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!