exciting!!

 

We also have our travel dates pretty well set now!  We can't book our tickets until our TA comes, so I can't say FOR SURE this is when we will travel, but as of now we are looking at leaving May 1 or 2!  That means less than a month!!!! 

 

We will hopefully only stay 12 days, but depending on when our consulate appointment is scheduled we may have to stay 13 or 14 days.  Our agency submits 5 possible dates for our appointment, and we just have to hope and pray our first date gets picked! 

 

I'm now trying to deep clean our house (which Ryan will tell you I've been trying to do for a month.  When you have a child at home with you all day it's just hard to get it done!), making a packing list, looking up info on the internet, trying to get caught up on the boys' journals since I know that won't happen when I get back, trying to get a few girls nights and date night crammed in since that also probably won't happen for awhile when we get back, etc...  It's been busy and fun around here!

 

I'll post when we get our TA! 

 

Introducing...Our Daughter!

No, she's not home yet!  :(  But I finally can post her picture on line, since we received our LOA!  I know most of you have already seen her picture, but for those of you who live far away...here she is!

 

Claire Wenxia Ann.  My friend Bekah has a friend from China, and she translated her name for us.  Wen-means culture

Xia-means dawn

 

 We think she's beautiful!!!!  In these first two pictures she's 11 months old.

 Here she's 14 months old.

 I just love her beautiful wide smile! 

These are the only pictures we have of her.  |They're up ALL over our house, pretty much anywhere you look, there she is! :)

She's now 18 months old.  I was hoping to have her home by now, but I know she'll be home in only a few more months!  We're getting closer and closer.  We are now waiting our our I800 paperwork to be sent to Washington, and then they'll cable it to China.  Then we have only one or two more steps..then travel approval! 


We sent her a care package through a person in China, and she sent us a photo of what it included.  I have been reading that it's good to send things that the majority of kids can enjoy, so I ordered a few books that they could keep at the orphanage.  Then the candy is for her caregivers.  The camera and film is so HOPEFULLY we get some photos of her, and then the little panda is for her to snuggle.  We also had her give Claire a photo book filled with pictures of us and the boys, and then we ordered a cake to be given to Claire, plus all the other children. 

The main thing I was looking forward to was receiving pictures of her eating her cake, and then we were able to ask 10 questions to include with the care package.  Talk about difficult-try picking just 10 questions to ask about your child!  Unfortunately the CCCWA (China's adoption welfare center) issued a new rule that the orphanages can only give updates to adoption agencies.  So we didn't get any pictures or questions answered. :(   I wish we had known because we would have asked for that a long time ago!  So we just requested it this week from our agency so I'm hoping we get an update with new pictures soon.  The woman we ordered the care package with was told that Claire did get the care package, and they took pictures of her enjoying her cake.  I can't wait to see them!

We then sent another care package this Friday ourselves.  It was so fun picking out stuff to send her! I tried to pick out a bunch of small toys for the orphanage to keep.  Then the two bags of candy are for the caregivers.  I had to label everything in Chinese.  I used Google translate but have no idea if it was right nor not!  It probably says something completely different than what I want it to say! :)

 Here's her lovey.  I have a second one for her that I'm going to bring with us to China.  I'm not sure if she'll even receive any of this stuff, but sometimes I think they receive it and don't bring it with them.  So I wanted to get 2 of everything that way I can bring it with us and hopefully she'll recognize it and it'll make her more comfortable with us.  I can hope anyway!

 This is a recordable book that we all read to her.  I have another one here at home.

 Then we sent a little photo book for her to see her family. 

I really hope she gets this before we travel to China!  I'll make sure to post new pictures once we get them!

Guess What...

Just 1 day after I posted about our long awaited LOA, guess what happened???

 OUR LOA CAME!!!!

Thank you thank you for any prayers you said...the power of prayers is amazing! :)

Our agency overnighted some paperwork we need to complete the next step in the process, so I'm hoping we can overnight our next step on Monday!   The LOA is the big hurdle in this process so it's all downhill from here, yay!!!

