Calli's Room is Ready!

I was so excited to finish all the little details in Calli's room over the weekend! We hung the letters Val and Gigi made her for Christmas and love the way they look over her bed. We also hung the puzzle picture and I just love looking at it.

We decided for now to leave the side off the crib and just see how she is most comfortable sleeping when she gets home. In her bed is the Chinese doll the girls and I got her, the Build-A-Bear dog Val and her girls got, and the teddy bear Aunt Maegan got her for Christmas.

 

More of her things in the window - her baby book, a few other books, the "Little Sister" shirt I got her that matches a couple of "Big Sister" shirts the girls have, her Tiny Toms from Pops and Kiki for Christmas, the purse Randy bought her in Cambodia, and a soft photo album I made with pictures of Randy, Kendall, Cooper and me in it to take with us to China.

Not sure if we'll need the changing table or not. A lot of times children in foster care and orphanages in China are potty-trained early. We'll see!

Cooper and Kendall sleep together every night now. I only separate them for naptime because Cooper actually needs to nap and Kendall just has rest time, reading books in bed. So here is their room they share! 

This pictures is not great at all - I was just using my phone, but one side of the dresser has Cooper's things and one side has Kendall's. The picture in the middle is of Kendall, Cooper, Gracie and Evy.

We hung their baby pictures on the wall above and below their initial. 

So as far as rooms go, we're all situated! Just ready to bring that sweet third baby home! I will post an update soon on where we are in the process.

Our Puzzle is Finished!

Remember when we started this? Well it is finally finished! We are so in awe and humbled by how God has provided for Calli Faith's adoption. This puzzle has definitely become a reminder to us of how He has been faithful to provide and to carry us through the process of bringing her into our family.

 We bought a 1,000 piece puzzle and each piece was sold for $5. The names on the back of the pieces represent 80 different families, donations and help with three garage sales, five different grants, and  a Pampered Chef party.

 Two families sold cars and gave us what they made, two families gave us their tax return, an anonymous family gave us the change they collected for many months, staff of two different schools bought pieces, and many more gave sacrificially for Calli's adoption. Most of the pieces were bought one at a time with friends and family giving $5 here, $10 there. We are so overwhelmed with thanksgiving.

 Our family mission statement is "The Dane family mission is to impact God's kingdom by living and loving generously." We have been encouraged and inspired towards greater obedience and generosity by seeing that shown in the lives of our friends and family.

From the bottoms of our hearts, thank you for how you have helped bring our Calli-girl home. We can't wait to let her meet each of you!! God bless you!

LOA Day!

Our LOA was overnighted to us and arrived Monday!! We signed it, added our I800 application, some other paperwork, more copies of our passport and Randy took it right back to be overnighted back to our agency. They received it Tuesday morning and then they overnighted it straight to USCIS (Homeland Security). We should hear from them in about 2 weeks that they got it, and then get our approval from them shortly after. Exciting day!

To celebrate getting our LOA, Randy and I decided we should go out for Chinese food. This was our first time to eat Chinese food as a family! We had heard of a great place in Angleton but had never been there, so we decided to try that Monday night. It was delicious - we'll definitely be back! Michelle went with us, so we all took some pictures. :)

 

 

 And here is our official Letter of Acceptance from China! So, so exciting to be here!!

Letter of Acceptance!!!

We got a very exciting call Friday morning - our Letter of Acceptance from China arrived at our agency's office in Birmingham!! This is a huge, huge step and one we have been waiting for since we submitted our Letter of Intent to adopt Li Xiaofei, or as we are calling her around here lately, Baby Calli Fei Fei. :) Here are a few questions we have been asked lately and some answers.

What does the LOA mean?
It means that as far as the Chinese government is concerned, Li Xiaofei is no longer an orphan (!), but a part of the Dane family.  She will officially become our little girl 24 hours after she is placed in our arms, but this is as close as we will get before going over to China. 

So what happens now?
Before we sent our dossier to China, there was a step in there where we filled out a form called the I800a and sent it to USCIS (Homeland Security). We then got the approval back from them to bring an orphan from China home to our family. The next step now that we have the Letter of Acceptance is to send that letter along with another form, the I800, back to USCIS. They will take the original approval and then match it up with this LOA approval from China and match Li Xiaofei to our family. This allows her to be a part of our family and to be a US citizen upon her arrival home.

