We are HOME!

Well we have been home for over a week now from our trip to China to get our son. This post is just a quick hello to our regular readers who we haven't had a chance to talk to since our return. My goal is to write a post about each day of our trip (or at least the really important ones) so it may take a little time. And now that we are a family of 4, I seem to have even less time than I did before. Weird how that works. All of us are very happy to be home and we are slowly adjusting to the time change and to our change in family structure. Since we have returned, a lot of our time has been filled with paperwork, medical appointments, and most importantly, gaining trust and building a strong attachment with our son. We feel so blessed to have our son home with us. We are so lucky to have been chosen as his family. He seems to be adjusting well to his new surroundings. For the most part he is a happy boy, who is mischievous, and who loves to eat. Our favourite thing to do is to find new ways to make him laugh. His laugh is the most wonderful sound.
Thank you to everyone who followed us on this journey, who kept in touch with us during our trip, who prayed for us, and who have supported us every step of the way. Your love and support has been amazing throughout this entire process. We cannot wait for all of you to meet our son. He is one amazing little person who I am sure you will fall in love with the minute you see him (we may be a bit biased, but wait and see what you think after he smiles at your for the first time).

Happy Spring everyone, talk to you soon...I promise.

Chinese Visas

This is a guest blog post.  I’m the husband that is grateful for my wife that keeps you all up to date with this blog on a regular basis.  She is phenomenal at doing each post and I’m good at proofreading if I’m around when she is about to post it – and that’s all I can take credit for.

I have had the pleasure of doing some of the immigration paperwork as well as the visa applications for our passports.  China is quite strict with accounting for who is coming and going and what is causing this movement. 

The Canadian immigration paperwork is done in two phases.  The first phase was completed almost a year ago (oops – I was supposed to do a guest post on that process).  The short version is that I filled out about 20 pages of online documents filling in all of our personal information from addresses to finances to family details and throughout those documents referred to our son as “unknown child” with ****-**-** as his birthdate.  This was all done with the help of women that has adopted two girls from China and has helped numerous families with this complicated paperwork. 

The second phase of that paperwork will be completed in Beijing during the second week of our trip after all of the official adoption paperwork has been completed.  Fingers crossed that all the immigration paperwork is done properly so that upon our return to the airport in Toronto, the immigration officers will simply say, “Welcome home” to us and “Welcome to Canada” to our son. 

Then there were the Chinese visas for our passports.  As I said, the Chinese government likes to closely monitor who is going in and out of their country.  We were warned that when filling out the application for our visas that we really needed to be meticulous in following the instructions and to be sure to include all the necessary documentation.  Each of our applications was four pages in length and included typical personal information, passport information, place of employment, family information on children, parents and spouse, reason for travel, flight details, hotel information for our stay in China and all the information about the Chinese adoption organization that we are working with. 

The closest visa office is in downtown Toronto (2 hours East of where we live) and because we needed all the specifics of our trip to apply, we really didn’t have the time to mail in our application.  With only three weeks until our trip, I drove the three applications down to the Toronto office.  My appointment was at 9:00am and I made it no problem.  By 10:00am I was finishing the third and final application.  All the supporting documentation was in order and the last thing to check were that the signatures on our applications matched the signatures on our passports.  One of the signatures (I won’t say which one to protect my wife’s identity) didn’t match enough to pass.  “So you won’t accept the applications because those signatures don’t match?” They needed an original document so there wasn’t another option aside from driving home to get another signature and driving back.  My lovely wife met me part way to save me some time to ensure I could make it back to Toronto in time to get it all sorted out.  I realized that day, that I’m not cut out to be in the driving business.  When I got home around 7:00pm, I was ready for bed.   I’m heading back to Toronto in a few days to pick up our passports and that is one of the final things off the list in preparation for our trip – aside from packing. 

ONE MONTH!

