Home Sweet Home!!!

WE'RE HOME!!!!!! We have been home since late Tuesday night. Boy it feels good to be home. I want to do a very long post with pictures but i am at the office right now and baby + office are not mixing very well so it will have to wait until either nap time or bed time. Pictures are coming soon....I promise!

9/2

Our consulate appointment is confirmed! We are leaving 9/2!!! As in next Wednesday!!!!!! Our flights are booked!!! Our hotels are booked!!! We are almost on our way!! And as if that wasn't good enough we received new pictures of Maizie!!!!

The next one is my favorite picture of her. Tracy is in trouble. She is going to look at him with her big brown eyes she is going to get what ever she wants.
They shaved her head but thats ok. She is still the cutest little girl ever and i have lots of bows!!!

TA!! TA!! TA!!

Guess who is going to China???!!!! WE ARE!!!!!! We have our Travel Approval! Our agency is still trying to confirm our travel dates. We have to wait for them to schedule our consulate appointment. But we might be able to leave on 9/2! That's right I said 9/2 as in next Wednesday!! If not 9/2 we will leave on 9/9. I am just so so so excited!!! It's so crazy to think we could could have our little girl in our arms 2 weeks from now!

Maizie's room

While we wait for out TA (travel approval) I thought I would post pictures of Maizie's room. I was thinking about painting it but time just got away from me and well now it's just too late.

And remember this chair???

Well it now looks like this!!!

There is kind of a funny story about how Maizie's chair brought us some good luck. This chair was in my grandparents house. I don't really know how it came to be in my house but it did and even though it was orange velvet I couldn't get rid of it. I kept saying for years and years that I would reupholster it...someday. Once we knew that we were going to have a girl I knew that now was the time to get going on the chair. My best friend (Liz) owns an antique shop so I dropped it off at her shop way back in March. I didn't push to get it done because lets face it I really didn't need it. On July 27th my mom called to tell me that my chair was sitting in their garage (Liz's mom had delivered it). On July 30th Tracy and I went to Saratoga to go to the track to watch the horse races with my parents and picked up the chair. We stayed in Saratoga that night. The next day on the way home I was thinking about how sad it was going to be to put this chair, that I had waited so long for, in Maizie's room. At that point we still didn't have our LOA and I was starting to go a little crazy with the wait. We picked up Kodi (our dog) at T's moms house and when we were getting back in the car I saw the little light on my crackberry flashing so I checked my email and there it was. The same day got our LOA we put the chair in Maizie's room.

Happy Friday!

We have our LOA!!!!!!!!! I cant believe it!! I am in shock right now!!!! We hope to be traveling in 5-8 weeks to get our little girl! I cant believe we are going to have her for her 2nd birthday, Thanksgiving and Christmas!!!!

HAPPY FRIDAY!!!!!!

We waited 159 days (but who's counting) and now that it is here i am SO unprepared. There are so many things on my list that i need to do. But right now i am going to CELEBRATE!!!

no news

Still no news on our LOA. We have been waiting a total of 142 days but only 14 days since finding out our dossier was in the wrong department. So we still might have a ways to go.

In other news we received an email from our agency yesterday that Maizie's file is still locked! This is very good news. Our agency said all along that they had no reason to believe that her file would become unlocked but couldn't tell us for sure. I feel like i can sleep a little easier knowing that she is still going to be our little girl...someday.

Another Pity Party

If you don't want to hear about another pity party don't read on.
This week was another really bad week. On Tuesday my mom called to tell me my Uncle Greg had passed away. It happened very suddenly. He was in DC with my Aunt celebrating their anniversary. He leaves behind 2 wonderful children Bertalina 18 and Matty who is 12. My Uncle played a big roll in our decision to adopt. Their 2 children are adopted from Guatemala. Bertalina came home first. She was about 5 or 6. I still remember the first time i met her. She was a little peanut. She had just gotten out of the pool and had a towel wrapped around her. She was the cutest little thing. I instantly fell in love and new at that moment that some day i was going to adopt too. I am so sad that Maizie will never get to meet him. He was always full of life and loved his children more then life. He would sometimes get these crazy ideas. He retired just a few months ago and decided in his retirement he was going to pan for gold! He owns a log cabin in northern New York which has a stream running through the property that he thought would be a good place to start. He will be greatly missed.

I thought with the bad news on my Uncle passing surely that would mean we would get some good news and get our LOA. Well my new agency called on Thursday with even more bad news. When our dossier went over to China our old agency never attached out LOI so China didn't know we already had a referral. So for the past 128 days our dossier has been sitting in the wrong department. That's right I said THE WRONG DEPARTMENT!!!!! Its now in the right department but we are back to being on day 1. 128 days down the drain. 128 days all for nothing. I had asked our old agency several times to check on our LOA to make sure everything was ok. They always came up with some song and dance on why that was a bad idea. As it stands right now we are back to square 1. China does know about our situation and there is a chance that they could take pity on us and give us our LOA very soon but China does what they want when they want so our agency said not to expect that. Most likely we will have to wait the normal 2-3 months to get out LOA. Followed by another 4-6 weeks for our travel approval and now we might not be traveling until the end of the year. I know i can survive the wait...well at least i think i can but it breaks my heart to know that Maizie spent and extra 128 days in an orphanage when she could have spent that time at home with us.

Ok Pity party over...for now at least. It's 4th of July and despite our bad week we are going to have a family cook out (my brother is flying in tonight) and then its off to the fireworks.

Happy 4th of July!!!!