Shamian Island... and happy new year!

Just one more quick update before we head to Yangshuo. Here are some pictures from Shamian Island this morning. We met one of the nicest people at a shop near by the hotel. The people we meet continue to surprise us with how nice they are.
 
In Yangshuo I don't expect us to get to email as easily so this may be our last update for a few days. Hope everyone is having a great start to the new year.

---

Get the power of Windows + Web with the new Windows Live. Get it now!

Hong Kong Mansions and More...

When someone uses the word "mansion" in Hong Kong, be sure to have them tell you exactly what they mean. Our first night was spent at the "Mirador Mansion", specifically, "The Cosmic Guest House". (Ok, maybe this part of the name should have clued us in.). I do not know how to explain it, so we will include a picture here. Although, we were initially worried as we entered, our room was very clean and the proprietors were extraordinarily nice and helpful. And we were able to get some much needed sleep.

The next morning, we started our international experience by sitting ourselves down in a Starbucks and ordering lattes. Not such an adventurous start, but a good adjustment activity. Actually, Hong Kong is a great place to adjust since it feels very European and most everyone speaks English. Also, it is very easy to get around, very clean and organized. We went to Victoria Peak and did a short hike. It is beautiful in the high rise city sort of way. Found a great place for lunch, (more adventurous this time). We could not identify some of the veggies in my dish, however, we enjoyed it all except for the ones that looked like deflated balloons.

In the afternoon, we took a train into Southern China. We arrived in Guangzhou around 6 in the evening. All went very smoothly as the hotel van picked us up. We settled in to the hotel, The White Swan. It is the same hotel we will stay at when we meet Isla and quite a contrast from The Cosmic Guest House. Found a Thai restaurant for dinner.

The thing that strikes me the most here is how nice and how polite everyone has been. Exceptional, really.  Ok, off to breakfast and then we fly to Guilin/Yangshou area for 4 days.

---

Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search.

Hong Kong @ Night

First pictures from Hong Kong. Now to some food and sleep.
--------------------------
Sent using BlackBerry

Enroute to China

Even getting up at 3am we still just made our flight from Reno to San Francisco. We now have a 5 hour layover in SF before we buckle up for a 15 hour flight to Hong Kong. Ugg.

Last bit of packing

We are finishing packing today. We leave for China tomorrow!
Bottles - check
Baby outfits - check
Camera - check
Diapers - check
Swim diapers - check (?? its 11 degrees outside ??)
We hope that everyone had a wonderful christmas holiday. We did. Thank you to our 'Frosty' neighbors for a great christmas dinner!
Keep checking for more posts. Our next post will include pictures from China. Love to all.

---

The best games are on Xbox 360. Click here for a special offer on an Xbox 360 Console. Get it now!

Travel details

Here are our general travel details so everyone can keep track of us. We will be sending family a more detailed itinerary with contact number etc.

29 December - Fly to Hong Kong
30 December - Stay in Hong Kong
31 December - Stay in Guangzhou
1 - 4 January - Stay in Yangshou
5 - 17 January - Stay in Guangzhou
18 January - Fly home

CONFIRMATION STATION!!

Our dates are now all confirmed! We meet our daughter on January 7th, 2008!!!
Only 3 and a half weeks to go!

Consulate date set, travel dates nearly final!

We heard back yesterday that our consulate date had been accepted. That is a very good sign that our dates will not change. Here is what it looks like.

Depart for China on Dec. 29th.
Dec. 31- Jan 5 explore Guillin / Yangshuo
Jan 5th Arrive in Guangzhou
Jan 7th Finally meet our daughter!!!
Jan 16th US Consulate appointment
Jan 18th Fly home!

Travel Approval Received!

Ok. Finally we received our travel approval from China. That was 3 weeks to the day since our agency mailed back the letter of acceptance.

Now with our invitation to travel to China our agency needs to apply for an American Consulate date. Once we get that (should be this week) we will know for certain when we are traveling.

At this point it looks like we will be traveling in the beginning of January and returning by mid January. We had hoped to get Isla sooner but we were not lucky enough to get our approval in time.

Keep your fingers crossed for us. Hopefully we will be in China with Isla in our arms in less than 4 weeks!

