Lily, HERE WE COME!!

It's hard to believe that the day is finally here, but we can now say, we leave for China TODAY! Daren and I both woke up pretty early, like two kids on Christmas morning. It took us four hours to complete our packing and despite our attempt to get everything into two small roller bags, in the end we just gave in and are taking one large roller and one small one. I know that we have overpacked, but what can we say, we're first time parents and want to make sure we have EVERYTHING. Just a couple little errands to run this morning to keep us from staring at the clock and we leave for the airport at 2:30. Our friend John volunteered to drive us to the airport and Cindy will be waiting for us at the airport when we return. I've attached a photo of me with Marsha, the woman that will meet us at the airport in Beijing and guide us for the first few days as we tour all the sights. Coincidentally, she was visiting Portland on the day we received our travel approval so it gave us an opportunity to meet her and have lunch before the trip! Not much else to say now except thank you to all of our friends and family that have traveled with us thus far on our long journey to Lily. Your love and support means the world to us!

1 DAY TO GO!!!

We leave for China tomorrow! It's unbelievable that it's finally here after months and months and months of waiting. We have the nursery all ready, mostly due to the FANTASTIC baby shower that Cindy, Lyndsey and PK threw for me last Saturday. It was a perfect day surrounded by friends and family on Lyndsey's back deck. I couldn't have asked for a better day! PK also made the best cupcakes ever! Well, we are going to do our best to post to our blog from China, but technology may decide not to cooperate with us. So stay tuned, and look for updates. We will have Lily in our arms one week from today on Labor Day (how appropriate is that?) on her exact 9-month birthday. Attached are some shower photos....now, must get back to packing!!!

Our Itinerary-6 days to go!

We received our tickets from our travel agency yesterday and the following is our itinerary:

8-29 Portland to LA, LA to Guangzhao, Guangzhao to Beijing
(arrive in Beijing on 8/31)
While in Beijing, we will meet our guide and visit The Great Wall, The Forbidden City, etc.
9-3 Beijing to Kunming (Lily's city)
9-4 We meet Lily for the first time? (This is still being scheduled)
9-10 Kunming to Guangzhao (We will spend 3 nights at the famous White Swan Hotel and do all of our immigration paperwork)
9-13 Guangzhao to LA-we will spend the night in LA after our long flight with Lily
9-14 LA to Portland

Our agency is still working out all of our in-country travel details such as which hotel we stay in at Kunming (hopefully The Green Lake) and exactly which day we meet Lily, which is the most important thing to find out! With the news of the Northwest flight attendants possibly going on strike, we are SOOOO glad that we decided to fly on China Southern Airlines instead. God knows I don't need any added stress right now!

We're hanging in there though and plugging away at all that we need to do. I'm really looking forward to my baby shower on Saturday...it's going to be so much fun. My mom, sister, Cindy, and her mom all arrive on Thursday night. Daren and I will both have our last day at work this Friday, so we will have all day Sunday and Monday to finish up all the last minute details.

In between moments of stress, I often catch myself just thinking about meeting Lily and I get a flurry of pure excitement...we can't wait!!!

We're traveling in 11 days!!!!

We received our travel approval yesterday! A LOT earlier than we expected. Even our agency was surprised by this. Today our consulate appointments were made and we made our travel arrangements, we leave on 8/29!!! Our last days at work will be next friday. I will post our itinerary once we have all of our in-China travel sorted out. After all this waiting, it's requiring us to shift gears a little, but we are so thrilled. We will have Lily in a couple of weeks!!!

Our Visas have arrived!

We have received our visas to visit China! We had to send off our original passports to the Chinese embassy in San Francisco in order for our visas to be processed and we were really happy that we got everything back yesterday. It's a little scary sending off your passports in a UPS envelope, but like everything else in this adoption process, it's just another leap of faith. We're now one more step closer to Lily :-)!!! Now we wait for official "travel approval" from China which should come late this month or early next month. Once we have TA, we need to be prepared to travel as soon as the following week.

Spent the morning at Babies R Us with my friend Betsy and her 4-month old son, Andrew. I needed one last run through with an experienced mommy and Betsy was kind enough to offer up her mommy shopping skills. Andrew slept the entire hour+ (such a good baby!) and afterwards we had a nice lunch.

