Surprise!

Last Sunday, my very best friends, family and neighbors threw a surprise Baby Shower! I was kidnapped and given a fortune cookie that read "Nancy, you are being shangheid, put on the blindfold". I was taken to a friend's house where about 40 of my favorite people had gathered, including my sisters and friends that had to travel quite a distance to come. It was so great! The girls had decorated the house for Chinese New Year with dragons and silk, there was incredible Asian type food and loads of fantastic gifts for Laina! She has a whole lot of terrific "Aunties" just waiting for her to come home; we feel so lucky to have such a supportive community and circle of friends. Thank you everyone, Jimmy and I are very moved by the show of support and amazed by the gifts. I tried to take a picture of it all, but there is no way to get them all in, but here it is!

Happy Valentine's Day

Hi everyone; The question you all have been asking, is WHEN? We are currently waiting for all 27 families that received their babies' referrals to complete and return documents of acceptance. Each family has medical reports reviewed and things like that. As soon as we all have sent them in, then the travel arrangements are made for the whole group. The agency makes appointments for us at the Consulate office as well as other places, they make our airline reservations, our hotel bookings, buses to take us everywhere, etc., so there's quite a bit for them to do. Once in China, we break into smaller groups and travel to the Province where our children are. Jimmy and I are with 3 other families so it's a nice small group. We have been in touch by email with them already and will meet the extended group at a mandatory Travel Meeting 2-3 weeks before the trip. We hope to go in early April and will get the word out as soon as we know so you can follow our journey on this blog.Meantime, I'll try and find things to add so the blog doesn't get too dull. Here's a somewhat sad face on the third photo we received, but she's still so gorgeous!

Laina the Beautiful

Wow! Yesterday was an incredible day. We were surprised by a call from our agency in the morning that they would be ready to see us after all; this is after 2 appointments had been cancelled and we had been told to plan on Wednesday. What great news! We raced there of course and finally found out all about our gorgeous baby. We were also told the wrong birthdate by a few days, she was actually born on August 12, 2006,,so she's a few days younger. We can't take our eyes off her photos, today I will put copies all over the house(she is already my screesaver!) Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy!

Speechless

Looking at her face for the first time, words cannot express the joy we feel today.

Laina Marie

Hurry Up and Wait

Well, it seems that we will not be able to see our Laina Marie's face until WEDNESDAY! There are alot of families whose packages must all be translated before anyone can see them. We are going crazy with the anticipation, this is really torture. Not much we can do about it though, they are working very hard at the agency to get them all done.Sorry, everyone, we'll post the photo as soon as we can!

Naming the baby

We have finally decided to call our baby by the name Laina Marie. It seems a nice combination of her given name from China and a family name. So, now we have a name but still no face! Our Social Worker is not sure that the documents will be ready for us on Monday, so we may even have to wait until Tuesday. Photos will be posted as soon as humanly possible. Thank you everyone for the calls and sharing the excitement with us. What an incredible few days this has been!

News

We got THE CALL today! Here is the basic information, more to come: We have a baby girl. Her Chinese name is "Lai Fu Na" (pronounced Lay-foo-na), she was born on August 6, 2006 (really young, we are so happy for that) in the Guangxi Province in southern China. We will go to our agency on Monday to see the photos and get the rest of her information. It's going to be a long weekend. We'll post the photos and everything after that. We are so excited. I received a funny error message with my first draft of this note, it said I couldn't use exclamation points. Guess our blog was on excitement overload, so you'll have to imagine lots and lots of exclamation points when you read this.