Another good week waiting on Ellie Kay (or "Ellie Tay" as Tru says)

We have had a good week this week.  It has been week #2 of school and week # "I have lost count" on waiting for Ellie Kay.  :)  I was able to meet with a sweet lady here in Memphis this week who recently adopted from the same province (Jiangxi), and she leant all sorts of helpful advice (Thanks Katherine!).  We also received a little updated info from our agency and know that EK is sitting up by herself per reports which is hopefully correct information.  (Babies adopted from China are often very developmentally behind since they don't normally have any belly or floor time).   

We also received some great news that we will be a featured family starting this coming week on http://give1save1asia.blogspot.com. Basically it's a blog that features a different family each week and asks its followers to donate $1 to the featured families to save 1 orphaned child.  It's such a cool concept!   We're so thankful for this opportunity!  To be a featured family, they recommended to submit a video, which we will post this coming week.  I'm not a super "techy" person, so the video took me all day a couple of weeks ago to create in IMovie, and it isn't perfect, but tells our story pretty succinctly in a short amount of time.  

In the meantime, the big boys are busy with school and soccer.  This is a pic of them in long sleeved shirts/jeans preparing to do one of their favorite past times - exploring in the woods (since we have quite a bit of poison ivy and they're quite allergic).  

 Tru has been busy learning new words and phrases and being the most adorable 2 year old on the planet!  He cracks me up every day with his mannerisms and language that sounds like it should be coming from a big boy instead of a little one (the product of having much older brothers).  

 Will update with our video on Monday!!

NVC letter received today!

It's hard to believe, but we got the copy of our NVC letter today.  Things seem to be moving pretty fast!  Our agency said they their rep in Guangzhou, China, will turn in all of our documents into the consulate/US embassy.  Now we're just waiting again for the next step, but we have another one down.

In the meantime, here's some pictures of my cutie pies!  

This is what happens when Lego loving boys find a turtle:

And when the little guy finds a mushroom:

And when he's entertained by the best ventroliquist on Earth - my Aunt Dale.  I bet your Elmo doesn't talk by himself!  :)

Here's our oldest with his favorite chicken, Crooked Toe.  She's the one chicken he daily feeds by hand.

Our first day of school with our traditional chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast:

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!!  

I800 provisional approval received

Thanks to anyone who was praying for our I800 approval!!  We were provisionally approved today, so hopefully it will come in the mail over the next few days.  There was a slight snag with the official red seal on China's "Letter of Seeking Confirmation  from Adopter" not showing up on the copy they were given, but the immigration officer I communicated with was fortunately super helpful and accommodating allowing our agency to fax her a scan from the original and she provisionally approved it the same day.  We often hear complaints about government workers and rarely the positives, so here goes a shout out to a super helpful lady who took her job seriously and did it well!!  Now we wait for a document review and an official I800 to come in the mail.

Prayer requests:

• For the official I800 to come in the mail quickly
• The next step - NVC letter - to likewise go smoothly and quickly

And she weighs in at.....

No real news or progress at the moment except for Ellie Kay's weight.  We were a little perplexed over the numbers we were given at first, because they said she weighed 16.5 pounds when she was 3 months!!  Asian babies tend to be tinier than American babies and that would have made her >95% on the American charts, so she would have been off the charts for Asian charts.  So we asked our agency to ask the orphanage to re-weigh her and that came back that her current weight as 7kg or 15.4 pounds at 8 months.  OK - now that sounds more believable.  :)  That hopefully will give us a better idea of what sized clothes to bring with us to China.  

We're still waiting on our I800 approval so we can move on to our next step.  Also our visas will be walked into the Chicago Chinese embassy/consulate tomorrow.  Visas from China cannot be applied for through the mail, so you have to hire a courier service to do this for you, which includes mailing your passports to them and having them walk your passports/applications in.  But - hey - it's cheaper than a plane ticket to Chicago!!  We're thankful we found a lady who is wonderful at catering to adoptive families and has her business down to a science.  She has patiently answered all my paranoid questions (like, "Are you sure I actually SHIP my passports to you"???!)  (If you're adopting and need a service look up There's Always Hope.  She's fantastic!)

Current prayer request:

• For the I800 to be approved quickly!
• For Ellie Kay to receive the love, nutrition, stimulation that she needs.

Dear Family and Friends,

As you know if you're visiting our site, we're in the process of adopting Ellie Kay from China.  We feel that God has called us to adopt one of the "fatherless".  If you want to read more of our story, and why we chose to adopt, it can be found here: http://thompsonsandadaughter.blogspot.com/2013/03/no-place-to-start-like-beginning.html.

As most of you probably know, adoption is super expensive and we've already paid most of our expenses.  We have already paid thousands of dollars worth of agency fees, immigration fees, home study fees, the enormous child rearing fee to China, and many more.  The biggest expense left for us to be reunited with Ellie Kay is travel for the oldest 4 of us to travel to China to get her.  We are also required to stay there for a little over 2 weeks to complete the official adoption/immigration process.  This is actually a blessing as many countries require multiple trips and we only have to travel once, so airline fees will be less for us in that sense.  We will be traveling to the port city of Beijing -----> then to Nanchung (the capital of her province) ---->  then to Guangzhou where the US consulate is located, which is where Ellie will officially become a US citizen ---> and last we'll probably take the train to Hong Kong on the way out to leave (the closest port city)  ----> and then home to Memphis.

