The Nursery is Coming Together

Tina has been working hard on Kai's room...

Well, we started thinking twice about not having a crib. We figure this will be what Kai has been used to sleeping in, so maybe a toddler bed isn't the best idea. And while we plan on having him in our bedroom with us for quite a while when he first comes home, our room is too small to keep an empty crib in before he gets here. So we made a big push to convert the "Green Room" back into a nursery.

Decorating a nursery again at our age is different. There's lots of nostalgia that it brings up.

The one big decision was the theme. We thought about something Chinese, like pandas or dragons, but in the end we went with Winnie the Pooh. There's a lot of really nice "Classic Pooh" stuff out now that has a soft relaxed look, not the loud Disney version.

We took some pictures and put them on a webpage you can see by CLICKING HERE.

Neighborhood Graffiti...

Finally Cleaned the White Board

This has been on our refrigerator white board for about a month now. i finally scanned it so we could wipe it off. Our 14 year old neighbor, Traesti Gudmundson (Ben's best friend) drew this one afternoon. Amazingly "ON" caricatures if you ask me! Well, the pictures we have of Kai are about a year old now, so I'm not real sure about his, but I think Traesti caught him in spirit.

Lucky Number 834798817500

We Are DTC!!!

DTC is adoption lingo for "Dossier To China".

834798817500 is the FedEx tracking number on the package going to China with our Dossier.

We are amazed that we are at this point already! The process we began last December has come to its first major goal. I feel like I've said that a number of times on this journal, but this one is really big. We don't have any more of the busy-work, paper chase tasks to complete. We have some waiting to do, and then we start the REAL process.

So how much waiting is there now?

Well, first we are waiting for LID. That's "Log In Date", the day our dossier is "logged-in" at the CCAA (China Center for Adoption Affairs). This will probably take one to two weeks -- could be a few days, could be a month. Once we get there, it will take about 8 - 9 weeks to get TA (Travel Approval).

Once we have TA it's pretty much get our tickets and go. If you do the math it looks like we will be traveling by early August! This has pretty much been our "aggressive" goal. We wanted to make this happen as quickly as possible. There were a number of times when things seemed to slow down for us, but really it has gone pretty smoothly. This is because Tina has been doing an amazing job of keeping everything organized and following up on everything each step of the way.

It won't be long now, and we will be on our way to bring Kai home!

The Last Piece of Our Paper Chase Puzzle!!

We Got The I-171H !!

That's it! We've got all the pieces of paper we need now to complete our dossier!

We have to get a copy of it notarized, then we send it and a bunch of other forms to Olympia for "authentication". Then we send them all off one more time to the Chinese consulate in San Francisco for authentication (yes, again!) and that's it!

Well almost. Then the whole packet goes to our Agency where it's translated and then sent to China. Since we already have "placement approval" to adopt Kai, the CCAA just has to confirm all our paper work is in order and then we should get our travel approval. Our agency thinks that August is a reasonable timeline to go!