Travel Approved

Okay. What was I doing six months ago?
We had lived in our house about one month. There were blizzards. There was influenza (me). There was the all-around adjustment of 'hey, this is our house now! No more apartment! How great!' and, 'I'll be fine to just stay settled in here...we've had a lot of change in the last year...it will be nice to just relax and enjoy living here right now.'

I can also tell you what I wasn't doing: thinking that I was going back to China again in 12 more days. But that is our reality. Of course, that was before we lost our hearts to JQ.

We received our travel approval yesterday. This is the point when we get notice from China that it is time to travel and to come and adopt our son. I had an inkling that things were going to go fast, but really, not this fast. On Monday, we received notice from the consulate in Guangzhou that they had picked up our Article 5, which is part of processing JQ's immigrant visa. We knew the next step was that we would eventually be notified of our travel approval. Our agency informed us that it takes between 10 and 21 days. I remember this. I remember getting this pre-paperwork notification about Ellie's immigrant visa at the end of November the year we adopted her. We received our travel approval a little over two weeks later.

So, I thought we had 10 to 21 days to wait it out, but we didn't. We had three days. Instead of taking 1 to 3 weeks from the Article 5, we had our paperwork picked up from the consulate on Monday and we were notified of our intent to travel on Thursday.

How's that for a fast turnaround?

As I said, I had his feeling...something was going to happen. Just that morning, I had been driving to Wal-mart at 7 am to get Asher some Tylenol and I was thinking and praying about this situation with travel. I had plans in my head...those that think about all of the things to do before leaving (maybe take on one more work project or finally finish painting the trim in the front room), those that think about what will happen while we will be gone (running a Half with two awesome friends that I signed up for this spring), and really just considering my own needs, to be honest. But I really felt this heaviness...I just needed to let some of this stuff go because the time that you wait for, the time when it is supposed to be "right," never really happens. It never seems to be the right time, you just have to go with it. I felt like I needed to let go of my plans and just wait.

And then I figured that once I did that, we would have some snag or delay and not get our travel approval until October.

But that didn't happen. Instead, we were notified about three hours later. And then we waited to find out about our consulate appointment while we are there. And then we looked into flights and booked our tickets, and now we are set to leave in 12 days, on September 9th. We will meet JQ on September 14.

Despite some of the peace, I can't say that I'm still not stressed. I am. Since yesterday morning's news, I have been doing the third thing I do the most when I feel stressed out, which is cook. (The first thing is to eat everything and the second thing is to bite my nails.) So, I have been working in the kitchen to take my mind off of things and ended up baking two loaves of bread, making some homemade mozzarella, cream cheese, breakfast rolls, a chocolate pie, and I canned some spaghetti sauce. I feel better.

This is a one-step-at-a time thing. This whole process started five short months ago, but it is going according to plan. Just not necessarily my plan. But that's okay. We are thrilled and excited and nervous and stressed out and happy and so many other things at once. And it's okay; in fact, it's really good.

But I probably need to stop cooking so much or else I won't be able to eat all of this food before we go.