Today was the big day…Lily’s Gotcha Day! In the adoption community, Gotcha Day is the day you get your adopted child. Today went so smooth. I will spare you the blah, blah, blah…and get to what you really way….the photos!
This is the first time we saw her. She walked out from the playroom to meet us.
Back at our hotel room she is playing with a few toys and eating a few snacks.
Girls are at church with their Gar Gar, our bags are packed, phones’ charged, packing list thrown away…and we are heading to the airport!
We will be meeting Lily for the first time in about 30 hours. Please be praying for us. For the first time EVER in the 13-14 years that I’ve known Travis, he said to me this morning that he was nervous!! That was me yesterday, but today I’m just super excited!!
Hailey’s first word to me this morning we that it was OK is I didn’t bring her a present home, because I was bringing her Lily!!
Thanks for all your love and support and we can’t wait to introduce Lily to all of you!Well, we will be leaving our house in less than 24 hours. It’s hard to believe it is finally here! 11 months ago we officially started the adoption process, and it’s coming to an end. We are so thankful God has led us on the journey. We are beyond thrilled to meet Lily!
I really wanted to show you Lily and Sydney’s new little room before we leave. This used to be our guest room with blue walls and white bedding. Now it is the most precious little room I’ve ever seen. The girls loved being apart of transforming it into a room for the 2 little sisters.
Here we go…
After taking all the furniture out and painting the room lavender, Travis, Madison and Hailey put the bed back together and cleaned it up.
We got a new ceiling fan, curtain rod, and curtains…
Once the new bedding was on the bed and baths were had, we had to do a little playing on Sydney and Lily’s new bed…
There’s plenty of room in this bed for Lily. The 3 girls all slept in there together that night.
After the final touches here is the new room. The dresser, lamp and picture frame were all painted white to match.
Lily and Sydney’s monogram was places above the bed. I repainted Sydney’s letters to match the new room, and made Lily’s name in cursive.
And changed the fabric on the window seat cushion.
We are thrilled with the way their room turned out. Lily will be in our room for awhile to help her bond to us, and Sydney will stay in the room with her big sisters for while. We aren’t sure exactly when they will move in this girly fairy room, but I’ll be sure to show you pictures of their first night in here.
Just wanted to share that we received our Travel Approval yesterday. Within a couple hours of that we had booked our flights and hotel room…and we are getting ready! Travis and I will leave here at noon on Sunday and fly to Guangzhou. Sunday night we plan to have a nice quiet dinner and good night’s sleep before we get Lily on Monday. (I can’t believe I’m about to have my 4th daughter!!) We will be in Guangzhou through Thursday, and then will head home that afternoon. We would love your prayers for our time there and also for the M, H and S who will be at home while we are away. Travis’ mom is here from the States and will be keeping them those several days. We are so thankful for her and all our dear friends here who will be helping her.
So, let the countdown begin…3 1/2 days til Lily is in our arms forever!!
I’m freakin’ out!! We found out tonight that our Travel Approval was mailed to us this afternoon! The awesome thing is that it was mailed to our house here in China. (Usually the CCAA mails it to our agency in the states and then the agency has to mail it back across the pond to us…which equals about 7-10 days of wasted time in the mail) But the sweet compassionate CCAA agreed to mail ours directly to us!!
So….the bottom line is we hope to have precious Lily in our arms this time next week!!!!! I finally think I know when my due date it…Monday, November 15th!
The timing of Lily’s arrive couldn’t be more perfect…Gar Gar (Travis’ mom) arrived here last night and will be here to stay with the big girls while we go get the little sis.
Well, I gotta go get packing…or something!
Well, while we are waiting on Lily I have been trying to get her new room decorated. I’ve been really proud of all my inexpensive ways to convert our guest room into 2 little sisters’ bedroom. I have lots of pictures of the entire room, but I’m not quite ready to unveil it.
Today, I was so proud of my new addition. What I’m going to show you will not be that impressive to those of you living in the West, but to those of you living in the East, I think you are really going to like it.
