Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Bambina's Baby Sister

So we are well underway in getting to Baby Sister and bringing her home. We got the LOA (Letter of Acceptance) from China last week, and it has been a total sprint since then. "Please return this letter by December 7th." Which meant pulling together a ream of documentation, filling in several new forms, making three copies of the entire packet and fedexing it--by the next morning. No pressure. I have spent more time than I can calculate at a) my desk, pulling all our documents and compiling new ones; b) Staples, copying and faxing said documents; and c) Fedex, shipping said documents. Literally entire mornings have disappeared doing those three things. I recognize that (as I like to say) it "beats an episiotomy," (and it does). But there is an exquisite and unbearable pressure involved in the knowledge that if you fill in one thing on these forms wrong it can mean several more months before you can meet your child and bring her home, which at this point is too much for me to even contemplate. We are also up against the Chinese Lunar New Year clock, which begins on February 14th. New Year is possibly the most important holiday in China, meaning that all government offices and, really, everything closes for two weeks. Almost everyone in China is traveling to get home, which means (as our agency put it) 117,000 people in line for tickets--and that is just the Guangzhou train station. So, if we don't get the paperwork processed and get in to China before late January, we are not going until late February. I know: a month, a month, only a month. But when you've seen her photo--and she is already one year old, you just really want every other month of her life to be with you from now on. So let's pray to the Homeland Security gods that they will turn our paperwork around and get us into--and out of--China ASAP.

From my blog to God's ears?

1 comment:

nm in mn said...

Good Luck E! I have forwarded this on to the appropriate people.