Where Baby?

It took about 34 hours to get here from the time of our wait for our first flight until the time we were settled into our bed in Fuzhou. 4 cities, 3 flights, long layovers, and a not so great airport experience in Beijing, and then we were here - the city where will meet Calli in person for the first time.

My mom and dad (Gigi and Peeps) got Calli a new stroller that is light weight and folds up very compact.  Perfect for air travel!  We gate checked it at every airport and pushed it around empty for hours.  Countless security personnel, airline agents, and even Chinese customs and immigration workers would look at Ashley, look at me, and look at the stroller with our carry-ons rested inside and ask - "Where baby?"  One person even said, "No baby?!"  Time and time it was as if they thought we had forgotten something important and they were reminding us.  The empty stroller even sparked a conversation with the agents in the United Club (yes, we were in the club thanks to Kent Evans - man it was nice in there!).  After we explained the empty stroller and explained that yes we had two biological children, and yes we were going to bring home our third daughter that we are adopting from China - the very interested and thoughtful agents wished us all the best.

Where is baby?  She is waiting.  Did we forget her?  Never.
How could we forget her?  All 34 hours she was on our minds.  Every time I opened and closed and gate checked the empty stroller I was thinking about it being filled - with Calli Fei Fei.  She has been on our minds since before this process started in January 2012.  Fei Fei has been on our minds since we first laid eyes on her back in November, when we received an update in December, and our final set of pictures in March.  She has been on our minds everyday for months.  And now we are here!  We are grateful for all the prayers for safe travel and all the prayers for our meeting tomorrow.  I spend a lot of my time in meetings.  Tomorrow is one of the most important meetings of my life.  27 hours from right now we will have a meeting in a hotel conference room where we will hold our daughter for the very first time.  I've done this twice before (in hospitals).  The circumstances are different but my heart and stomach feel the same.

We are here baby!  Safe and sound, thank God!

Calli's Quilt

“In China, when a baby is due, friends and family offer swatches of cloth and good wishes to the new mother so she can sew a “100 Good Wishes” quilt. The red thread used to stitch it is a traditional symbol of the connection between those destined to be together. Adoptive parents from the United States have embraced this tradition, which busies their hands with a project and soothes their hearts while they wait.” (From Waiting For May by Janet Morgan Stoeke)

 

About a month ago, I decided I wanted to make a quilt to take with us to China for Calli. I had read about this Chinese tradition, so I decided to make one of these for her. Here is the email we sent to our family:

 

To our family:

We need your help with a project we are working on for Calli Faith. We would like to create a traditional Chinese “Bai Jia Bei,” or 100 Good Wishes quilt to take with us to China when we pick her up. Our hope is that this blanket will be something she can attach to, feel secure with, and in the long run she will come to understand that it is made up of fabric given by members of her new family who love her and have prayed for her for a long time!

So if you would like to, please send us a swatch of fabric along with a short note to Calli or prayer for her written on an index card size of paper. We will cut some of the fabric to include in the quilt and then we will attach a small part of the fabric to the card and create a book for her showing where all the pieces of her quilt have come from. The fabric can be something that has been meaningful to you, us, or our family, or it can be just something you like!

The catch is that we would love to take this with us when we travel to China, hopefully in early April. So we need to begin collecting all the swatches and notes soon. If you would like to mail it to us, you are welcome to do that, or we will be in Ft. Worth the weekend of March 15^th, and if you can get them to Alisa, Anita, or Lisa before then, we’ll be seeing them that weekend and can get them then. Thank you so much for helping us with this! We are excited to bring Calli home to her new family and teach her all about the history and legacy of our sweet families. We love you!

 

We started to receive scraps of fabric from all our family members. It was so fun to see what everyone sent and to read the notes they wrote.

 

Once we had all the squares cut, we laid them out to start arranging them.

 

I included some fabric from my wedding dress...

 ...and from my yellow blanket I slept with growing up. Randy put some fabric from his favorite Garfield sheets in the quilt.

We love the way it looks! And each piece is special to us. My plan is to put a separate scrap of each fabric next to the note for Calli from whoever sent that piece into a book. Then she will know where each one came from and be able to always read the notes from her new family! There are pieces in the quilt from all our parents, all three sisters, Gracie, Evy and Oliver, all four of our grandmothers, Randy's papaw, Randy's aunts Brenda and Kathy, my aunt Donna, Michelle, and my Great Aunt Doris. My granny sent tons of scraps from clothes she and mom made for Alden and me when we were younger. Lindsey helped me get started and let me use some of her fabric, so there are a couple of pieces from her quilting stash that I loved. Then, Kendall, Cooper and I went and picked out some new fabrics that we loved to represent Calli's new home with us. The girls also helped me pick out the backing, a soft pink flannel.

