Gotcha Day!!

 

One final picture of our family of 5!

 

 

 

11 months ago we started this adoption journey.  God lead us to China and then to Emme.  He was faithful every step of the way. We have been dreaming of the day we hold her in our arms and today that dream was fulfilled. 
We met our group in the lobby at 9:30 this morning.  We boarded our bus and drove 20 minutes to the registartion office.  When we arrived, our guide announced that the Kaifeng kids (Emme's orphange) had already arrived.  I teared up before even walking in the door.  When we did we were greeted with this....

   Our sweet Emme was waiting inside.  I love how this picture captured all 5 of us greeting her!

 

                                                          
                                                               Now a family of 6

                         Looking at the photo album the orphange gave us...another blessing!

 

Our picture for our paperwork

                                    
                                                                  My 4 kiddos

We are in love and she has been great!  She even fell asleep on the ride back to the hotel.  She loves the attention from the kids and they love giving it to her.  Elsa is a natural in the big sister department.  We know this "honeymoon phase" may not last so please continue to pray.  Right now we are just enjoying loving on her and making her a part of our family!!

Day 3

We woke up Saturday morning to this breakfast buffet!!!

 

Some of the pastries

 

Max' dream come true...doughnuts AND m&ms!

Then we were off to the Great Wall.  The pictures do not do it justice.  It was so amazing to see.

 Elsa's gymnastics teacher has a little sister adopted from China.  She was so excited for Elsa's trip.  She wanted Elsa to take a picture doing a cartwheel on the Great Wall!

Lunch with our travel group.  It is such a fun group and we are having a lot of fun.  There are 6 famies total, but only 4 were here at this time.

 

Our hotel in Beijing...Sunworld Dynasty Hotel

Day 4

We flew to Zhengzhou.  This is where we will meet our sweet Emme TOMORROW!!  We checked on our hotel and had pizza with some friends.  Then our whole group headed down to Walmart to stock up for our babies.  This Walmart was enormous and had a lot more items than you find in Walmart in the US.

Walmart has 4 stories and escalators that you can take with your carts.

                                                Something you do not see everyday.

 

Check out.  There were so many people there.

 

Elsa and I spend time this afternoon preparing for Emme's arrival.  We have her diaper bag ready to go.  I will leave you with one final picture that has us emotional yet so excited.....

 

 

Tomorrow our daughter will sleep here. Tomorrow is THE DAY.  Tomorrow she will be placed in our arms and become a part of a family. We have talked about her, prayed for her and stared at her pictures for 11 months now.  Please pray for her.  Our hearts break at the thought of what she will go through leaving all she has ever know.

I just hope I can sleep tonight:)

Day 2

More flying!  We arrived in Beijing at 4:40PM local time (or 2:40AM Morton time).  We were met by Jean our CCAI representative. She got us safely to our hotel.  We got some dinner and crashed. 

We did not take many pictures today since we were mostly flying and SO tired.  Here is our hotel room.

                                                                    Our bathroom

 

We had an adjoining room with 2 double beds for the rest of the family.

We made it!

One of the first things we learned in China was 2 websites that are blocked here are facebook and blogspot!!  That would be the reason we haven't posted until know. :)  We did get Adam's VPN to work and we are up and running....

Thursday morning we arrived at the Peoria airport about 8AM.  Here are the happy travelers and ALL of our luggage!!

 

Our flight from Peoria to Chicago went just as planned.  Our flight from Chicago to Beijing started out with a 1 hour delay. 

 

All nestled in for our 13.5 hour flight!  The monitors on the back of the seats were a lifesafer.  The had movies, tv shows and games to play.  The kids each took a bag full of things to do and hardly touched them:) 

 

You could also track where we were in the flight and the time remaining until arrival.  We all got very little sleep and were so tired when we arrived!

Itinerary

As you can imagine, it is like Christmas Eve here at our house!!  We are all beyond excited to board our plane in the morning. Many of you have asked what we will be doing each day or what our trip will be like.  I figured the best way to inform everyone was to write out our itinerary:

Nov 7th - Fly from Peoria to Chicago, then from Chicago to Beijing!!
Nov 8th - Arrive in Beijing at 3:40PM local time
Nov 9th - Tour the Great Wall
Nov 10th - travel to Zhengzhou - (where we will get our daughter)
Nov  11th - GOTCHA DAY!!!!  We meet Emme for the first time.
Nov 12th - Mitchells 12th Birthday!! Paperwork, go to Kaifeng City to apply for Emmes passport and hopefully visit her orphanage.
Nov 13th - Free Day
Nov 14th - Paperwork
Nov 15th - Free day
Nov 16th - Travel to Guangzhou
Nov 17th - paperwork
Nov 18th - Emme gets medical physical
Nov 19th - Get Emmes tb test read
Nov 20th - Consulate Appointment
Nov 21 - Receive Emmes visa and take train to Hong Kong
Nov 22 - Fly from Hong Kong to Chicago.  Emme will be a US citizen when we land in Chicago!!
Fly from Chicago to Peoria!

As you can see we will have a lot of down time to get to bond with Emme.  Please keep her in your prayers.  While we can't wait to welcome her in our family on the 11th, she is going to be taken from all she has ever known.

TA and CA

On Friday Oct 25th we received an email from our agency saying that our travel approval (TA) should arrive any day.  I am going to write the rest of this post in a timeline to get all the facts in...

Friday Oct 25th - email says if we get TA by Tuesday Oct 29th we could leave the next week on Nov 7th!
Monday Oct 28th - check email a lot - no TA
Tuesday Oct 29th - check email even more - no TA but we did get an email saying they extended our timeframe and if we received TA by Wed the 30th we could still go on the 7th!!
Wednesday Oct 30th - we receive TA!!! They request our consulate appointment (CA) and they have to reply the next day for us to go on the 7th!!
Thursday Oct 31st - We have a confirmed CA!!
We now have 7 days to get our family of (soon to be) 6 ready for a 16 day journey of a lifetime.