I've never celebrated Mardi Gras. I have eaten pancakes for Shrove Tuesday, but that doesn't seem quite the same.
As I drove around town today and looked at the gray, dead landscape of the tail end of winter, I thought that if ever there was a time in need of a party this is it. One last big blowout before we begin the final countdown to spring. I mentioned our little Chinese New Year celebration this last weekend, but I didn't mention our other big reason for celebrating. On Friday we received our I-171. This is the document that says our petition to bring Shen home has been processed by the USCIS. This was the last piece we needed to complete our dossier. Now we are waiting for China to grant us Prior Approval (PA) before we can send our dossier to Beijing. Then we will wait for China to send us a Letter of Acceptance. Then we will wait for Travel Approval and a consulate appointment.

We have finished all the preliminary steps required and now begins our very own season of Lent. I wish that like Lent we knew how long this wait will be. I think it's safe to assume we have more than 40 days until our Easter comes. But each day we mark off brings us closer to Shen. The days are still cold, but the sun is coming closer. Soon this worn and weary landscape will surrender to the quickening forces of spring. We have begun our wait.

This is the most recent photo we have of Kai's new little brother (Note: he's Cam & Ben's little brother too!). This picture was taken in October by a parent who was at the orphanage in Xi'an to adopt their daughter. They posted it online in an album of photos. They didn't know us or that we were adopting this little boy when they took the picture, or when they posted it, but we are very grateful to them. We have 5 pictures of him that we received from our adoption agency as part of his file. In all of those pictures he has a pretty sad little face, so it was really nice to get one of him with a happy face!

And now, I'm tired of only using pronouns when talking about him, so I'm going to tell you the name we have finally decided on. His new name is Shen.

We will keep Yu-Heng as his middle name, just as we kept Hui as Kai's middle name.
We had a harder time deciding on this name than we did with Kai's name. My preference is for short names. Cameron and Benjamin are longer names but they have good short versions: Cam and Ben that they use more regularly. We want to give him a Chinese name that is not difficult or awkward sounding to westerners. The Chinese character we chose for Shen is 深. It means "deep" or "profound".