Snow?

I thought I should check the weather in Guiyang before I started putting together what we will take on our trip. Good thing I did! I had been thinking, that in Southern China, the weather wouldn't be much colder than San Francisco. It turns out that the high's right now are in the 20's, and snow is expected this week! Guess I will be packing that turtleneck after all.

Travel Plans

We had our travel meeting with our agency Thursday, and confirmed we are leaving on February 15th! It is great for us to have so much time to plan for our trip. At the meeting we met one of the other couples we will be traveling with. They are also from the Bay Area and have a son close in age to our first daughter. Saturday I attended another meeting at our agency, "Babies in Hotels", to prepare us for our trip. Two adoptive families shared their travel experiences; one family adopted from China, the other from Russia. I was so glad that I went to the meeting. Not only did the families provide much needed advice for the trip, but it also helped to see how well the children had adjusted since arriving home. Two adorable kids, and so obviously attached to their parents. Today I was on the phone several times with our travel agent trying to book tickets even though our return dates haven't been confirmed. Now I need to start packing!

Travel Approval!

We recieved travel approval from China yesterday. Our agency hopes to have our travel dates set by the end of this week

Introducing Kathryn!

Here is our beautiful daughter! We have named her Kathryn after my very beloved and missed maternal Grandmother.

Her current Chinese is name is Cao Ying Zi. Cao is her last name and is likely the finding city. Ying may have been given to all the girls for that year in that Welfare Institute. Zi was given to her by the caregivers there.

The characters for her name are being translated for us and when we have more information we will decide what parts of her name to keep as her middle name. For now we only know that she will be Kathryn first.

We had a great meeting with our agency today. We will travel with three other families from our agency, two from southern California, and one other from the Bay Area. We will learn more about our trip at our travel meeting on January 17th, but it seems reasonable that we will travel after Chinese New Year which is on February 7th. A trip from about February 15th to March 1st is likely, with Jeff returning about halfway through.

We will continue to update this blog both before and during our trip to document our journey to bring Kathryn home.

Please feel free to check in anytime!

Referral!

We got the call today from our agency that our referral had arrived! Our little girl was born on 12/20/2006 and is currently in foster care under the supervision of the Guiyang Children's Welfare Agency in the Guizhou Province. We will meet with our agency today and finally see her picture!