How long must we wait!!??

Hopefully this post will be followed shortly by a post that says "Yeah, we are leaving soon". At this point we are still waiting for the travel approval letter from China. The wait feels longer than the first 2 1/2 years even though it has only been 28 days since we sent the acceptance letter back to our agency.

The good news is that most everyone who received referrals in November now has travel dates and most of them are traveling in early December (we even know of one individual who already has her daughter). The bad news is we haven't received ours yet. :(

I (Will) can't tell you how jealous I am of the families who are leaving this weekend and next week to pick up their daughters. We wish them all a safe journey and that they all find their daughters in good health.

So we will be sure to update the blog as soon as we know when we are going to meet Isla. We are still hopeful we can travel in December but are preparing ourselves for the possibility we will have to wait until January.

Love to all our family and friends. Thanks for all the wonderful gifts for Isla and support for us.

Celebrating with friends!

WOW! Sending out a huge thank you to all of our friends who celebrated Isla's (soon-to-be)homecoming with me yesterday!! Special thanks to Stacie, Christie, Judy, and Kim for hostessing a magnificent "shower". And hugs to Chef Didier for the scrumptious and beautiful pastries.
We are overwhelmed with your generosity! Isla is so lucky to be surrounded with such loving friends. I can't tell you how much we appreciate everything. It was great to see you all and I can not wait until Isla gets to know all her new friends.

Isla Update.....and waiting for TA

We are finally getting back to our blog! Several house projects and setting up for Isla has kept us busy lately!! We have made lots of progress and are ready to bring our new daughter home!

We received the packet giving us more information on our daughter back on November 8th. The packet contained a translated developmental assessment and general info about Isla ZiShao. She is described as active, restless, and liking to play outdoors...hmmm, remind you of anyone? Her favorite activity is listed as "teasing others". She sounds perfect for our family! Isla's development looks great. Her assessment was done at about 6 months of age (on June 12th, Barb's b-day!). She is a bit small for her age, but she appears to be growing well. Big thanks to Dottoressa K. for reviewing the medical info and starting a growth chart!

We are now waiting (not so patiently) for our TA (travel approval )from China. Several new parents who received their referral at the same time we did have received their TA and are preparing to travel later this week!! Hopefully, our agency will soon be calling us with our travel dates. If possible, we will leave a bit early to get in some travel within China. The beautiful area with the limestone karsts is just north of where Isla lives. We would love to see that area and check out the climbing. The soonest we could leave is 10 days from now! On the other hand, it could still be another 3or 4weeks. Hope that we hear soon, we want to go and meet Isla ZiShao as soon as possible!

Package day?

Today is the day we expect to receive our package. We will keep you posted.
1:30pm addition: We discovered that we will have to wait until tomorrow (Thursday) to receive Isla's package! We can not wait to learn more about her! Stay tuned.....

Update: We received the packet from our agency yesterday. We have already read it several times. Since I will be away on a business trip through next Wednesday we are trying get everything in order to send an acceptance reply to our Agency.

Where is Isla? Yangxi SWI.

Isla is in the western Guangdong province in an orphanage in the city of Yangxi. Since receiving our call from the agency on Friday we have gotten many posts and emails from others who adopted from the same Social Welfare Institute (SWI). The information we have been directed to on the web has been tremendous. Knowing where your daughter is and that she is well cared for is great peace of mind... especially when you can hardly stop thinking about her enough to get some sleep.

The Research-China website is a particularly good site for information about the SWI. It even explains why Isla (Zi Shao) was given the last name of Yang Xi while her friends have the last name of Song.

To find Yangxi on a map of China you first need to locate Guangzhou, capital of the Guangdong province and one of the three major cities on the Pearl River Delta (the other two are Hong Kong and Macau).Once you have found Guangzhou you have found the Guangdong province. If you follow the coastline west you first see Macau at the edge of the delta and will eventually run into Yangjiang which is very near Yangxi.
Yangxi is only a short distance west of Yangjiang.

Introducing Isla Zi Shao

We can't begin to express how excited we are right now. This is Isla. She was born in the south of China in the Guangdong province on Dec 2oth 2006 and is currently in an orphanage in Yangxi county.

