Sunday February 13th - Update on Travel Dates

We've passed two milestones this week. The first is in completing a mountain of paperwork to accept our referral. The second is that we started the work to process our visa's and book our travel.

Our file left our home on Friday, and is scheduled to arrive at our agency tomorrow morning. It will then be translated, with one portion heading to the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social services (they still have to approve of the match) and the second portion heading to China to let them know to start processing Lilah's paperwork to join our family.

Rose at Tinbo Travel in Ottawa called yesterday to confirm that we will be leaving on Tuesday March 29th for Shanghai. We'll be returning to Toronto on Thursday April 14th. We are getting really excited that this is all becoming so real. It's hard to believe that in 7 short weeks, we'll be back in China and holding Lilah!

We are thrilled that we will be returning to Hunan to adopt Lilah. It means that we will be spending one week in Changsha while we process Lilah's paperwork. We loved Changsha when we were there two years ago, not only for the food and shopping but also because the people were so friendly. One added bonus is that Naomi's hometown is so close. We've also been in contact with Children's Bridge about setting up a trip to Zhuzhou to visit the orphanage, see some of the sights in the area and to tour the countryside so that we can get a feeling for what our daughters' alternate paths might have been. Our In-China travel agent (Swan) is working on getting the permission and setting us up with a driver and a translator for the day. We are particularily excited about this leg of our journey.

I've also posted a picture of Naomi to the website. It was taken at a Chinese New Year celebration we attended in Toronto, and one of my all time favorite pictures of her!

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!
Naomi and Lilah's mommy!