I believe now our timeline is 2-3 months to travel, so I'm praying for the beginning of April...that's a longshot but can't hurt to hope!

100 Days

We have now been waiting 100 LONG days for our LOA.  (This is the letter where China says that we can officially adopt Claire.) 

We need this letter in order to continue all of our other paperwork and get our travel approval. 

100 days is a LONG time to wait.  People can get it anywhere from 40-100+ days, but 100+ days is not very common. 

Our agency found out a few days ago that the reason it's taking this long is because the agency who issues the LOA lost a receipt that we sent to China back in August saying that we paid for our dossier.  Because of that one little lost receipt, they didn't complete our paperwork.

The most frustrating part is they never told us!  A few weeks ago my agency inquired about our LOA and we were told it was "in process."  We were never told we were missing any paperwork! 

Needless to say I am getting very tired of the wait and very frustrated, and mostly just dying to see our girl!! 

Please please pray that our LOA will come any day now, especially before the Chinese New Year which starts I believe February 10, and will go on for a week. Everything shuts down during that time.

Thank you!!!!

Still Waiting.

I wanted to post a quick adoption update.  We're still waiting on our LOA (Letter of Acceptance) from China saying we can officially adopt Claire. We're on day 53 ( I believe).  It could come any day now, but it could also be another month or even longer!  SO SO hard to wait but we just keep praying for our precious girl.  I'm hoping for an early Christmas present!

Girly Outfits!

I just had to share a few outfits I have bought for Claire recently.  I have no idea what size she will wear (she's fairly tall but skinny so I don't know what that means size-wise.) 

 

 I kept eyeing this coat at Target and finally bought it for her for next year.

 I bought this dress a few years ago in the off-chance we had a girl!

 The cutest little outfit my mom got Claire.  And there's a very small preview of her :) I don't know how well you can see her-this is her referral picture! One of these days when we're officially accepted then I'll post her pictures for you.   Ryan made lots of fun of me but I had to lay the outfit on the picture to see what she'll look like in it!

We received an update about Claire last week, she's doing so well!  She's walking now and looks so much older already :(  That makes me really really sad.  They sent a picture of her smiling her big beautiful smile and I just can't wait to hold her.  We also received a short video of her walking around so we can really see her doing it!  I don't know if we'll receive any more updates until we go to China, but usually when people send a care package they'll take a few photos of the child with the care package.  I already asked when we're allowed to send one-as soon as we get our official letter of acceptance then we can send one.  I can't wait! 

More Halloween Activities

 Jackson's friend Holly came over right before Halloween and brought each boy a little basket of goodies.  In it were these glasses-a huge hit!

 

 Aren't they so cute?

 There were also these vampire teeth.  The boys tried hard to scare me!

 My friend Leanne who I met through MOPS had a Halloween party for our table.  The kids all dressed up-it was so cute!

 She also had lots of yummy treats including these cupcakes to decorate.  Here's her daughter Alexa decorating her cupcake.

 Here's Holly decorating hers!

 Beck and Bodie

 Here are all of the kids in their costumes.  Aren't those the cutest costumes??  I took a few pictures of some of the kids for their moms.

 Adorable baby Kade

 Isn't this costume just amazing??  Leanne made this herself!!!   He's the owl and his sister is a tree-isn't that just so cute?

 Beautiful Holly is a flapper.  Her sister Emily is as well, but unfortunately Cooper and Emily had to miss it because they were in school.

 Here's Alexa in her adorable tree costume.  She told her mom she wanted to be a tree and this is what Leanne came up with.  Isn't that amazing? I would have probably had Jackson wear all brown and just glued fake leaves to it!  She's obviously very talented.

 I had to end with this sweet picture.  The boys are watching a video of Claire Wenxia (or Claire Gao Wenxia, Claire Gao Wenxia Ann-we're not sure yet!) crawling around :).