Another thing that happens now is that our agency requests a final update on Calli!! They will request new pictures as well as updated measurements so we can make sure we know what size clothes to bring for her. We are super excited about this step! We have only had the initial referral pictures and then the pictures we got in mid-December, so we are super, super pumped about new pictures to look at a million times a day!
When do we go get her? 
Our agency estimates that from getting your LOA to travel is about 10-12 weeks. Most of the adoptive parents who are in China now went from LOA to travel in about 2 months.  But, with Chinese New Year coming in a week and a half, that probably won't be the case for us. That puts us traveling around early April, probably.  We hope to get in and out and miss the trade fair in Guangzhou, which starts April 15.  Prices for everything, including hotels, nearly double during that time. That might not be possible, but that is our hope (and something you can be praying with us about!).

When will we have exact dates?To me, this is still the weirdest thing. Believe it or not, we will not know EXACTLY when we are going until about a week before we hop on a plane.  We will start to get a rough idea, but will not know exactly until we get a call that we have travel approval.  Then they will give us some rough dates and request a consulate appointment.  Then we will get a date, rush through some travel arrangements and be on our way.  Our agency arranges everything within China and we generally travel with a group, but getting there and back is on our own.

How can you be praying?
- As I mentioned, please pray about the timing of our trip. We would love to leave early April so we are in and out of Guangzhou before the trade fair and before prices for everything go up. We are trusting God for his timing on this!
- Pray for our sweet Calli Fei Fei. We are praying that God goes before us and prepares her heart to become part of our family. She turns 17 months old on Thursday the 31st, and will not have any idea as to what is happening to her. People always say that orphans are so lucky to get out of the orphanage and be part of a family and yes, she is absolutely very blessed, but she is also going to lose everything she knows, the language, the food, the smell, her crib, the only people she knows.  Pray that even now her caregivers can somehow prepare her for the changes coming her way and that she will be ready for us when we come.
- Pray for our family and for the girls as we prepare for this big adjustment to a family of 5. We are praying about Calli's attachment and for the girls as they welcome a new sister to our family. They pray for Calli every day and are so excited for her to come but this will be a big adjustment for everyone!

We're so thankful to be able to share our excitement with our friends and family. Thanks for following along and for celebrating and praying with us!! I wish this post had some new pictures with it, but hopefully we will have some soon!!

Answered Prayers

God has been so faithful to us on this journey to our sweet Calli Fei Fei. We have been blown away by how we have seen him answer our prayers. Our faith has grown, we have learned about praying big, bold prayers, and we have fallen more in love with our Heavenly Father who delights in giving good gifts to his children.

I posted back in June about the specific things we have felt led to pray for related to Calli's adoption. I wanted to make sure I documented how God has answered those prayers here in her blog. We are so thankful to look back and see how God has answered each of those God-sized prayers!

1. The first thing I said we were praying is that we would be able to complete the adoption debt-free. DONE! Through a combination of our savings, ways we have earned extra money, selling puzzle pieces, the incredible generosity of our friends and family, and grants we applied for, we have a total of $30,500 for an adoption that is estimated to cost between $27-30,000! We received 5 grants, for a total of $15,500! That is unbelievable! We have finished our puzzle (pictures to come soon) and I can't wait to write about that in a post all to itself. So we should have everything we need for these last few steps and then for travel as well. Praise God! And, any funds we have remaining we are able to use for her medical care when she comes home. Calli will require several surgeries over many years, so we will be able to use any extra to help with the costs of those surgeries. We are so thankful and humbled!

2. We prayed that we would receive a referral by Christmas. DONE! We were matched from the shared list that was released on November 26. What a wonderful Christmas present for our family! We also were praying very specifically that our baby would be at least a year younger than Cooper, who was born on August 31, 2010. Calli's given birthday is August 31, 2011. That is just incredible to us!! She was found on November 7, 2011, and estimated to be 2 months old. We are not sure on the details of why she was given that birthday, but that was a very clear answer to us from God that she is our baby!

3. We have been praying for her attachment and bonding with us. We obviously won't know much about this until we are with her, but part of that prayer has already been answered. We asked God that she would be attaching to her care-givers or nannies, so that she would understand in time how to transfer that attachment to us. So many babies that are living in institutions are by themselves so much that they really don't know how to receive love: how to be cuddled, how to be fed by someone else, how to be rocked and held. We knew that even if it meant the separation would be hard, that we wanted our baby to be learning how to attach before we got her. That prayer has been answered even more than we expected! Calli is in a foster home with a foster mom and dad and we learned last week from our update that she is very loved by them and even sleeps in their bed with them! We are so thankful for the way they are caring for her. This makes me sad for her for when we go to get her - she knows them as a mother and father and I can't imagine the grief she will have while at the same time we have so much joy in receiving her as our daughter. We are praying very much for that transition time, that God will prepare her little heart for that and that as much as she can, she will be ready for that time. We are hoping the pictures we sent of us will help a little with that. Will you join us in praying for that as well?

