LOA!!!!!

I am shouting it from our rooftop:  LOA!!!!!  After 138 very hard days, the paper copy of our LOA has arrived from Ch!!  Our agency told us last week it could be 2-4 weeks from being “matched” to getting the hard copy of the LOA, and I was a bit distraught about that.  I was hoping it was going to arrive today, and it did!!  Now, the true race is on!!  I will be doing several blog posts in the coming days with each step we complete.  There will be a lot going on in the next 3-4 weeks  (several steps which somewhat overlap each other), so I’ll try to break it down for anyone who is interested in all the blood, sweat, and tears that go in to adoption.

First step:  Our first step is to sign the LOA.  Our agency is overnighting the LOA to us.  David and I will meet at a copy shop tomorrow evening to sign it, make a copy, and then overnight it back to our agency (we are meeting at a copy shop near the local fedex facility, which is on the other side of town, so we can get it back to our agency by Wed).  Last night I printed some additional paperwork that has to be signed/initialed and sent back with our LOA (specifically, the care plan we submitted back with our Letter of Intent as well as all the pages of Evan’s file that was sent to us back in March have to be initialed by us).  I also filled out our Visa applications so we can get our visas to Ch.  I will probably wait a week or two before we submit those due to timing (I’ll explain that later).

Once our agency receives our LOA on Wednesday, they will overnight that along with all our immigration paperwork (i800, ds230, etc) that I completed back in May to USCIS.  That will begin the final immigration approval needed from the US for us to adopt him.  It will take about 3 weeks to complete all of that and obtain all the approvals needed from them.

Travel timeline:  Travel to Ch occurs approximately 8-12 weeks after the paper copy of the LOA arrives in the states, with the average being 10 weeks.  Given the holidays and what not going on in Ch in October, my guess is that we’ll travel sometime in November to get Evan.

Anyway, now that we have LOA, we can give out a few more details about our son Evan.  Before this point they said we could share pictures and video, but highly advised us not to post anything about his location.  Now that we have LOA we can post a little more.  He is located in what appears to be a great orphanage in Datong City, Shanxi province.  I’m not sure if it’s a Half the Sky orphanage—if not, it’s modeled after a Half the Sky orphanage (I’ve read things that say it is a HTS, and things that have said it’s just modeled after HTS).  Datong City is northwest of Beijing.  It is a well known coal mining town.  They have very cold winters (and we’ll be traveling there when it’s cold), and comfortable summers.  Here is a great video about Evan’s orphanage, specifically the foster parents associated with his orphanage:  http://www.cncworld.tv/news/v_show/24253_Countryside_foster_mothers.shtml

I’ll update again in a couple of days after everything is signed and on it’s way to USCIS.