Celebrating Kelsey's 13th Birthday

"Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.". Colossians 4:6

This past week has been busy. We received our LOA via Federal Express on Tuesday. John had a friend that was gracious enough to come by the house that afternoon and picked it up after I signed it and took it to Culpeper to John at work (he was going that way) for John to sign it and put it back on Federal Express back to the agency. That is one expensive piece of paper by the time it gets back to the CCAA in China! As of right now, it is in Beijing awaiting delivery as it was mis-routed somewhere along the way. I completed the I800 form and its accompanying documents on Wednesday and it is also in route to USCIS. We now wait for USCIS to give us provisional approval which I am told takes around 10 days and for the CCAA to give us TA (travel approval). We, then, can start working with travel agencies to book the trip (once our agency has also secured the necessary appointments for the province paperwork and the consulate paperwork in Guangzhou). We are still hoping and praying to travel around February 10th or soon thereafter.

Melissa had her first visit with the doctor and they sent us an ultrasound picture on the cell-phone. I am hoping to get a copy soon to put on the blog as it is the first "glimpse of our grandchild". All is well and her due date is July 19, 2009. Two days after their 5th anniversary.

On Saturday, we celebrated Kelsey's 13th birthday. For those that do not know our entire family, she is my niece. She spends LOTs of time at my house. She is quite small for her age and is very energetic. She is very likable and has a good heart. I am including pictures of her birthday party. Unfortunately, Shane wasn't feeling great and he left the party with dad before picture taking started so there are no pictures of him at the party. I still haven't replaced my digital camera and I REALLY need to as it is so great to be able to snap a picture for the blog anytime that I want to.

I don't expect that I'll hear anything from China this week but will be busy continuing our packing. I have Shane's clothes for the trip set aside and have washed Abigail's size 3T's and will be completing her portion of the packing this week on my two days off from work. We still have not any snowfall other than the dusting we had in early December. Shane and Nicholas continues to eagerly hope for snow to play in.