Can you believe what a terrible parent I am? We've had these photos for a week now and I'm just now getting them on the blog! The family who took the little stuffed bear for us took these pictures. I've had to tweak them a bit because of the backlighting, so the color is a bit wonky. But is this guy cute or what?
So, the LOA (or now I find out that people are calling this the Signing Commitment or SC) has gone back to China, and we are feeling pretty good about the first week of August for traveling. If my little weather widget over there in the sidebar is accurate (when it manages to update at all!) then I'm not too worried about Xi'an in the summer. I'm trying not to think about Guangzhou.

It Came! It Came! It Came!

That's our "Letter Of Acceptance" and is the document we have been waiting for China to send us for the last 77 Days. It's a letter we have to sign and return to China which states we accept the "referral" of Shen. As we didn't have to do this when we adopted Kai we're actually a little frustrated that they've inserted this step into the process. I'm guessing it was implemented by China's Department of Redundancy Department. You see, we started out by asking them for permission to adopt Shen and they wrote us a letter giving their approval. Now they've gone over all our paperwork and have written us a letter asking if we want to adopt Shen.

But it's Finally Here!!

And so now we can finally start waiting again! For the next step, which is Travel Approval (TA). Best guess for that is 2 to 3 weeks after our signed LOA gets back to China. When we adopted Kai we traveled 17 days after getting TA. So when do we travel? I'm guessing sometime in the first half of August. You are welcome to post your best guess for "Gotcha/Metcha/Family Day" in the comments.

We have sent another little gift off to Shen with a family we met through the Yahoo Group for families adopting from Xi'an. They left on Friday for China to adopt another little boy at Shen's CWI. We are hesitant to send too much stuff, as it's hard on the traveling family and on the nannies. I have heard stories of families sending clothes and when they finally travel to get their child the nannies take the brand new clothes out of a cupboard and return them. The nannies assume the families want the clothes back and there isn't anyplace to store individual belongings for the children. The families I know of would have been happier if the clothes had simply gone into the community bin, but the nannies err on the side of caution. Photo albums are quite welcome, so we've sent two of those so far. This time we sent a little Beany-baby sized teddy bear with a cut-out heart tag bearing a little photo of Tina and me labeled Mama and Baba in Chinese. We know it might go in the cupboard till we get there, but we figure at least he'll get to play with it for a little bit, and he'll see a photo of us again. We are hoping we will get more new photos of him again too!

What's Blog Bling? Blog Bling is what you call the little "widgets" people put in the sidebar of their blogs. There are thousands of funny little programs you see on different blogs, some are functional and some are just silly entertainment. I like having a few of these over there on the right if they're relevant. So last week I searched around and found a few fun ones to put here on Shen's blog. We've got a "count-up counter" keeping track of the number of days we have been waiting for LOA. We've also got a the current time and weather in Xi'an listed as well. These let us see a bit what's going on in Shen's world at the present moment. The last one I added is a little Chinese language flashcard. Each time you reload the page it displays a different word, and if you click on the little play button it will play a recording of the correct pronunciation of the displayed word.

Today our documents have been logged in at China's Center for Adoption Affairs for 65 days. We have been hoping to hear something soon, specifically we want to get our LOA - Letter Of Acceptance. A bunch of people logged in shortly before us received news today, but not us.

We did get a very happy present from a family in Xian right now though! They were able to take another photo album to Shen for us and post pictures of him online for us. It's just a couple pictures, but they are really great ones, in the photos he is holding the little picture album we sent him! Check out his new summer haircut...