In exactly one month we will be flying to China to get our son Emmett Zhen Feng! As a side note, for those of you that don't know, we decided (after a lot of thought) to go with Emmett for his name and will keep his Chinese name as his middle name. That way if he ever wanted to use his Chinese name he could......
So back to leaving in a month, to my husband and I that seems so far away but also so close all at the same time. While we would like to be leaving tomorrow to get him there is still so much we need to do before then. Over the last few weeks I have worked on narrowing down our packing list. I have used the list that our adoption agency provided us along with researching several adoption blogs to see what others who have taken the trip recommend bringing. I have narrowed it down to 5 pages. My husband and I have been on a few trips overseas that require planned packing and Tetris like skills to fit everything in the luggage but this is going to be different. The amount of recommended medicines on our list could take up an entire carry-on, plus we will have two tiny humans with us. We are talking more preventative medicines then when we went to Africa for our honeymoon where we slept in tents and didn't have running water! The main reason for this is because some medicines we may need are either not the same in China, are not available, or are just too expensive. That is where the blog research has come in very handy. Some of the blogs I read even wrote out exactly what they took on the trip and indicated if they would bring it again or leave it at home. Perhaps I will do the same with our packing list when I return from our trip so that it is available for others who might take same the trip in the future.

We have also received our finalized itinerary from Children's Bridge. Seeing on paper what we will be doing each day has made it even more real. I have written out a summary of our trip below.

Beijing:
Sat. Feb 25 - Adoption travel guide will meet us at the airport in Beijing and transfer family to the hotel.
Sun. Feb 26 - Adoption travel guide and driver will meet us at the hotel and bring us back to the Beijing airport for our flight to our sons province Fujian.

Fujian:
Sun. Feb 26 - Provincial adoption travel guide will meet us at the airport in Fuzhou, Fujian Province and bring us to the hotel. We will receive our son on the afternoon of Sunday February 26th.
Mon. Feb 27 - Prov. adoption travel guide will meet us at the hotel and bring us to the provincial adoption centre for registration, notarization and to complete our son's Chinese passport application.
Tues. Feb 28 - Sightseeing in Fuzhou City.
Wed. Mar 1 - Prov. adoption travel guide and driver will pick us up at the hotel for the drive to the orphanage. Visit the orphanage (approx. two hour drive).
Thurs. Mar 2 - Prov. adoption travel guide and driver will bring your notarized adoption paperwork to you at the hotel.
Fri. Mar 3  - Prov. adoption travel guide will pick up your son's Chinese passport and bring it to you at the hotel. Free day in Fuzhou.
Sat. Mar 4 - Prov. adoption travel guide will pick us up and take us to the Fuzhou airport for our flight back to Beijing.

Beijing:
Sat. Mar 4 - Adoption travel guide will meet your family at the Beijing airport and transfer your family to the hotel.
Sun. Mar 5 - Complete paperwork for CIC (Immigration).
Mon. Mar 6 - Medical examination for Emmett. Adoption travel guide will take immigration paperwork to the Canadian Embassy. Visit the Great Wall in the afternoon.
Tues. Mar 7 - Visit Hutong, make dumplings for lunch, acrobat show in the afternoon.
Wed. Mar 9 - Visit the Beijing Zoo (panda house).
Thurs. Mar 9 - One dinner arranged by adoption travel service (Peking duck).
Fri. Mar 10 - Adoption travel guide and driver will pick us up at the hotel and transfer us to the Beijing airport for our flight back to Canada.

So as you can see the first few days of our trip are going to be very busy and very exciting. Fingers crossed everyone will adjust to the time change in a very short amount of time (ha ha). We know the day we receive our son will be a whirlwind (and sadly likely very traumatizing for him). We weren't expecting it to be so soon after we arrived but the more time we have to bond with him before we fly home the better.

While I have been working on the packing list and finding/purchasing the supplies we need my husband has been working on all of the paperwork that needs to be completed. Right now he is working on our VISA applications. Perhaps sometime he can write a bit more about that process (once it is complete and we know that we did everything correctly).

I have also downloaded a few apps for our phones and I Pad that we will use on our trip.  A few translation apps (Pleco Chinese Dictionary), and a learn Chinese app, so that we can communicate with our son and with the local people when our guide is not around. I downloaded a Chinese Kids Songs CD that we can play for him in our hotel or on the plane. Our goal is to learn one of the songs so that we can sing it to him when we meet him. That was an idea I received from one of the blogs I followed. They said that it was the best thing they could have done to help with the beginning stages of bonding with their adopted child.

This weekend marks the beginning of the Chinese New Year. 2017 will be the year of the Rooster. To celebrate we are hosting our families for a traditional (well we are going to try) Chinese meal and festivities. We hope to make this a yearly tradition. So far our daughter has loved seeing the bright red Chinese decorations I have hung throughout our main floor. She is really looking forward to our "big Chinese party" this weekend.

