Making travel plans

We met with the travel coordinator earlier this week. He seems to think we'll travel on June 11 and Family Day will be the 14th which just happens to be Flag Day. There are seventeen families in our travel group and there will be about forty-five people in the group before babies. Thirteen of us are traveling to the Jianxi Province, three to Hunan and one to a province that I cannot remember. I do remember it begins with a G. Guangxi maybe?
The meeting was pretty intense. There's a lot of stuff to remember. We already sent away for our visas. I went ahead and paid the extra for one day priority. I'm so glad I did because the day after I sent them, the contact person to where I sent our applications emailed me to let me know he had received them and he was taking care of them that afternoon. Hopefully we'll have the visas in our hands by May 6.
Our travel coordinator did confirm the CCAA had received our LOAs and we are now waiting for our travel approvals. Our travel coordinator said it was taken about five weeks to receive travel approvals. We are hopeful they will arrive sooner. The sooner they arrive the sooner we meet our daughters!

Shopping

The last post was too depressing for me. I thought about deleting it but felt that that was the equivalent to deleting my feelings of frustration. Yes, I'm weird.So, in an effort to cheer myself up along with everyone else, I thought I'd post a few pictures of some of my latest purchases. Of course, these are the purchases just from yesterday. They're all six to nine months in size. I'm hoping she doesn't weigh more than twenty pounds on Forevery Family Day. She weighed fifteen pounds three months ago so she could certainly be that much. However, she only weighed five pounds at intake. I have several twelve month outfits, too, though so I'm not too worried.

Three of the outfits came from a consignment store and one outfit came from Wal-Mart. Can you guess which one came from where?

Paperwork

There just aren't any words to describe how I feel about paperwork -- no good ones anyway and the bad ones are just too vulgar to put into writing. Ever since Friday, I've been trying to gather the necessary paperwork to send back to the agency. I finally gathered it all and we delivered it today. Only to be told when we were an hour away from the agency that no, they were missing a piece. I just emailed it to them and hopefully we're all good. Keep your fingers crossed.

In addition to the paperwork fun, we also went to Louisville today to be fingerprinted. There wasn't much of a wait today -- we were the only family in the Immigration Office and the third family in the fingerprinting office. Lots of prayers going out to those responsible for updating our I171H form with the new fingerprint date so we can get that out of the way. I had planned to take pictures of the courthouse today and post them but I forgot my camera.

The Delivery

The Fed Ex guy left too quick for me to take his picture. So, instead I got a picture of the truck leaving and JD getting the package from the doorstoop. JD has a pretty cheesy smile in this picture but he kept looking away and this was the best we could do.
Most of the report was in Mandarin but part of it was in English. We learned that MeiLin is a deep sleeper and is active and likes to listen to music and play games. We should receive a translation soon and then the whirlwind of paperwork will begin and before we know it MeiLin will be in our arms!

Our Referral

Woohooooooooooo!!!!!!!!! After 36 months and 21 days, we finally received a referral.

Introducing Mei Lin Grace -------

Mei Lin lives in the Jiangxi Province. She is absolutely the most adorable sweetest little baby I've ever seen. Of course, I may have a biased opinion!!!!!