Our PA is a letter stating that someone in China has looked over all the tons of documents and paperwork that we had sent them along with our LOI and have decided that there are no problems and our adoption of Lu Jingjing may proceed. So I will lay out the next multiple steps for you so people can stop asking us why it takes so long for us to go get her now :) We are now in day 3 of our wait for LOA. All our documents proceed to a translation room where everything is translated into Chinese and then it moves to an in process room and no one has any idea what happens there....stuff just gets processed. This whole step could take anywhere from 30-130 days...no one knows! Next we file our I-800 which is our US immigration approval to adopt this specific child. This takes around 3-4 weeks. Next is the NVC(National Visa Center) cable which is an email or cable of our approval of our visa petition which gets sent to our agency and the US Embassy in China. This takes around 1-2 weeks??? It really gets confusing here. Next is the Article 5 which is issued by the US Consulate in China and that takes 2 weeks. That is then sent to the CCCWA and they will issue your TA or travel approval. It is at that point that you will know the exact dates that you travel and you usually leave only 2-3 weeks after the TA. There is the synopsis and that is why it takes soooooo long. I am sure I got some of that wrong as I don't fully understand it either.
Back to the PA (look at the column of abrev.) So Monday my agency could not get on the CCCWA site at all to print off my documents. Their website was down and I was having some communication issues with my agency. They though that they had done this step last week and that I had the documents, I informed them that they were wrong and I WAS nice about it. So Monday no PA, no documents....at this point I start thinking...so this is where the road block will be.....bring it on!!!!! For anyone that has followed us on this journey or had to listen to me rant and rave you will know that it has been a journey fraught with things gone wrong or not done right....usually not on my part. I wake up Monday and there is an email from my agency saying that we have our PA and here is an attachment of the documents for you to sign. WOW!!!!!!...and then I realize that there is no attachment to the email, no documents to sign.....really!! I just start to laugh as that is so typical with us.....and then I start to cry, and I cry and cry. I had not realized how guarded I was keeping my heart and my brain and how much of a wall I had built up to keep me from any further disappointment! It all came crashing down with two little letters PA! I was finally able to really think that Sofie is going to come here to live with us, forever! I had known from the time I first looked at her picture that she was our daughter, I was just so afraid something would go wrong. There may be hurdles,road blocks or stumbles, but, Sofie will be here with us, soon. I have done a lot of thinking the past few days and not a lot of Christmas decorating! I have been telling myself and everyone else that everything happens for a reason and there are reasons for everything we have been through. I just never really believed what I was saying until Tuesday. Everything over the last two years DID happen for a reason and that reason WAS Sofie. Her paperwork for a potential adoption had not been made ready until a short time ago so she was not eligible to be adopted until the Nov. list. If one thing out of all the things that went wrong for us over the last two years had gone right, we might have gone off on a different path and not ended up where we were. I haven't told many people, but, China was one of the programs that we had looked into initially but we chose Ethiopia instead. If we had chose China, we wouldn't have found her. We would have been matched with a child a long time ago. And then it dawned on me! The very first initial meeting we had at our adoption agency, which began our process, was the end of August, 2009. Sofie had just been born and was only about 2 weeks old when we started our adoption! Her date of birth is the same day as our wedding anniversary. "An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break" -Chinese Legend .
We have another daughter :)
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