So, this was my very first quilt. I have never made one before! I even had to relearn how to use a sewing machine. Growing up, I used to sew with my Granny in the summers on her machine, but I haven't touched one since probably middle school. I had a lot of fun relearning how to sew and also learning for the first time how to quilt!

 I had lots of help along the way from my mom, my granny, Debbie Erskine, Kathy Pickering, Tammy Flack, Carlette Madary, and Lindsey Hiatt. I was so thankful for their experience! It is for sure not perfect - very far from it - but it's finished and I am pretty proud of it. Jen Armstrong said she'd help me bind it when I get home, and she told me that the quilter's motto is "finished is better than perfect." That definitely applies here!

The girls had fun "helping" me along the way, too. And on Monday, two days before we left for China, I finished! Here is the finished product. I can't wait to wrap Calli up in it and snuggle with her! Tomorrow!!

Kendall and Cooper fly to Ft. Worth!

Yesterday began our journey to China and to Calli! Well, our physical journey - we feel like we've been on this whole journey for over a year now!! The girls were so excited because they were getting to fly to Ft. Worth with us where we dropped them off to stay with all the grandparents for two weeks.

We were pretty much packed and ready to go by Tuesday night. Wednesday when the girls woke up, they had some breakfast and then took baths before their big flight. Kendall drew this picture and I loved it - that's all four of us, then an airplane and then that's Calli on the far left. She said, "We're going to get her!"

Michelle met us because she was taking us to the airport and we all went to Chick fil A one last time before we left.

 Look at all that luggage! Three suitcases going with us, two carry-ons and a stroller, and then one suitcase for the girls and a carry-on apiece. Not too bad for two weeks around the world!

Michelle drove us to the airport and took one more picture of all of us before she left. Thanks Michelle!! We love you!

I wish I could even convey how excited these two were. They were so funny - they were just giddy. Cooper kept screaming with excitement all the way up 288, "We ah-wuh getting CLOSER!!!" They were so excited.

Our flight was delayed two hours! Kind of crazy to have a 2 hour delay on a 1 hour flight. That was just more fun for the girls, because it gave them more time to run around the airport, see all there was to see, watch the airplanes come in and out, and play with all the goodies they brought in their backpacks.

 Mrs. Melissa and Mr. Paul even brought them lots of fun things to do on the plane before we left on Wednesday! They had fun coloring and playing on their Leapster.

Snuggling under Calli's quilt. More on this in a later post - but I was super excited to finish it in time and very thankful for all of the family and friends who helped put it together!!

Finally on the plane! I think this picture pretty much sums up Cooper's excitement.

We started out sitting 3 and 1 but then decided to sit 2 and 2: Cooper by the window with me and then Kendall by the window in front of us with Randy. They did great on the flight! Never got scared, loved looking out the window, loved the tray table, and spent more time coloring. They were really so great the whole day and we had so much fun on our adventure!

 Last night we had dinner at Pops' and Kiki's, Gigi, Granny and Papas came by to see us, and then we put the girls to bed and went to bed ourselves. We had to leave their house at 3:30 this morning, so it was a very short night. Now we are in Chicago on a 4 hour layover, waiting to board our LONG flight to Beijing. Our next post will be from China! Let's do this!!

We're Coming to Get You!

Kendall asked if she could make a card for Calli yesterday. This is what she wrote. I love it!

It's today, Calli!! We're coming today!!!

We're going to China!

This past Friday I noticed a lot of travel approvals were being issued to people in my adoption group online. Randy and I just knew ours was coming that day. When the end of the work day came and went, we decided to just enjoy our weekend and figured we would hear something early the next week.

But then, Saturday I checked my email mid-afternoon and had an email saying our travel approval had just been delivered to our agency's office! On a Saturday! We were so surprised - I just cried and cried! This meant we would be leaving SOON! I posted a status update on Facebook that said "My water just broke! Aka...we got travel approval!"

Our coordinator said she would be applying for our consulate appointment Sunday night (Monday morning China time) and we should have it confirmed by Tuesday and would be able to book our flights! Monday we didn't hear anything - until 9:30 that night! We got an email from her that said our appointment had been confirmed for April 15! We're so thankful for our agency and coordinators who seem to work all the time!

The consulate appointment is the last thing you do in China before you are able to travel home. That is where Calli's visa will be issued. You are allowed to leave after 7pm the following night, so this information was what we needed to be able to book our flights.

