Wednesday, April 30, 2014

80 days until we travel to China


Here we go again !

80 days until we make our way to the other half of the world to meet and bring home our son, Rui Nash Julius Webster.

Back in September, I was mindlessly surfing the internet. I must have been feeling a bit nostalgic, and went to the Great Wall China Adoption page. They had a new feature for waiting children, which included pictures ... Click, click and there was this face ! I continued on, read his description only to find out that he has the same condition in his legs as Luolin does. I took it as a sign.

After talking it over, the process began to bring this little boy home to our family.

We hoped that we would be able to use the agency that took us to China the first time. Being in Canada, we wouldn't be able to. We kind of found out the hard way, after putting in an initial application for Rui. Not being able to use our agency, we had to locate one in Canada. We were fortunate enough to find one that took control and was quickly able to bring Rui's file to them. We did lose him for a few hours, which was horrible. After finding his file, the process began. We had our home study done and took parenting class. After completing both, the ministry saw that we were "fit" to adopt and Rui became a part of our family.

We have waited for our travel date, which came yesterday, July 19th, 2014.

We will spend 11 days in China, starting in Honk Kong and Shenzhen so Luolin can see "her China". If nothing else, we will visit her her orphanage from the outside to give her some answers to questions she has asked over the years. Next we will begin our trip north to Nanjing to get Rui and take care of the paperwork, exams and all that goes into the adoption process. Last stop will be Beijing and the Canadian Consulate. Here we will get his Canadian passport, finalize the paperwork and board our flight home to Toronto. After that, back to the lake in Maine for the rest of the summer.

As our trip gets closer, I will update the itinerary and any news we might have !