Happy New Year everyone!

Flights are booked!

On the weekend we booked our flights to CHINA! We fly out of Toronto to Beijing  on February 24th and back home with our son on March 10th. We didn't have a lot of choices to make regarding flights etc. as most of those decisions were already made for us. One thing we had to decide was whether or not we wanted to buy a seat for our son for the flight home. Since he will be under the age of two he is not required to have his own seat,  but since the flight will be approximately 13 hours (less than what we originally thought, hooray) we were advised by the adoption agency that we may want to purchase him a seat. The cost to buy him a seat on our flight back from China was more expensive than one of our adult round trip tickets. So we weren't exactly sure what to do. Would he need to be in our arms for the entire flight? Could our daughter and son share a seat for part of the flight (knowing that our daughter  would likely want to be in our lap at some point as well). We looked into booking a flight back to London from Toronto as it has always been recommended to fly as close to home as possible, since your newly adopted child will have never rode in a car seat before. Our compromise was going to be if we could get a flight back to London that we would forget the extra seat from Beijing to Toronto and use the money to pay for the London flight. Unfortunately there are no flights into London on March 10th that would work, so the decision was made for us. As much as it pained us to pay the extra money for a seat on a flight that may not be used we decided we should just bite the bullet and book it. Perhaps the extra seat could provide more room for one of us to sleep and stretch out? Or provide a dumping place for all of the items we will need to keep two children occupied on an overseas flight? I guess we will just have to wait and see.
As a side note all other flights and accommodations while we are in China will be booked by our adoption agency. We should receive a full itinerary of our trip in the coming weeks as everything gets finalized.
Now we need to figure out how we are going to get to and from the airport. Will we drive ourselves and leave a vehicle in Toronto while we are in China so that when we return we can just hop in and go? Will family meet us at the airport to greet us and share some of the drive home? The biggest problem is that we don't know how any of us will be feeling at that point in our journey. Will we be too exhausted to drive? Will the kids sleep on the way home, or will they be wide awake and cranky? How will our son react to being strapped a car seat? We are still working on our return home plan as you can see. The only thing we do know is that once we land in Toronto all we are going to want to do is get HOME to start our lives as a family of four and sleep in our own beds.

While I was writing this blog post we received updated photos of Zhen Feng along with his most recent measurements. It was an unexpected surprise on a Monday and it completely made our day. He is still looking healthy and happy which makes our hearts smile. I haven't stopped looking at the new photos since we received them. I cannot wait until February 24th!

Care Package...and other news.

As promised here is a picture of the care package we sent to our son in China. With the help of the amazing sewing skills of my Mother-in-law we were able to make a felt book that would be able to be rolled up and crammed into the tiny box we were permitted to send.

Our hope is that the package makes it to him, and that his caregivers read him the book so that our faces become a little more familiar to him.

Our 2-4 month wait for the Letter Seeking Confirmation (LSC) ended up taking only 2 weeks to arrive! We were shocked when we received the call from Children's Bridge. When the original LSC arrived at our home we had to sign it and send it back to the agency A.S.A.P. There are two "original" copies of the LSC, one was ours to sign, the other one is for the Provincial Government to sign. Then the two originals are sent back to the China Centre for Children's Welfare and Adoption (CCCWA) in China. To summarize the LSC, it is a document that requires us to make a decision about adopting our son. Basically we check a box that says "we accept the adoptee mentioned above" and we sign our names.

Now that the LSC has been signed our agency sent us tentative travel dates (while I was writing this blog post our travel dates were actually confirmed) for our trip to China. Our travel dates are February 24 to March 10, 2017. This is so much sooner than we anticipated! We are very happy and excited that all of our waiting will be over in the next couple of months. There is a mountain of paperwork to be done before then and I will continue to keep the blog updated with information as we move through the process.

In the meantime we need to start reading the 14 page document that Children's Bridge sent us called "China Waiting Child Program Travel Guide and Packing List" - cue my anxiety now! Packing for an 18 hour flight with our 3 1/2 year old and then a return flight with our son should be interesting. I am looking forward to every aspect of the journey that lies ahead of us, except those plane rides!

We did find out that two other families will be travelling to China at the same time as us. Although our children are in different provinces  we will be doing a majority of our travel with them. One of the families has already adopted a little girl from China and she is approximately the same age as our daughter. We feel very fortunate to have an experienced family with us during our time in China. Hopefully our daughters will be able to become fast friends during the trip and possibly entertain each other on some of the more boring portions of travel (like the plane ride I mentioned earlier).