4.  And we are still praying for the fourth thing, for when we bring Calli home. For our adjustment to being a family of five, for Kendall and Cooper, for energy and wisdom in how to best parent all three of them. Now we know we are also praying for issues related to her cleft lip and palate. We would love to have your prayers for that time as well!

Those are the big things! There have also been so many other answers to prayers we have prayed along the way. One of those was when we learned that we would be able to make the decision regarding whether or not she had her first surgery in China. We have been talking with Michelle's mom, Connie, who works for a plastic surgeon in Ft. Worth. He specializes in cleft lip and palate and saw Calli's pictures the first day we got her referral. We asked him his opinion about what to do about the surgery and his first response was that really both options were right. It would be fine to wait (wouldn't affect development any more) or it would be fine to let them do it and then repair when she got here. So that was fine, but we really needed some clear direction about what to do. Randy prayed about it with our friend Kirk the next morning at the office, and then I got a call from Connie and she said, "Is it too late? Have you already told them your decision?" I told her no, that we still hadn't decided or told our agency anything. She said that Dr. Schuster had gone home that evening and thought about it some more, then talked to some of his colleagues during surgery that morning and all of them agreed that it would be best to wait until she was here to do the surgery. Her gap is pretty wide, and there is risk of losing some of the lip that is there already. That was all we needed to hear! I called Randy and he told me about he and Kirk praying about it that morning. We were thankful to have that information from the doctor and were able to tell our agency our answer quickly! Also, we just got that update last week and the doctor saw her pictures and said again that we made the right decision in choosing to wait. Awesome!

"I lift my eyes up to the hills - where does my help come from?
My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth." Psalm 121:1-2

God, thank you for answering our prayers the ways you have. I believed that you were ABLE to do those big things we were asking, but I am so humbled that you CHOSE to do them. Thank you. May we be faithful with the sweet gift you are giving us in Calli Faith and honor you in the way we live our lives as a family. We desire more glory for you and more honor for your name. Teach us to have a big faith that trusts in you for big things!!

"Three cute flowers for your three cute girls!" From my sweet friend Chantel, the day after we received Calli's referral.

"Sorry ooosh in China, baby!"

We got our first update on Calli Faith last week! We are able to request updates through our agency at three points during the process, one being at referral, one at LOA, and one right before travel. Since we are in between referral and LOA, we decided to get an update another way, which is to send a care package through a service called Red Thread China. The lady who runs this site is named Ann and she is in China. You can order care packages through her, she puts them together there in China, and then she requests answers to questions and pictures when she sends the care package. I decided to do this without Randy knowing, in hopes that we might have an update by Christmas. Of course I couldn't wait when we did get the pictures and I showed him right away! He was so surprised and we were both so excited.
I chose a package called the "girl pajama package." It included pjs, a doll, a blanket, candies, and a flash drive for her caretakers to put pictures on of her. I also added an album of pictures that I emailed to Ann so that Calli can begin to see who we are. I was able to ask some questions and write a letter to Calli and to her caretakers. Here are the pictures of her care package! I was so pleased with the things Ann sent!

 

It was great to be able to get some answers to questions we had. Here are their responses:

1.Li Xiao Fei is called as Fei Fei.The orphanage has passed her new name Calli to her foster family .

2.Height :78cm weight :12kg Head:45cm Chest:47cm Foot:12.5cm teeth:6

3.She lives with foster family.

4.She sleep with her foster dad and mom in adult bed.

5.No ,her ears are fine.

6.She can not speak yet but she can make some noise now .

7.Her foster  family feed her with spoon.

8.She is too young to know what is adoption.

Love that we know she is called "Fei Fei!" We learned that is pronounced like "pay," so it sounds a lot like her middle name, Faith. We've been calling her Calli Fei Fei. :) 

Also, she is a big girl! Those sizes mean she is wearing 24 month clothes and size 5 shoe! And she just turned 15 months! 

We are very thankful that she is living with a foster family. Even though we know this will make separation harder on her, we are thankful to know she knows how to attach and bond and that she will eventually be able to transfer that attachment to us. Such an answer to prayer! 

