We have LID (Log In Date)! Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

Finally, we have our Log In Date from China! It was 8/26/2009, which puts us on Day 41 of our official count already - yippee! I have seen some families get their LOA/LSC (Letter of Acceptance, now Letter Seeking Confirmation) in 49 days lately, but many have waitied 80 or more days. We shall see...



There are several new hoops to jump through between this next approval from China and our Travel Approval (TA). These are new since Eliana's adoption and are due to the implementation of the Hague treaty on international adoption. With the new steps, it appears to be taking somewhere along the line of 60 days from LOA to TA currently. That means if we get LOA at the end of October, we would hopefully receive TA at the end of December and travel in January. I am still hoping for winter break travel (at least by the end of winter break?), but unless we get LOA very soon, this is looking less and less likely. The next steps for us are:

• LOA/LSC from China
• I-800 application to USCIS (immigration) - not to be confused with I-800A, which we already did before our dossier went to China
• I-800 approval from USCIS aka
• Cable sent from USCIS-NVC to US Consulate in Guangzhou, China
• Article 5 approval from US Consulate
• Article 5 approval is delivered by our agency to CCAA in China
• Travel Approval issued from China

I hope I have all of that right. Truly, I am not familiar as I should be with what all of the above steps entail. Our agency completes the I-800 for us and we just sign it and send it on. That much I know! I will become intimately familiar with all of these steps over the next days and weeks.

We may be pressing our luck to hope to ring in 2010 in China, but it looks likely we will have Mei Mei home in time for Chinese New Year - Year of the Tiger, which starts February 14, 2010. Let's certainly hope so, because otherwise we would have to wait until March to travel . Traveling to China to adopt during lunar new year really is not possible - all offices are shut down and booking flights and trains within China is very difficult and expensive as the Earth's largest annual migration of human beings takes place and virtually all Chinese citizens travel to their hometowns to celebrate with their families.


Speaking of celebrations, we are in the process of celebrating the Jewish festival of Sukkot, and also the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival or Moon Festival. I will try to get some pics up soon. Here is the package that Mei Mei received from us for Moon Festival - a box of moon cakes to share with her foster family, a Barbie doll, a photo album and a letter from us, and also a cover letter from us to the Director of Wuhan Children's Welfare Institute and a box of mooncakes for him as well. I included my email address to him and we were thrilled to received email confirmation (in Chinese, of course) of the receipt of our package. I used a service within China to do all of this, which is much less expensive than buying items here and shipping them to China. I plan on doing several packages in that manner as well, though.

I hope to have good news to share very soon!

Laura Beth