One Big Change

There was one big change to our travel itinerary. Our son will actually join us on the 11th in the afternoon! Very exciting.

Confirmed Travel Dates

Nov. 8 - Fly out of Boise to San Francisco
Nov. 9 - Fly from San Francisco to Beijing then to Xi'an

(crossing the International Date Line will put

us in Xi'an actually late the 10th)

.

Nov. 11 - Sleep, get over jet lag

Nov. 12 - Bowen joins us

Nov. 16 - Fly to Guangzhou

Nov. 19 - Consulate Appointment

Nov. 21 - Fly home/Arrive home

Consulate Appointment and Travel Dates

I should be excited that we received our Consulate Appointment today. But I'm a little disappointed to not be going as early as we had hoped. Our Consulate Appointment is on November 19th. The Consulate was booked on the 5th and closed on the 12th so we were pushed to the 19th. It'll work out better for the girls and we should be back just in time for Thanksgiving break. That also gives us a little more time to get things ready.

The Consulate Appointment is close to the end of the trip so we will be leaving about the 10th of November and probably coming back on the 21st. I'll know more accurately when we get our flights booked.

TA!!!!! == TRAVEL APPROVAL

This is the baby photo of Bowen that was on the TA paper. I had to post it because it was so cute!

We got our TA today! That means we can leave as soon as they get a CA (consulate appointment) for us! We have requested a CA for November 5. If we get it, we could be traveling in a week and a half! We'll find out tomorrow.

LOA! LETTER OF ACCEPTANCE

We were able to sign our Letter of Acceptance (the letter which states that we absolutely want to adopt this child) on October 4, which is a whole month early. This actually means that we will be able to travel to get Bowen in mid-November. We're thinking sometime around the 15th or the 19th. We are only waiting for our travel approval now. That should come around the 29th of October.

While signing the LOA we found that we had the Pinyin of his Chinese name spelled wrong. His Chinese name is Cao Xiao Xian (instead of Xuan). Because of this error we have now been able to look up the meaning of the characters and find what his Chinese name means. It means "Little Bow String." What fun, to think that we are giving him the American name Bowen! We will try to ask while we are there the reason for his name.