Carry On Woes

With all the recent news, it's looking like our plans of going carry-on-only to China may not work. At least we will can still pack for COO and not have to lug around so much baggage in China. I'm hoping that by the time our travel dates come things will relax somewhat. It's going to be a long flight without my normal flight remedy that I take with me on our trips to Europe. My flight remedy consists of chapstick, nasal spray, eye drops and an atomizer to spray on my face. Daren laughs at me (especially when I use the nasal spray) but I have such a tendency to dehydrate and I have found that the above works really well. Not looking forward to traveling without it, but as Daren pointed out to me last night, we have to keep our focus on Lily and "don't sweat the small stuff". My voice of reason, that's why I love him so much! We WILL survive and we WILL be a family of three soon!

Lots going on..lots to do!

Daren and I just spent a weekend visiting friends and "nesting". On Saturday, we visited some new friends that we met on-line while researching about Kunming. They have a beautiful two-year-old that LOVED playing with Daren. They shared their adoption video with us and allowed us to borrow some great informational books. It was great to meet them and hear all about their experience and to think about all that is to come for us! We pretty much decided that we'll stay in the same hotel in Kunming that they stayed in, The Green Lake Hotel. After that, Daren was a good sport and allowed me to take him to Babies-R-Us to do some gift registry stuff. I actually think he even got into it a bit...testing out the strollers, etc.

I just found out that there are two baby showers planned for Lily, one given by close friends and family and one to be given by my co-workers. We are so fortunate to have so many caring, thoughtful people in our lives to do such things!

On Sunday we went to the the Christening of Baby Claire. We met Claire's parents last year while taking our mandarin classes and have fast become good friends. Rob and Carole brought home Claire from China in early June and she is such a cutie. Her big sister Caitlin is also a real cutie and such a helpful, good big sister! Rob and Carole have given us a lot of good China travel advice and are letting us borrow a lot of good baby travel gear for our trip. Sunday afternoon we pulled a lot more baby items out of the garage that were given to us by Cindy. We cleaned them up and put them in Lily's nursery. It's really starting to look like a baby room in there now...we just need to add one baby.

Today we made our doctor's appts. to get our travel medications for the trip (in case we get sick in China...which I hope doesn't happen!) and to have him look over Lily's translated medical information. Since Daren and I go to the same family doctor (that we love), and since he has a background in pediatrics, we've decided to take Lily to the same doctor. He will also prescribe antibiotics and other medications for Lily for us to take to China...just in case.

Anyway, lots going on and lots to do....this month is quite busy so hopefully the time until we travel will just fly by!

Photos from 7/28/06-Referral Day

On our referral day, I was on a "girls" weekend for my friend Amanda's bachelorette trip. We were on an organized wine tour (if you're ever in Oregon I'd recommend it), little did I know that this day would change our lives forever. The top photos are of Daren and I seeing each other for the first time as parents (yes, the girl's weekend went out the window), the middle photos are of us girls at wineries before the call (Amanda, the bride-to-be is in the white skirt), and the bottom photo is me actually getting "the call" from Daren. I'm so happy we were surrounded by friends and they were able to capture these moments for us.

Lillies for Lily

Our dear friends from California, Kristin and Jason, sent us this beautiful bouquet of lillies today. They're just beautiful and smell even better. Thanks you two!!

Andrea & Daren

Name Translation, Pronunciation and other tidbits

Our wonderful Chinese language instructor, Fei Yang, was able to translate Lily's Chinese name today. Rui Zhen, pronounced "Ray Jen", means "auspicious (or favorable) treasure". We couldn't agree more! We are keeping Rui Zhen as her middle name(s) and made the decision probably a year and a half ago that her first name would be Lilian after Daren's beloved grandmother.

I also starting to re-review her paperwork from China and discovered a couple little tidbits about her that I had missed before. Apparently, Lily already has two teeth and under the personality box it indicates she is "restless" and "fond of imitating". Not sure what they mean about "restless" but they also state that she's a "deep sleeper". Well, I guess in a couple of months we'll be able to see for ourselves.

Still waiting for her medical records to be translated. Our agency thinks we will have the translations by next week. Her paperwork indicates that her health is "normal", but we are going to have our doctor look at the translations anyway. Not that it really matters at this point, she is our daughter already and we will deal with anything that comes our way.

I looked at the growth charts today with Cindy, and she appears to be within normal percentiles for everything except weight. On the weight chart, she's at about 95%!! Our little girl likes to mangia...just like her mommy! My mom always said that out of her three children, I always had the "healthiest appetite". Not exactly what a girl wants to hear, but I have to admit, she's right!