Two Weeks until E Day!

It's almost unimaginable that in two weeks we will be holding Miss E in our arms! After nearly two years we can hardly wait!

Our Travel Itinerary

October 26 - Arrive in Hong Kong for some Huen family time
October 30 - Take the train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou
October 31 - E Day! Happy Halloween
November 1 - Adoption paper work day
November 2 to 9 - Free time in Guangzhou
November 4 - Elan's first birthday!
November 10 - Fly from Guangzhou to Beijing
November 11 - Tour of the Great Wall
November 12 - Tour of the Summer Palace
November 13 - Elan's medical exam
November 14 - Tour of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City
November 15 - Elan's visa for Canada comes through
November 16 - Free day
November 17 - We're home. Hooray!

Miss E is Eleven Months old Today!

In honour of this milestone Mommy has sterilized bottle nipples, soothers and teething rings and washed sippy cups, bottles, plastic bowls and forks and spoons!

Mommy and Baba can't believe that this time next month we will be celebrating our darling Miss E's first birthday as a family! Hooray!

Travel Dates are In!

Great news! Our agency has managed to move our travel dates up so we can be with our daughter on her first birthday! We will arriving in Guangzhou on Tuesday October 30 and can come home any time from November 16 onward, leaving from Beijing. Detailed itinerary of our time in China to come.

An Élan Update from China!

Yay! Our agency called today to let us know that Élan is reportedly doing very well in her orphanage and had some new stats for us! Our little sweetheart is now 2ft 2" tall and weighs in at 17 pounds - she is now officially bigger than our two fuzz puffs (cats). Her little feet measure 4.1" and she has two teeth!


On the travel front, we won't be meeting Élan before November. We were hoping we might squeeze in before the industry trade fair in Guangzhou begins in October but no such luck (and at a 3000% mark-up on hotel rooms during the trade fair we're just as glad to be waiting until November!). Right now we are scheduled to be in China from November 5-23. Our agency is working to see if we can advance those dates a little bit so that our little girl will be with us on her first birthday (November 4).

Ten months and counting!

The clock has just ticked past midnight in China. Élan is ten months old today!

A Perfect Day to Enter the World

The wonders of the Internet. On the day of her birth this was the weather in Zhanjiang:

Temperature

Average Temperature 22 °C
Max 28 °C
Min 16 °C

Moisture
Average Humidity 55
Max Humidity 93
Min Humidity 19
Precipitation 0.0 cm
Wind
Wind Speed 5mph / 7km/h
Max Wind Speed 11mph / 18 km/h
Visibility 6.0 miles / 9.8 km

By all accounts, a lovely day to enter the world!

Checking the "Yes" Box

Yesterday we met with our adoption practitioner (i.e. social worker) to formally accept Elan as our daughter! (Yes, you can actually tick a box that says “we refuse the proposed adoption. As if!)!

The process involved updating our home study with an “Acceptance of Child” report for the Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services and signing a “Letter of Seeking Confirmation from Adopter” for the China Centre of Adoption Affairs (CCAA). We will be returning all of these documents to our agency today who will then submit them to the appropriate government body. And then we wait for our travel advisory from China! Yay!

On the travel front we were disappointed to learn that we will not be traveling to Suixi to meet our daughter and see the people and place where she spent the first year of her life. Instead, Elan will be brought to us in the capital of Guangdong Province, Guanzhou. Guangdong Province requires that adoptive families spend a week and a half in the province (more paperwork) so we are hoping that during that time we will receive permission to visit the county of Suixi as well as her orphanage and finding spot. We have been able to find a few pictures of her orphanage on the Internet. The play room looks clean and bright!

We’ll know more about when we leave for China sometime in September, when our agency will hold a travel meeting for us and the one other family we will be traveling to China with. We’ll make a smaller than normal group on the ground! (This is because the CCAA batches files by log in date (LID) not by agency. In the latest round of referrals from the CCAA only ourselves and one other family (also of Chinese heritage) fell within their LID cut-off for this round.)