You are currently browsing the daily archive for October 6th, 2008.
Karen and Hua Mei just returned from the post office at the airport. They sent off the package to China for Xia Mei. Karen did a really nice job putting together the small photo album. It has photos of all of us, Karen’s folks, my dad and sister, and others. We also sent a disposable camera. We decided not to send the blanket since it made the package too bulky.
CHSFS had sent us the address to Wanzai County Social Welfare Institute in both English and Chinese. Unfortunately the post office wouldn’t let Karen put the Chinese label on the envelope too. Great. We have very little confidence that the package will now be properly delivered once it reaches China. 
Karen got a call from Juli at Childrens Home. Juli will be setting up our appointment at the US consulate in Guangzhou. This is when we will receive an immigrant visa for Xia Mei. We will leave China shortly after our consulate appointment.
We have asked Juli to see if she can arrange our appointment for some time during the first week of December. Working backwards, we would then expect to travel to China around the middle of November. This should then give us about a month to get our travel visas for China. To do this, we send our passports to Chicago where the Chinese consulate there will give us our visas. We will also be sending Laurel’s, Abby’s and Grace’s passports with ours. We’ll need a little advance time to arrange our plane reservations and also our travel plans in Beijing. Having a month’s time to prepare will be a big help. Hopefully we’ll get an update on Xia Mei so we will have an idea about the size clothes that she will wear. We’ll need to bring along clothing, formula, etc. I know Karen has the long list of things to bring along that we used last time.
Originally Juli asked about Nov 10th or 11th for an appointment date but that would only give us a couple of weeks to take care of everything! So, it looks like we will be celebrating Thanksgiving in China. Works for me. I prefer eating duck over turkey any day. Grace will be celebrating her birthday there. This month will go by very fast.
Superstruct gameplay begins late tonight.
