Chinese Visas

Friday our passports returned to us via Fedex with our wonderful travel visas inside. I am very relieved to have them back as it is very unnerving to have your ability to travel to see family so limited. While they were only gone for a week, it is still a very odd feeling to know that you cannot cross the border whenever you want to..and it is only 6 hours away. I have never had a visa in my passport before. Everywhere I have travelled before I did not need one. Ainsley thought it was so "awesome" that the picture of the Great Wall is on our visa.  The Chinese government says it is OK for us to travel in China, now all we need is for their agency that oversees adoptions to say that it is OK for us to come and get Sofie....the TA!

Tuesday March 27 China time our paperwork should be picked up from the US Consulate and then sent to the CCCWA in Beijing. So that will be late Monday evening our time so I will not hear anything until Tuesday...I think I got that straight.  That is the day we start our wait for TA! This is the last and final step other than the travel and the actual adoption in China. We have reached the last step! I cannot even begin to explain the emotions that this statement brings over me. We are so close to finally seeing our daughter and being able to hold her and be her Mommy and Daddy. Every time I think of the fact that we will be waiting for our TA I just swell up with emotion and tear up.

I looked back at my old calendars (yes I keep them) today and I figured out that it has been 3 years since we started this journey. It seems like a lifetime some days. June 9, 2009 was our first meeting with the first agency that quashed our hopes of a domestic adoption. We were told that for the age we were looking for, we would have to foster first and we didn't feel like that was the path that was right for us. The only avenue left open to us was international adoption but we couldn't adopt through Canada as we no longer had a residence there and we couldn't adopt through the US as neither of us were US citizens. We then started the process of becoming citizens, the journey through the Ethiopian adoption process, the loss of the Ethiopian adoption process and a little girl from Haiti who opened our eyes as to the path that we were supposed to be on. Finally, we arrived where we are now. It has been a long journey, yet, not as long as some people's. We are now where we are supposed to be, soon to be on our way to China :)