What's new this week?

Things are moving fast these days! Here's a few things that have happened lately

1) We received Milo's immigration approval last week! Of course that required us to fill out yet another crazy form with questions like "is he coming to the country to practice poligamy?".  This form will be sent to the US Embassy in China and hopefully we will have that approval in about two weeks.

2) A few weeks ago we had the opportunity to send a donation to his orphanage. We are so grateful to them for taking care of him the first year and a half of his life and for allowing him to be adopted internationally. Hopefully they will get good use out of the bibs and gloves!

3) We also sent a photo album and teddy bear to his orphanage. We hope his nannies will show him our pictures and talk to him about his parents who can't wait to come get him! We plan on bringing a second identical bear to China so that we have something he recognizes with us. 

4) We sent off our travel visa application this weekend. This was REALLY scary as we had to send our actual passports! I guess the visa is something they stamp or stick on one of our passport pages. I know it will be fine, but it still doesn't seem like a great idea to send off our passports two months before we hope to travel! These should come back within a week and I can't wait to have those back in our hands!

We've been working on a few other things that I will post about later this week. 

Thanks for the prayers and good thoughts everyone! They seem to be working as things are moving at a good pace right now! 

Another goodbye and a little more info

First, we lost another amazing family member this month. Grandma Bell was 98 years young and lived a joyful diverse life. We will miss her terribly! 

Next, we wanted to share a little more about Milo and the special need we alluded to earlier. 
When we started this process, we knew that our kiddo was going to have a special need. As I explained here, the China "healthy child" program has a 6-7 year waiting list. Not only were we not interested in the wait, we felt called to extend our comfort zone and adopt a "special needs" child.

Milo was born with a unilateral cleft lip and palate. As you can tell from his picture, his lip has already been repaired and actually repaired really well. We do have a pre-surgical picture of him that we haven't shared widely yet. God perfectly formed every inch of our son and we think he is beautiful in all ways. However, we are already starting to feel a parental protectiveness about him and one of the lessons we learned in our pre-adoptive training was that we should be sensitive about what we share before he has a voice to tell us what he is comfortable with. So for now it is a picture we are keeping close. We wish we had been there to comfort him during his lip repair, but we are glad that it seems to have been corrected well and it will be one less surgery he will have to have when he comes home.

His palate is still unrepaired and he will need to have surgery at some point. It is necessary to repair as it impedes his ability to eat and speak. When it will be done depends on how well he is doing nutritionally and emotionally. It could be done right away or we may choose to wait several months. We found out shortly after being matched that there is a cleft clinic with a team of surgeons, nurses and various therapists very close to us and we are SO thankful for that. He will be able to have his surgery and follow up care within 20 minutes of our home. He will also most likely need speech therapy and possibly another surgery as he grows. We feel very confident with our local cleft team and honored that we will get to be his support going forward.

Here are a few links we have found to be helpful if you would like to learn more.

Web MD and the Cleft Palate Foundation have a lot of helpful information on clefts, what they are and how they are treated.

This is a great blog post from a family that adopted a daughter from China with cleft lip and cleft palate. She explains things much better than I could!

One last piece of info, we learned today that our I800 (immigration paperwork) was approved! Yay!! On to the next step, which is getting our visas. We are still on track to have travel approval in March/early April and travel at the end of April.

 Thanks for reading this long and wordy post!  Happy Valentine's day everyone! 

What's next?

So now that we have our official LOA the next step is to get immigration approval, also called I-800 (step 9 above).
But wait, didn't we already go through an immigration step??
Why yes, yes we did. Here and Here.

Basically, the step we went through prior to this was telling the USCIS that we were planning on immigrating a child to the USA, what type of child our homestudy approved us for (country of origin, sex, age, etc) and that we had jumped through all the (many, many) hoops to allow us to legally do this.

This step is telling the USCIS that we have been matched with our son and this is the child that will be immigrating and officially becoming a US citizen as soon as our plane touches ground on USA soil. They will look at our son's info, match it with what was approved and tell us we are good to bring him home.

This approval process should take about two weeks. After that we will get our visas and hopefully in a few short months we will have travel approval!!!

Pretty amazing that things move so fast in this part of the process. April will be here before we know it!

Go Broncos!

Hope everyone enjoys watching the Broncos win the Superbowl today! 

Click the picture to see how Brian transformed this generic cozy coupe into a Broncos-mobile and the paintings he did for the room.