Consulate Appointment & Plane Tickets!

So our Travel Liaison in China has our plane tickets reserved. She is supposed to call today to confirm everything! So exciting!!!

In order to have our consulate appointment on a Monday thru Wednesday, we needed to leave on a Sunday, so we have chosen November 14th to leave!! Just 2.5 weeks from now!!! oh my!!!

We plan to have Maria on the 18th and Kimi on the 21st. We will spend Thanksgiving in Changsha, Hunan. It would be nice to visit Hengyang (Kimi's city) on Thanksgiving, then on Friday we will head down to Guangzhou for the medical and consulate appointment. We will fly from Shanghai to Chicago on Friday, December 3! Check this out... we leave China at 6pm on Friday, and arrive in Kalamazoo at 10:35pm pm Friday... Too bad its not only 4.5 hours of flying! ha! We are going to be some TIRED puppies! Our greeting party isn't going to be too happy about the arrival time... but they will get over it! The boys will be ready to see us, that is for sure!!!!

Our Consulate Appointment (CA) is November 30th! So will will be gone for just less than 3 weeks.

We have been marching along like crazies over here. Jerry started some jobs this week and will have them done by the 5th. Then he has to bid a big job the next week and we will be outta' here!!!

We are still praying for our Motorhome to sell!! Please pray with us! we only need about 5k more to do these adoptions debt free! That would be so amazing!

Last weekend, a lady with a little girl at Maria's orphanage emailed me and said she might have a picture of Maria. There was a little girl in the background that looked like Maria... Sure enough it was!!! I wasn't sure at first but after looking at it about a million times and then Alex and Jerry looking at it too... we decided that it most definitely was her! She looks SOOOO LITTLE!!! and... still shaved! goodness!

We also have their car seats installed. Good grief! that's a lot of car seats! The boiys have been sitting in the girls' seats and after we return home i will be turning Maria's around to face the rear, but for now since people will be using our truck while we are gone they will stay this way. The boys will be staying with Jerry's parents, so i will install the boys' car seats in their car, so they don't have to change them around all the time... I think they will be spending a weekend with our friend Bonnie's family, so she will just take our truck and the boys can ride in the girls' seats again. I get nervous about car seats not being installed properly so the less they need to be moved the better!

Aren't the girls' seats cute!? They are very nice, very well built and can hold a child up to 85 pounds!!! The girls will be in there a long time!!! haha!


I have been trying to decide which cute clothes we will be taking for the girls... My friends Heather and Kim have given us a bunch of clothes and they are all cute!!! I need to take a range of sizes since we aren't sure how big they are exactly. They are both light as feathers but "tall-ish" Maria has little feet, size 4 will fit for a while, Ann of Red Thread told me. We had her send them each another care package last week.

This was Maria's stuff. Plus 3 pictures. One of the family here and one of herself and one of Kimi!


This was Kimi's package. She got a sweater jacket instead of a whole outfit. Isn't the sweater pretty? I can't believe how big her shoes look! :) She got the three pictures too. In their letters i told them about what we were going to do when we got to China and picked them up. About taking a train and the airplane, stuff like that.

I can hardly wait to leave and get them! But i have soooo much to do before we leave!