Enjoying a peaceful excursion in the country side.

Isla taking the directors role at the orphanage.

Booked after being caught attempting the V0 crib problem.

We received a call from our agency yesterday at 1pm. I was at work and Barb was at home so we couldn't be together when we learned who our daughter would be. Fortunately we were able to have a conference call though a phone is not easy to hug.

Our agency received a package that contains more info but its all in Chinese and they will need to translate it before we learn more about Isla. This should happen early next week and they hope to have the translations to us by midweek.

It was wonderful share the news with everyone yesterday... and we are still calling more of Isla's new friends and family today.

Update: Sorry to remove the pitures. Once we receive our packet we realized we were not supposed to post to pictures online. Family / friends please contact us if you haven't seen her yet.

What to expect when you are expecting... a referral from China

Our best guess is that our referral will arrive at our agency on Monday, November 5th. That is excellent news, but it is going to be tough to not think about it all weekend!

The referral is the first time we get to see a picture of our soon to be daughter (or son). It is a package that contains information about our child-to-be including their name (given by the orphanage), where they are from in China, their age, weight, basic medical info, and of course, a few pictures. Our agency will forward the package to us which will probably take an additional day or two ( in the meantime they will send us an email that includes scans of the pictures).

Our first obligation is to post the pictures on this blog for everyone to see and make a lot of phone calls. After that we will have a doctor look over the medical information that was provided. Once we have reviewed all the information, we will send back an acceptance letter to China and will begin to wait once again.

This wait should be much shorter than before. The next information we will need will be our Travel Approval (TA) from China. That will tell us exactly when we can go to China. This has recently been taking 2-5 weeks to come after the referral has been accepted. The TA will contain one very important date... the Gotcha Date, the date we pick up Isla!

I bet you are asking "So when will that be?" or at least that is the question we think about a lot. Like the rest of this process, we don't know for certain when the gotcha date will be! It is very possible that we will have Isla in our arms by Christmas!

The first pictures of Isla are almost here!

Well it has been an exciting morning. I have attached the link to the ChinaAdoptTalk website home of the Rumor Queen. The first news we woke up to was that referrals had arrived in the US and that they would go through the 8th of December (we are logged in as of the 5th of December 2005). As you can guess that was a pretty exciting headline to wake up too.

If you check the site right now who knows what you will see, but as of the last update (#3) the referrals have not arrived. :( RQ_they-are-here

Hopefully we will hear in the next few days and will be able to post some pictures of Isla for you to see!

Welcome - 欢迎

Welcome to the site of Isla's first (and ours for that matter) Blog. If all goes well we will be posting the first pictures of Isla here by the end of next week!


Needless to say we are excited beyond words at the moment... especially with all of the waiting over the past three years. Yep it has been two months short of three years since we started the adoption process. For twenty-five months, a stack of dossiers has been sitting on a desk in China while we wait for ours to float to the top when our daughters name gets called.

Its amazing to think somewhere in China our daughter is unknowingly waiting for us to come get her, probably from a place we have never heard of and can't correctly pronounce.

From what we know we will be leaving from Guangzhou (bottom of the map) which is just inland from Hong Kong and Macao.

In Guangzhou and the south of China, Cantonese is the primary language, but the majority of Chinese speak Mandarin ("the common language". We have been learning a little Mandarin.

Not far from Guangzhou are some of the most striking landscapes in China. The country side is filled with karsts, giant limestone formations that shoot up from the lush green country side and are only passable from the rivers that have steadily carved routes through them for thousands of years.

If we don't find Isla learning to rock climb around here we may find her further up north.



Beijing is the capital and the second largest city in China (behind Shanghai). It has been the center of China's political, cultural and economic well being for 800 years.

Long before that, in the 5th century BC ,the Chinese had begun construction of the Great Wall to keep out the invaders from the north.


The Great Wall is the largest man made structure, longer than the continental US is wide! It is, however, only a myth that the Great Wall is visible from the moon. This myth was edited from Chinese textbooks in 2003, after China's first astronaut failed to spot the wall from space.

Who knows where we will go and who we will meet to find our daughter in China. All we know is we can't wait to finally meet her and have the chance to be family to her!