We Have Travel!!!

It's amazing to me how a day can take such a turn. Thursday was a nice, normal day. Keely and the kids did school and were heading to the park. I had some extra meetings so I was late meeting them. Right before I left, I checked my email to make sure I was not missing things and ... BAM... there it was. Travel approval! Suddenly the day was a different day.

The thing is, now we had a pretty good time frame for the next steps.  It means that we are done with the paperwork.  Now we had to look at consulate dates.  To do this, we needed to coordinate with the travel agency to double check tickets. Oh - people keep talking about 'trade fair'. What is that? Oh, you mean hotel prices are likely to double? Tomb-Sweeping? Yes, Kenley and Kellin have studied that in class. Oh, you mean it might be really hard to get a plane ticket? Where should we fly out of on the outbound? Atlanta? Tampa? Orlando? Tally? What about the return? Guangzhou? Hong Kong? You get the picture.  All of this was to pick our top five consulate dates. On one of these days we will  officially be the boys' parents in the eyes of the Chinese government.

I remember this day with Karwen. We were already a family. In many ways it was just another round of paperwork. But we were in a room full of new parents and families.  Joyful confusion!

They take everyone's family portrait as you come down the stairs:

To us, this really looks like the beginning of our new family!

So now we have travel approval. We will know in a few days when we will leave.  We are using the same travel service and have our fingers crossed that we will have some of the same guides. I have been amazed at how important our guides have been in our lives. We have not had any contact with them since we left (other than sending a  thank you email and pictures) but they are still in our family conversations.  It reminds one that you can make a huge impact in someone's life and you may never truly know what a difference you made.