Travel In Sight!

Well we received the good news today that our travel approval is on its way from China! So this means our travel dates are approaching fast, like real fast! How does next week January 13th sound!!
Our adoption agency has requested our appointment date at the US consulate in China so once we get the appointment time confirmed we can plan the other portions of the trip. Essentially once we get the US consulate time our adoption agency then works backwords and plans out how many days prior to that we need to be in China to pick up Lainey and go through the Chinese portion of the adoption. 

It was kind of a crazy day.  We knew the call from our adoption agency could come at any moment. It usually takes 2-4 weeks I guess for the travel approval from China and today was 3 full weeks.  The agency has my cell number to call first during the day and sure enough I was in the middle of Hocking County, a very remote area with no cell service for my personal or work phone!  I was there on a story for a couple hours and when we finally moved back into cell service my reporter got an email on her phone from the assignment desk, have Scott call in ASAP.  The message was over an hour and half old! I kind of had an inkling that today might be the day, and we were still driving on winding and icy back woods roads and wanted to wait until we got to better roads before I tried to stop and call Christina to find out what was up.  When I finally did call, Christina said, "Are you ready to go to China next wednesday?!"  I hate to use the cliche that it hasn't sunk in yet, but too many things are racing around in my head now and it seems like all my thoughts are swimming through paste!  We need to stop the paper and the mail, get the petsitter set, start packing, look at flights, get extra medicatons to take, get vacations approved, look at weather reports, fill out more papers, put high chair and stroller together, tell everyone!, and then panic, I know we are forgetting something!  So that's it in a nutshell.  Tentatively our agency says look at leaving the 13th and coming back January 29th.   Those dates could slide either way depending on the appointment date.

Thanks for reading, we hope to have more updates soon.  In the mean time here is a short video I shot yesterday with our new Kodak camcorder.  Its an HD pocket camcorder in the flip camera style so it plugs right into the computer and will upload to youtube.   I gave a quick one minute look around Lainey's room, so give it a view!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVbFFb4hxww