It also means that we leave NEXT WEEK! One week from today we will fly to DFW with the girls, where they will stay with all their grandparents for two weeks. Then our long day of flying begins the next morning at 5:45!

We will have Calli in our arms on Sunday, April 7. Just writing that makes me tear up! This has all made me so emotional! I am excited, and I also feel like I may throw up many times each day!

After this long year of waiting waiting waiting for a million different steps, all the sudden we are in hurry up mode! Packing, booking flights, calling credit card companies, packing, making lists, downloading VPNs, packing, making sure we're caught up at work and around the house are all consuming our time, as well as spending quality time with the girls before we leave them for two weeks. My thought the past few days has been that I want to be as present as possible with the girls as our family's world is about to change dramatically.

This is happening!!!

New Pictures of Calli!

We received the last update we will get on Calli this past weekend! Our agency requested our final update back in January when we got our LOA, so I have been stalking my email every day since then! We haven't had new pictures since December and we have just been dying to see our sweet girl's face again!

She is getting so big! Her hair is growing, which we knew Kendall would like. :) She is 18 months old now and we also were given updated measurements. She is 24lbs and 31 inches tall, which puts her in 18-24 month clothes. She is in a shoe size 5.5 or 6 and she has 6 teeth! We can finally start picking out clothes and getting her packed!

She is all bundled up - that is just the way they do things in China. She lives in southern China, and it is typically about 70-75 degrees there during the day right now. Of course that must mean scarf weather! :)

We think she must still be living with her foster family because this looks to be the same place she was when we got the pictures in December. Sometimes children will be sent back to the orphanages when the orphanage gets word that a family has their LOA, and we weren't sure if that would be the case for Calli or not. We just know so very little! But we are thankful to see she is in the same place currently.

So what's next? Well, we are on Day 8 of our Travel Approval wait! Those have been coming in anywhere from as early as day 7 all the way to like 4 weeks. We are certainly hoping to be on the shorter end of that wait! We would love to hear that we have TA this week, apply for a Consulate Appointment, get our visas and plane tickets next week and leave as soon as April 4. It all depends on when we get this TA though, so pray that that comes quickly!! We are more than ready to go get our little girl.
Also, please continue to pray that God will prepare her heart for when we come to get her. I know I've mentioned this before, but this will probably be a very terrifying experience for her and we are praying that her foster parents, or whoever is caring for her, are showing her the pictures we sent of our family, telling her that a "mama" and "baba" are coming for her, and helping prepare her heart. We know it's best for her in the long run, but in the short term I just get so sad thinking about taking her from the place she's known most of her life and doing anything that would make her scared. Please pray with us about this.
So that's all for the final update! These are the last pictures we'll see before we hold her in our arms! Can't wait for that day!

Update - Article 5

It is March! We are really hoping to travel in April, so to be just one month away is super exciting to us! I thought I would give a quick update as to what's going on with our paperwork.

We received notification on February 13 that our second round of immigration paperwork was approved. This approval was titled "Petition to Classify Convention Adoptee as an Immediate Relative." Love that! It was specific for us and for Li Xiao Fei so we are matched now in the eyes of Homeland Security.

Next that approval went to the National Visa Center, they put it with some other forms and then cabled it to the US Consulate in Guangzhou, China, where Calli's visa will be issued when we finalize her adoption there!

Once it got to the consulate, then our Article 5 drop-off happened. (I'm still not sure where it was dropped off and where it is picked up - this step is confusing to me).  The Article 5 is an official document from the US Embassy that lets the CCCWA (the child welfare agency in China that oversees all adoptions) know that Calli's paperwork for her visa is good to go. Our scheduled pick-up date for that is next Tuesday, March 12. Once we get that, then we will wait for the CCCWA to give us our travel approval!

Travel approvals are taking anywhere from 10 days to 3 weeks to come. We are certainly praying for the shortest amount of time! Once we get our travel appointment, we'll request a consulate appointment date, get confirmation of that, and then book our flights! We'll hopefully fly out just a week or two after we get our consulate appointment.

So in summary: (you're welcome) :)
Article 5 pick up (next Tuesday)
Travel Approval and Consulate Appointment (hopefully just 2-3 weeks)
Travel! (1-2 weeks after that)

We are still hoping to leave that first week of April, but we'll see! Not sure about avoiding the trade fair at this point, but we know God has that all in his hands.

And the biggest thing we're still waiting on: an update on Calli!!! Our agency has requested it but so far we haven't seen it. We are just so wanting to see new pictures and get her measurements. The last pictures we have of her are from mid-December. Praying that update comes this week!