Wednesday night Tina and I spent the evening waiting for an American family in China to get back to their hotel room and get busy!

They adopted their daughter from Shen's orphanage earlier this week and Wednesday they were scheduled to visit there. This is the second family in two weeks that has been able to visit the orphanage and deliver gifts and take photos for waiting families. We had sent them a little gift bag with a small toy airplane and a greeting card from us. The airplane is a little Matchbox model of a jet airliner. (we hope someone might tell him he will be riding in one of these with us) In the greeting card we glued a picture of us holding a large print of a photo of him taken by the family that was there two weeks ago. We also printed out some phrases in Chinese like, "This is your mother and father", and "We love you." and pasted these into the card as well. We were hoping to get new photos of Shen and we weren't disappointed! Both of these recently traveling families have been able to upload photos to Walgreen's within hours of their visits to the orphanage. And both times we managed to check their Walgreen's accounts as the photos were being uploaded. We could see the number of photos in the album go up as we clicked through them. Tina wanted to study each picture, but I wanted to click through them all as fast as possible to see if they got any of Shen. Again, not disappointed...



It is truly amazing to us to see pictures of him looking at pictures of us looking at pictures of him!

Even though he's only 3, these correspondences are going to make him aware on some level that something big is going to happen to him. The families that are bringing them to him are adopting other children and he is seeing these children leave with them. He is seeing pictures of us, and hearing the plan. This can only help make the transition into our family easier for him.

Last Thursday 3/23 was a VERY Big Day here!
Our agency called to let us know they had received our P.A. That is "Prior Approval" to adopt Shen. This is the CCAA's (China Center for Adoption Affairs) official reply to our L.O.I. or "Letter of Intent" we sent to our agency on January 12. That makes it 10 weeks for us to get this final piece we needed to be DTC (Dossier To China). The CCAA actually only took about 8 weeks from when they got it.

We keep benchmarking our progress on Shen's adoption against the time it took to complete Kai's. This is pretty easy as we began both adoptions in early January two years apart. The difference is that we have completed things in different order. Last time we had P.A. well before we managed to complete our dossier. With Kai the big wait was for the USCIS to get us our 171-H. This time we managed to have all of our documents assembled and ready to go quite quickly, but couldn't do anything with them until the PA arrived. So now our documents are on their way to China! We are almost 2 months ahead of where we were with Kai's adoption. However, the next phase, waiting for Travel Approval, is taking over two months longer now than it did two years ago. With luck this will hopefully change, but we are now on to the next phase of waiting.

When I first put this blog up I really wanted a picture of Shen in the header, but the only happy face picture we had of him was the one with him holding a sucker in front of his face. I tried photoshopping it out, but I'm not that good. So I went with a composite of landmark images from the city where Shen lives.

But now we have these amazing pictures of Shen taken by a family who was at his orphanage last week to adopt their daughter. The internet really makes some amazing things possible. A family in Texas we've never met in person carried a gift from us to Shen. They took pictures of him and posted them to the internet, and we were able to print the photos within hours of them being taken.

Another family is traveling this week so we are sending another little gift bag. This time we're sending a little toy airplane and a card with a photo of us holding a photo of Shen...

It amazes us being able to send little gifts to hem this way. We hope that it helps to prepare him for the adoption and transition into our family.

Little Dog is serving as a bit of a Trailblazer for us. We have sent him along with a little photo album to Xi'an for Shen. A very kind family from Texas has carried him with them for us on their trip to adopt their daughter from the same orphanage where Shen is.
Before we travelled for Kai we were able to send a package for him through a service called "Blessed Kids". We didn't know anyone who had been to Kai's orphanage and there were no online groups for families who had adopted children from there. Shen's orphanage in Xi'an has a very active online group of families both who have been, or are waiting to travel. It has provided quite the network for people to send items or to get photos and videos of their child before they travel to meet them.
We hope that Little Dog and the photo album will both get to Shen. We printed little tags with Shen's Chinese name on them and put the tags on the album and Little Dog. The album is filled with photos of our family and home. We labeled the pictures in Chinese so maybe a nanny will be able to tell him who's who in the photos. We have heard that the orphanage does a really good job preparing children for the adoption process so we are hoping that they will have time to look through it with him.
Hopefully it won't be too long before we can follow Little Dog and meet Shen ourselves!

Since I stopped updating Kai's original blog I intended that the Stinky Mouse site would serve as a family blog, which has been great, but we want to have a record for Shen like the one we kept for Kai. This blog will mainly be for the travel story, but we will keep track of the other little steps along the way here too. I have copied some posts from the Stinky Mouse blog into here to fill out some of the paper-chase. I haven't been as good this time at documenting each step along the way. It's just gone so much faster this time and some of it just didn't seem as big a deal. I feel bad for that - the curse of being the second child has already struck! The same thing happened to Ben, though I have to say that it seems to even out on the other side in that now that Cam has moved out we seem to spend more time one on one with Ben, so hopefully we will find balance in our lives with Kai and Shen as well!

The picture at the top of the page is made of two signature images from the city where Shen is now. In the background are the Terra Cotta Warriors, and on the right is the Bell Tower in the center of the city. This graphic is different than the our other page headers, maybe a little more formal, but in that way it more closely resembles our original blog for Kai. I'm sure as we get to know Shen and have more pictures of him this will change.