She's Ours!!!!

It is 2 am our time and our agency just called with our SCL (seeking confirmation letter) notification and Lilymei is officially ours!! We will be traveling to China, but not until after the Olympic games.
We were happy to wake up this early for such great news. We will post more once we "officially" wake up. Thank you all for the love and prayers.

Scott Survived the Ohio Cold & Vegas Charm!

To all of the people I got a chance to see on my trip back to the States, thank you! I had a great time, especially playing with the kids. I can't believe how big everyone is getting. The weather could have been a little more conducive to not causing me to freeze, no 65 degrees is NOT warm! We hope to be able to visit again soon and miss you all.
I also had (yes had) to stop in Vegas on the way home to see some of my friends "Jim" and Alan. We had a great time, but I am not sure I could have survived another night on the town. The Hot Hot Slots paid off well for one of us, let's just say it wasn't me. Thanks for all of the great times to everyone involved in the trip back.

Adoption Update

We received an update from our adoption agency this morning. No, we haven't received our referral. :-( More on that in just a minute. It has been 8 weeks since we received our pre-approval from China to adopt a now 16 month old baby girl. The China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) has just started using a new computer system which is supposed to "speed" the process along. Our adoption agency expected us to receive our official "Seeking Confirmation Letter (SCL)" OR "Referral" from China within 6-8 weeks from the date of our pre-approval, which was March 12, 2008. Every night for the past month we have gone to bed hoping to be awakened with a phone call from our agency. Every morning we wake up with the realization that "THE" phone call did not happen. How frustrating!!!

Well, last night Scott emailed our agency in St. Louis to see if they had any news for us. They promptly replied to our email with the information that there is nothing we can do but wait for the CCAA to review our dossier (the tremendous pile of documents that took us 6 months to accumulate, have notarized, certified, and authenticated that tells our complete life stories). Apparently, because our Log In Date (LID), the date the CCAA logged us into their system, is Oct. 26, 2007, there are other families like us who have chosen a Waiting Child but their LID is earlier than ours and they are receiving their SCL's before us.

What that all means is that our agency thinks we will have to wait another 1-2 MONTHS before we receive our referral. I guess we can count on getting a few more full nights of sleep between now and then. Our best estimate now as to when we think we will be traveling is September or October. Sighhhhhh.

As always, we promise to update you all whenever we hear something! Let's hope it's sooner rather than later!

Happy Mother's Day to all the Mothers out there!

Oh my they did it again!

As I get ready to head out on a trip back to the mainland, US. I would like to brag one more time about my sons. Nate & Drew once again won a base wide writing contest this week; the theme was "What does it mean to be a military child?". I am so proud of them both for their hard work. I thought it would be nice to place at least part of each of their essays on the blog, so:
Nate's "...it means that we get to go to interesting place. My dad didn't used to be in the military. When he was a civilian he would not come home for lunch or dinner. Sometimes he would have to stay at a hotel for the night. He even worked on weekends. Now that he is in the military we go to assignments together. Now we almost always eat dinner together. It feels really nice to have my dad back. I am very proud that my dad is in the military."
Drew's "I am a military child. I am 9 years old, my dad joined the military when I was 4 years old. I can't remember what it was like before the military. I like my dad in the Air Force because we can see all the cool stuff like the jets and air planes. I feel proud with my dad in the Air Force. I like being a military child because we meet new people, live in different houses, and live in different climates. I get to travel around the world with my family. We get to go to cool places like Japan and China for vacations."
So as you can see the boys are busy doing some writing, but as we speak they are both enjoying the spoils of their winnings, a new Wii game called MarioKart.
Well to those that I will see during my trip back to the states, I hope to travel safe and be there after a mere 24.5 hours of travel! Take care to all-Scott.