If you feel led to help with the finances of our adoption, we have some instructions below that will make this a tax deductible donation for you.  FIRST let us say that we expect no particular family or friend to donate.  We are not "entitled" to anything and we are fully aware that adoption was our decision and therefore our financial responsibility.  Also, I want to mention that if you are deeply in debt to others, your financial obligations are to your creditors first. We would never want someone deeply in debt to take funds owed to their creditors to give to us. However, if you feel that God has led you to help financially toward the cause of our adoption, we wanted to make the tax deductible information available to you.

If you are interested in doing this, you can make a check to LifeSong for Orphans, and 100% of the donation goes to us, but is considered a charitable donation for you (they will send you a receipt for taxes upon request or will automatically send you a receipt per IRS guidelines if your donation is $250 or more).   If you choose to donate through LifeSong by check, write "Thompson family" and account # "3637" on the memo line.  You can mail your check to Lifesong For Orphans, PO Box 40, Gridley, Illinois 61744.  Or you can pay via paypal (they would take 2.9% paypal fee out of it if you decide to use this route) at lifesongforphans.org/give/donate.  From there, you would select, "Give to an adoptive family" and complete the online form with our account number and name.

Again, this is not our friends' and families' financial obligation - it is ours alone - but we wanted to provide this information just in case God was leading someone in this direction, it would actually be a tax deduction for you.  Thanks for reading!!

Every Good and Perfect Gift is From Above (James 1:17)

It's been a whirlwind since first laying our eyes on Ellie Kay's face.  We have been buried in mounds of paperwork and I have been seeing federal immigration forms in my sleep and probably have been mumbling terms such as I-800, I-864W, DS-260, visas, etc, etc.....  Mostly, I have been in fierce "Mama Bear" mode, which means I have been overnighting anything and everything that we need to in order to get to her as quickly as we can.  My Fed Ex guys thinks I've lost it I'm sure.  His first thought was probably, "Oh, those are poor homeschool kids that never get out and think that the Fed Ex guy coming is the highlight of their day".  And then, "Oh wow! Here comes the crazy Mom running out the door with her camera.  They REALLY don't get out much!".  In all seriousness, he was a great sport and a super sweet guy and understood after I told him my reasons for taking his pic.  (He did give permission to post).  

We have found out a few things about Ellie Kay.  First of all, we were thankful to learn that she's not in an orphanage.  She has been with a foster family and we are SO, SO thankful for this!  We pray for the foster Mom who is caring for her right now and pray that God will show her love through this lady/family.  We also discovered that she was abandoned when she was 1 day old at the entrance of the orphanage, which shows that someone took great pains to deliver her to a place she would be cared for in spite of the risk of being caught abandoning a baby (which is illegal in China).  She was described as "chubby with big eyes".  When she was 5 days old, she entered into foster care.   She was also described as "loving to cry" during her newborn stage, and her foster mother kept thinking something was wrong with her to make her cry so much (and she would even bring her back to the orphanage due to the crying).   But  according to her records "at the same time, when she looked at her fair, round, little egg-shaped face and big eyes, she couldn’t leave her and she would have a change of heart and come get her to raise her".  At 2 months they took her to the local hospital and had many tests run and was found to have nothing wrong.  Then, at 3 months she became much more tranquil.  I guess time will tell if she's truly gotten over her "feistiness".  :)  We cannot wait to meet her, hold her, and learn her personality and all about the way God uniquely created this precious little girl.  

 

Ellie Kay is in Jiangxi province, but more specifically, within Jiangxi,  she's in Wanzai.  Her  given surname of Wan reflects that she's from Wanzai (all Wanzai orphans have the surname of Wan).  Wanzai is a rural area with a population of less than 500,000 people.  It is surrounded by forested mountains and it's major industries are fireworks manufacturing and rice liquor distillation.  Their main economic activity is agricultural with rice being the major crop.

These things are fascinating to me right now and makes me wonder of the occupation of her biological parents - are they farmers or do they work in a fireworks factory, etc?  All I know is I will forever grateful to them for being willing to carry precious Ellie Kay for 9 months and then making sure she was delivered to a place where she would be safely cared for, while risking their security in the process.   What a gift they gave to us!  Many Chinese mothers would love to keep their babies, but with the one child policy have no choice to keep them.  Within the culture in rural areas, some families have a bucket of water ready for the delivery which is often at home, and if their first baby is a girl, she will immediately be drowned in a bucket.  These parents obviously did not want that for their little girl.  They wanted to give her a chance for a life!  Praise God for His protective hand over her little life.  I'm sure it was the most heart breaking thing for her biological mother to do - to have to deliver her over to an orphanage after holding and caring for her for her first day.   I will seek to always honor this lady and even celebrate her on Mother's Day.  I really wish it was possible to reach out to her and let her know that Ellie Kay has a chance for a new life in America.  I think she'd be pleased!    

If you are praying for us, one specific prayer request right now is that her I800 form will be approved very quickly and that we can move on to the next step!!  

We're working very hard to get to you, Ellie Kay!! :)