And finally, here are her latest pictures! These were actually taken last week, so she is 15 months old here. Such a big girl! Still in love with those big brown eyes!

We sent these to the specialist we have been talking to and heard back from him today. He said that he still believes her palate is involved, even though her teeth are facing forward and there is such a small gap in between. He said he is glad we made the decision to have the repair done here. It is an incomplete cleft which does not go up into her nose, so that is good, but the area below her nose is pretty wide. We are confident that we made the right choice in deciding to wait to have her surgery and are thankful for helpful doctors as we navigate these decisions!
Calli's sisters could not be more excited about her and can't wait for her to be here! Kendall is ready to dress her in lots of girly clothes with big bows and lots of pink and ruffles. Cooper asks to see my phone and scrolls to Calli's picture at least once every day. She loves baby Calli. She talks to her and shows her picture off to anyone she sees. It is so precious to watch her becoming a big sister. We have a 5x7 picture of Calli framed on our kitchen cabinet. The other day Cooper was running around the house playing and she stopped in front of the picture, looked at it and said, "Hi Baby Calli! Sorry ooosh (you're) in China baby!" She talks about mommy and daddy getting on the "hairpane way up there" and asks us to go every day. All of it just melts my heart and I long for the day when Calli knows the love of these two sweet sisters!!

 

Calli Faith

We received our Pre-Approval from China this morning! It came so fast-we submitted our Letter of Intent on Wednesday, November 28 and got our PA on Tuesday, December 4th!

So we are finally able to introduce you to...

Calli Faith!

Calli's Chinese name is Li Xiao Fei.  We had decided on the name Callie already, but chose to drop the e when we saw that part of her name is Li.  One of the first questions we want to ask is what she is used to being called, and if they can start calling her Calli or not.

One of the very cool parts about getting Calli's file was hearing her birth date. We have been praying very specifically for a baby that is at least one year younger than Cooper. Cooper's birthday is August 31, 2010.  When Logan called to say she had a referral for us, she said that the baby's birthday was August 31, 2011.  Exactly one year to the day after Cooper's! Pretty awesome answer to prayer.

So, Calli is now 15 months old.  She has been at the orphanage since she was 2 months old (approximately) and we think that she may currently be in a foster home. We are trying to get some of that information soon.

Calli's special need is that she has congenital cleft lip and palate.  We have the option of having her first surgery done soon in China or of waiting until she is home with us.  She will have to have several corrective surgeries as she grows, and we will begin seeing specialists about this when she is home. We have actually already been in contact with a cleft lip and palate specialist regarding what we want to do about this first surgery.

Her file was just full of the sweetest details about her.  As it is all we have right now, we love reading it over and over and just stare at the four pictures we have of her. We loved hearing that her favorite thing is to be cuddled, that she likes to be warm (like her mama), that she is active and extroverted, she has a "ready smile," likes colorful rag dolls, has a good appetite, is not picky about food, and that she is a sound sleeper.

The last paragraph of her file is a section titled "Our Wishes." This is such a sweet note from whomever her caregivers are right now. They say that Calli is a quiet and lovely child. Their hope is that she will be adopted by a family who will give her a good education and will help her grow happily and healthily. They ask to be informed of her growth through notes and pictures, and they invite her to come back at anytime to the Child Welfare Institute "where she used to be raised."

Isn't that amazing?! It is obvious to us that Calli is very well-loved right now, which is something that we have been praying a lot! Her caregivers love her enough that they have wishes and hopes for her specifically, and they want to see pictures of her as she grows. We are so thankful for the people who are loving and caring for our daughter right now.

We told the girls about Calli and showed them her picture the day we accepted her referral. They are just so excited about her and can't wait to go get her! They aren't too happy about the fact that Randy and I are not taking them with us, but when we tell them they will be with their grandparents, that makes everything better. I have overheard Kendall telling her friends about Calli and that she has a boo-boo on her lip but it's ok, the doctors are going to fix it and she won't even feel it because she will be asleep. :) The first thing Cooper said when we showed her Calli's picture was "Her has no pants?" The picture is just of her face. :) Then she said, "Her has a boo-boo on her mouth?" Randy explained that she did and that when we bring her home the doctors will fix it. They pray for Calli all the time and love to talk about how when she is going to bed, we are getting up and when we are going to bed, Kendall prays that Calli would "have a great day today." We just love their sweet hearts for their new sister.

So one of the things PA means is that we are allowed to send care packages to Calli! And along with the care packages, we can send a list of questions and request updated pictures. We are looking forward to doing this very soon!!