Two new pictures today of Ali.  First one about broke our hearts.  She is so pretty…

We are realizing that she is tall and thin, and you can start to see that in this next picture:

Kelly has decided it is time to go shopping for yellow clothing!  It looks good.  Britt just thought the top was cute.  Whatever…

Here I am this past week signing the US I800 form basically telling the government that we are adopting Ali.

And here we are with the official Chinese form acknowledging that Ali is ours.  Long time in coming …

We are sending off for VISA’s for Kelly, Brittany, Abby, and myself.  Always nice when we are moving forward!

Cameron

Been a very long time since I updated.  And, pretty much been a long time of nothing!  As a little background, this year China made a new policy that, if you had been to China on an adoption within the last 18 months, you could reuse most of your dossier.  Since we just went to get Caleb last year, this option was available to us.  We thought long and hard about this because if we have learned anything, we have learned that the “easier” way in international adoptions is rarely the “quickest” way!  But, at the same time, it seemed like the prudent choice since 80% of the paperwork would already be approved and there were less documents that China could have issue with.  So, back in March, we decided to reuse our current dossier.

Well … THAT was a mistake!    What we didn’t realize at that point was the problems this policy was going to cause for the Chinese government.  It appears that they didn’t really have a plan in place for how to process these reused dossier’s, so they basically sat in a pile on someone’s desk for several months.  We have tried, and our agency has tried, for months now to get some activity on these dossier’s and it wasn’t until recently that things started to move.  Today, finally, after a long wait, we received or Letter of Approval from the Chinese government.  This basically states that they have accepted our petition and that Ali is ours … once we jump through all the additional hoops required of both governments.  But, the clock is now moving again and it looks promising that we will be traveling sometime in October!  Yay!  We are now applying for our VISA’s and getting the additional documentation needed for the U.S. Government.

On a side note, we went to Michigan earlier this month and met Leah, a girl that is Ali’s age and who was her friend in the orphanage.  They live in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and we stopped on our way out to the sand dunes to meet her mother and her.  It was nice to have a person who actually knows Ali and someone who Ali can meet with here in the U.S. when she gets here.  Brittany and Leah hit is off right away (go figure) and seemed fast friends before the lunch date was over!

Now that there is POSITIVE news and some movement, I will try to update things on a more frequent basis.  But, you know that once we are actually in China, I will barrage you with information!  So you should enjoy the periods of rest you are getting right now!

Cameron

P.S.  A big note of appreciation to Joe Kirby.  Love the Kriby’s, even if Ginger tends to threaten violence periodically (she doesn’t like complainers …).  For all of our adoptions, Joe, as an attorney, has notarized documents for us thereby saving us an extra step needed if we were to use a regular notary.  This past week, on the day he was leaving on vacation, he fit us in to his busy day at work to notarize a last minute paper that China was requesting.  He has saved us so much time during these adoptions that I wanted to make sure I spent a few minutes publically thanking him…