This is one of those examples of something you see everyday in the U.S., but I’ve never seen here. OK…enough already…Sydney and Lily’s monogram on their new wall:
I had been trying to figure out how to put their monogram on their wall for awhile. I knew I wouldn’t be painting it. I had considered ordering it on Etsy and having someone bring it in, but that just seemed like a pain and I didn’t want to spend the money. Then I thought I would try one of our local print shops and see if they could do it. (For those of you picturing Kinko’s, you should scratch that imagine, because our “local print shop” looks nothing like that.) Anyway, this afternoon I walked over to the print shop and explained to them what I wanted. I showed the lady where to download the font I wanted and 10 minutes later I was walking home with my wall art. I immediately called my very artistic friend, Lori, and asked her if she could help me hang it.
She came right over and 15 minutes later I had a cute monogram on the wall, and was on my way to pick up the big girls from school.
This is one of the things that actually turned out to be easier and much cheaper than it would have been in the States. I think I’ve found a new hobby and will be creating some new things with my new find.
I promise I will post pictures of the entire new room soon. As far as a Lily update goes, we are trying to wait patiently for our Travel Approval. Once we have our TA we will be heading to pick Lily up!!! We are really hoping that we will be able to pick her up in about 2 weeks! Stay tuned for pictures of her new room…and hopefully, news that we have received our Travel Approval!
That is what I feel like these days. I feel like I’m hugely pregnant but have no idea when we may meet our new little baby.
We have one more grueling step before we can go pick up Lily. We are waiting for our last documents from the US government to be delivered to the CCAA in Beijing so they can issue our Travel Approval. Once we have the TA was can go pick up Lily!!!! A week or so ago there were some reports of other adoptive families getting their TA’s in 4 days! This process usually takes 2-3 weeks, so I started freaking out about not having things done. So, last week I started thinking we may get Lily on November 1st or the 8th…now I’m thinking it may be more like the 15th. Either way, I’m dying!
In the meantime, we have converted our guest room into Sydney and Lily’s new room. It is super cute (I’ll post pictures soon) and our family had a great time working on it. It is just sitting empty waiting on those cute little sisters to occupy it. (It will actually be awhile before they move into it, since Lily will sleep in our room for awhile to help her attach to us.)
I’ve also been trying to decide what size clothes Lily will wear and then get out what i think will fit her. Based on the measurements we have been given (which may or not be accurate), I think she may be wearing 18 months clothes. After checking with others who have adopted children from China, I think that may be a pretty generous guess…I think she may actually be wearing 12 month clothes. Who knows?!
These are just a sampling of the questions that fill my mind and heart every moment of the day. Praying she comes quick…I don’t think I can wait much longer!A few weeks ago we had the privileged of meeting 2 people who we have known and been working closely with for the past 10 months…the President and China Director of our adoption agency. They were in China meeting with their staff and holding some seminars in various cities about adoption for expats. We have been so satisfied with our experience with them that we invited them to come to our city to do one of their seminars.
On my way to pick them up for dinner, it hit me that i felt like i was going on a blind date. Travis was coming directly from work so it was just me going to pick them up. The thing much different about this “blind date” was that they already knew everything about us…and i do mean everything!
We had a fantastic time with Jim and Josh Savley at dinner and then at the adoption seminar. It was great to have so many other expat families attend and be very interested in growing their families by adoption.
This post is a little behind, since the Chinese celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival in late September. I can’t really tell you what the Mid-Autumn Festival is all about but usually family and friend get together for a big meal and then afterwards go check out the moon (which is always full on the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival). Unfortunately in the city we live in we usually can’t see the moon for the “clouds”.
Another major part of the holiday is to give and eat mooncakes. Most people don’t even really like them, but just have fun being apart of the tradition of giving and eating them.
This year we went with some new friend to a restaurant near the center of the city that is actually on a bridge. We only managed to get a few pictures before our battery went dead.
