We're Heading to China!!!

Well, this week is the week!  We are so excited to finally get to this part of the journey and get to go meet Mei Mei and bring her home!  It is a flood of a mix of emotions. All I've wanted for as long as I can remember is to adopt a little girl from China and in one week, all of my dreams will come true.  I am SO thankful for my husband, Aaron, who has walked this journey with me and has helped me reach for my dreams and achieve them.  We are packed (pictures will be posted Tuesday when we close them up) and getting things ready here at home for the big kids.  We head out at o'dark hundred Wednesday morning for Newark and then that afternoon, fly onto China.  What do you do for 13.5 hrs on a plane??? We're hoping we can SLEEP, a lot but we also plan on catching up with each other.  Aaron has been working non-stop to get things ready at the office for the 12 days he'll be out of the office and I've been getting things ready on the home front, so the times we meant to go on a quick date, didn't happen. :-(

We will fly into Beijing and tour for two days.  And then fly to Mei Mei's province and meet her NEXT SUNDAY afternoon and she will be with us from that moment on!  EEEEeeeeeee!!! Please pray that her orphanage has been preparing her for this change.  She is going to lose everything she has ever known, her caregivers, friends, bed, everything! Please pray that her heart is open to receive our love and that she's not anxious.  We have had months to prepare for her to join us but chances are she has maybe known about us for 3-4 weeks and really how much does a 2 yr old understand about being adopted???  We need God to step in here and do what those on Earth are unable to do!  We will stay in her province for a week and finalize her adoption, visit the city, get her passport and get to know each other.

Mei Mei is from Gansu province (blue in the middle of the map) and her town is in the little hook on the eastern edge (about where the "w" is in the watermark).  Her town is too far from the capital city, Lanzhou, where we will meet, so we will not be visiting her orphanage.  While we really wanted to see where she is from and where she has lived for the first 33 mo of her life, we felt that moving her so much in such a short period of time and spending 10-12 hrs in a car, would just be too much for her.  We plan to return to China in the next few years with the entire family and we will plan to visit the city of her birth at that time.

We end our trip in Guangzhou, which is down near Hong Kong.  This is where Mei Mei will get her US visa to be able to enter the United States.  We are so fortunate that one of my childhood friends, Joey Coburn, lives in Guangzhou and has offered his home to us that week.  We are super excited to see a less touristy part of the city and spend time in a home and not a hotel and to have someone available daily to translate for us. :-)  After we get her visa toward the end of that week, we will take the high speed train to Hong Kong and fly home from there.

It will be a whirlwind tour and we will see many parts of China from the north to the south and the middle, too.  Planning on taking a posting a ton of pictures and our story along the way.  Thanks for following and for keeping us in your prayers!