More Steps Along the Way

We received our official I797 (I800 provisional approval letter) in the mail yesterday.


I never imagined years ago that I would so excited one day to get a letter in the mail from the US Dept of Homeland Security, but each step is so exciting, because each step is one step closer.  Now, our next step is to get a copy of our National Visa Center (NVC) letter for Ellie Kay.  Evidently this step can take weeks for them to mail it to you.  So to get around that, you have to continually bug them with calls and emails until they email you a pdf copy of the letter.  This takes week off of your wait, so we're going to be the squeaky wheel for a few days until we have it in possession.  

So, if you look at the chart below we have now the first 3 steps down and working on step 4.  Last night I worked on reviewing dates of families who have gone before us and started averaging wait times at each step, so we think the timeline should be something like this:

• NVC letter arriving on average about 8 days after I800 approval - around August 9th ?
• Article 5 issued takes about 3 weeks - around August 30th?
• Travel Approval - 2&1/2 weeks - around September 18th?

Then once we get Travel Approval,  theoretically we will travel in 10-21 days from then.  So, it looks like probably early October that we'll be traveling (hopefully).  However, the first week of October is China's "National Day" - basically a lot like our Fourth of July.  China's legal holidays are Oct 1-3 but celebrated by the people Oct 1-7.  Evidently, plane tickets and hotels and such are fairly expensive for that week, so we may be going the second week of October.   This is all assuming there are no major paperwork issues, mistakes, or snafus between now and then.  But, this is our best guess so far realizing all steps are out of our control for the most part.  

Lastly, we also got our  China visas delivered today for Matt, Jacob, Aidan and me.  We've all had passports for a while, but I've never gotten a visa so that whole process was new for me, and I was happy to finally get that squared away with visas all attached in our passports and ready to go!!