CA received!

We received our CA today!!!! For those of you not up on your international adoption lingo, it stands for consulate appointment. That is the final step needed to travel home with Storie. The appointment is with the US consulate in Guangzhou, China. On October 15th Kurt and I will take Storie with us to the US consulate building. They will look over some of our paperwork and then we will have to raise our hands and swear to have her vaccinated, so forth and so on. It is really a very benign appointment but one that we must complete. They are basically giving us permission to bring Storie into the United States.

Since we received our CA we can now finalize our travel dates. We were told today that we would be traveling October 3rd through October 17th. It is a relief to finally know when we are going to go get our daughter. We were originally told last week that we would be traveling in September to bring Storie home. Unfortunately, due to the Olympics many adoption agencies postponed travel for their adoptive families. What has since happened is there is now a mad rush to get these families to China to get their children. The problem we had was getting an appointment with the US consulate. They are booked through September, so our adoption agency was unable to secure an appointment for us. We found out on Monday that September was not an option. We have been waiting to see if an appointment could be obtained for October. It was a relief to find out today that we will leave for China on October 3rd.

We still have to make sure Kurt will be able to take time off from work to travel to China. He has some very important things going on in October that may pose a problem to him going with me. We went ahead and booked his flight but will not find out until later this week or next week if he will be able to come. We had been hopeful that our adoption agency would get us there in September so we would not need to worry about him taking time off in October. We thought that the Olympics would not affect us since we knew we would be traveling after the conclusion of them. Boy we were wrong! While we would have liked to travel in September to bring Storie home, we realize that it is out of our hands. One thing you learn while adopting from China is nothing is in your control. We just have to look at this setback as one last pothole on this very bumpy road to China.