Getting Ready

Well, we've all gotten our shots to go to China, and the boys were so brave! Typhoid shots hurt! But they were willing to do it for Lilli Grace, just so they could be there to see her from the first moment. They are so anxious to get there; I'm starting to feel anxious to get home. I just want my girl!

We got the boys' passports in the mail, so now I can finish their visa applications and mark something else off my expanding list. We have four weeks exactly  before we leave, if our travel dates hold out.

We've decided to use Lilli's room as the staging point for our packing, which will begin this weekend, I hope. I've been busy reading other people's lists and trying to decide what we need to take.

We're still waiting for our official travel approval, so we won't know much about flight information until probably a couple weeks from now. But there's plenty to do! See my to do list for today, for instance:

1. Freak out! We'll be in China one month from today!!

2. Calm down. We have to focus.

3. Slight rise in heart rate with thoughts of organizing the packing. Head gets a little swimmy.

4. Deep breaths, one thing at a time. Start making lists.

5. AHHH!! She's finally coming home!!!

6. Sit quietly with a deer in the headlights look.

Repeat steps one through six at various points throughout the day.

All that being said, this really is the fun part. We actually shopped for clothes for Lilli Grace and registered for gifts for our shower at church on July 12. I can just imagine her in each outfit. The boys had a good time picking out outfits; Eli was walking around holding up tops to match with the cute little skirt he had picked out. They can believe she's real now, too. :) I look at her picture and try to see the smallest details about her. My little girl. I'm so ready.

And now, I think it's time to go over my list again:

1. Freak out!! We'll be in China one month from today . . .

Still chasing papers

After all the months of paperchasing, I thought we were pretty much done. Someday I'll do a post on just what all we had to do to get our dossier ready at the beginning of our adoption journey. Fourteen pieces of paper that sum up our whole life.

Now, two years and two months later, we're a lot farther down the road, but it's like deja vu all over again.

Today I FedExed our Referral Acceptance and several other papers so they will arrive at our agency in Virginia by the noon deadline tomorrow, and this afternoon, we got a packet of about 30 pages of travel-related documents to fill out. I'm feeling overwhelmed!

And we neglected to get the boys their passports already, so I'm really kicking myself now. Okay, I've never traveled outside the country before, and I didn't know you had to have your passport way ahead of time in order to get your visa. So we'll be paying some stupid tax to get them expedited. Don't know if it will delay our travel, but it does mean more paperwork.

Oh well, like the old saying goes, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

It's a good thing I'm hungry to get to China :) When I think of our little girl waking up and going to sleep in the orphanage, I would do anything to get to her.

Okay, gimme a pen and that stack of papers . . .

Big News

For those of you who may not know our big news, here it is:

Our family is fixin' to get bigger by one! We are in the middle of an adoption from China, and just today, after a really long and difficult wait, we finally got the referral acceptance from the Chinese government to proceed with the adoption of a little girl we were matched with back in March. With the official approval comes permission to share her photo with all our friends and family.

This adoption journey has stretched all of us beyond what we could have imagined, and she's not even in our arms yet! What a privilege it has been to see God's hand at work. That's material for another post!

For now, we invite you to share our joy as we prepare to bring our little girl home. We are hoping to travel in late July or early August, but we have found that the only thing for certain in international adoption is uncertainty! So we shall see, but we know that we will one day be home as a family of six, with a lot more pink in the house! :)

Introducing . . .

Like cold water to a weary soul is good news from a far country (Proverbs 25:25) . . .

After almost two years of waiting, praying, and hoping, and 103 days after we first saw her face, we have permission to introduce you to the newest member of the Istre bunch . . .

Lilli Grace Yingjiao Istre
She currently lives in Shanxi Province, China.
She will be two in August.
There are no words to say how thankful we are that God has granted us favor in allowing us
to travel this adoption road and to love this sweet child!