We have a CA

It is official....we have a CA (consulate appointment) date. It is May 22!!!! Here is our tentative schedule. We leave May 8, are in Beijing May 9-13, Hefei May 13-18 and Guangzhou May 18-24. I still have to book our air tickets to China and then the agency looks after everything else....that part scares me :) The day we meet Sofie and she becomes part of our family forever will either be on Mother's Day or the day after Mother's Day. A Mother's Day I won't soon forget :)
We were going to leave a week earlier but I called the agency and told them to postpone for a week. WHAT!!! you say. After all the whining and complaining I actually have the gall to postpone it for a week. Well, there is a story. Here is the story I wouldn't tell you last night for fear something would go wrong.

It started sometime before Christmas when a person that my husband works with and a member of an online chat group that I frequent contacted me for the password to Sofie's blog. The coworker is with the same agency as we are and we had a lot in common. We have become good friends. It is amazing to be able to share the ups and downs with someone else who just gets it. We will both be off this summer so I am looking forward to some fun times. The other woman, we found out after she logged into the blog that our daughters are in the same orphanage. She had no idea when she contacted me.
I had given up on being able to travel with either one of them until the twists and turns of waiting in international adoption kept bringing our time lines closer and closer together. We all waited too long for some stuff and got other stuff very quickly. I had started thinking that the "coworker, for lack of a better term, and I where very much on the same timeline but the RQ friend was planning on traveling in late May and I was leaving May 2 no matter what.......funny how things work out.

The RQ friend got her TA super fast and the "coworkers" TA got delayed and mine came in the middle. I could leave May 2 but it would be without either one of them. It was a difficult decision for me, not for Jim, he just said well we wait a week. So we decided to wait for a week in order to have the wonderful opportunity of traveling with two people whom I consider good friends and being able to share a once in a lifetime story with them. I am so lucky.

The RQ friend is bringing her daughter with her, she is just a little bit younger than Ainsley,  and her soon to be daughter is just slightly older than Sofie. It hasn't quite sunk in that we will all be there together...none of the last couple of days has totally sunk in yet. I feel like I am living a surreal dream. Now we all only need one more TA for all of this to work out :)