Checking off items one by one.

On Wednesday we received an email from our Program Manager at Children's Bridge that our son's China Center for Children's Welfare and Adoption (CCCWA) online file has been locked and that the CCCWA will now review our match and issue the Letters Seeking Confirmation within the next 2 - 4 months. She did mention in the email that this timeline has been faster for recent families. So fingers crossed it is the same for us. So this puts us at step 17 of the 30 step process that was given to us when we originally started this whole journey over 3 years ago.
Once the letters seeking confirmation have been received back at Children's Bridge (we have to sign  the letters and send them back) the adoption agency will begin to plain our trip to China which means that we will likely travel 6 - 8 weeks after that.
So now that our CCCWA application has been locked we are permitted to send a care package to our son. We were notified that we are not permitted any direct contact between us and the orphanage our son is in until after our adoption has been completed. We were advised to prepare a package that includes the following items:

• A small photo album book that includes photos of our home, his room, photos of us and any close relatives he will meet once he comes to Canada. We were also advised to make a duplicate photo book to bring with us to China in case the care package does not make it to him. I plan to post a photo of the book we create on our blog once it's complete. Right now it is a work in progress.
• A small stuffed toy or lap blanket
• A toddler sized back pack
• A short one page note for his caregivers that will be translated for us

We were instructed that these items need to fit into a small child sized shoe box that weighs no more than 2kgs! We are trying to get all of these things together quickly it might arrive by Christmas (whether he celebrates it or not). We have to first send the package to Children's Bridge in Ottawa and then they will send it to China.

Buying these things and creating this book has been such a joy. It feels amazing to be able to provide something tangible to our son to let him know how much we love him already. I promise to post a photo of the completed package so stay tuned.

Another exciting thing that happened this past week was the Children's Bridge monthly email arrived in our inbox. Guess who's names were in it this time?!

"Warm congratulations are extended to the Palmer family on the referral of their son."

I of course cried happy tears reading those words. After months and months of reading about other families receiving referrals it was finally our turn. I took a screenshot of our names written in the email and I look at it from time to time to remind myself that this is really happening. Our time has come and we couldn't be happier!

Pardon me, we have a son?!

Following our last blog post we had quite a few follow-up calls with our Adoption Agency, Children’s Bridge. We were left feeling very frustrated and confused as to why we weren’t receiving a child referral. Some of our documentation was set to expire in January and we were starting to discuss the changes we could make to potentially broaden the pool of children we could be matched with. Last Wednesday night I had a conversation (or meltdown) with my husband as I felt overwhelmed with frustration. I said that I knew our son was out there waiting for us so why can’t we know who he is?! Following that conversation, we made a list of questions for our agency to ask the next day. On Thursday November 10^th 2016, my husband called and left a message with our Program Manager letting her know that we had a few questions and asked if she could return our call. Later that day, as my husband was about to coach a championship final for his boys volleyball team, he received her call. He was reluctant to answer since he was a bit busy, but he took the call and planned on telling her to call me instead. She said, “We don’t need to worry about answering those questions, as we have matched your family with a little boy”. In complete shock he told her to call me and that he would get the details later. How he went on to coach and win that game with that phone conversation lingering in his head I will never know.

I received a frantic text from my husband that said “Answer your phone when Cathy calls - I guess we don’t need those answers. They have a boy for us, he just turned one”. I of course missed the text and the initial phone call. I got back to my desk and saw that I had a text message and a voicemail. I looked at the text message and panicked. As I started to listen to my voicemail I immediately started to cry. Before I could finish listening to the message our Program Manager was calling me back. I answered the phone and she said “Kathryn, this is a day that you are going to remember for the rest of your life”. The next few minutes on the phone were a blur. I tried to write down absolutely everything she was saying while wiping away tears. She assured me that she would be sending all of this information in an email right after we spoke, but I didn’t want to miss anything. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! I hung up the phone and felt like I should pinch myself. Was this really happening. Co-workers gathered at my desk and congratulated me as they could overhear my excitement during the phone call.

I refreshed my email on my phone what feels like 100 times before the email came through, and when I opened it…there he was…our son!

The document we received was 10 pages of background information and medical history on our son and 4 photos. It will likely be the only information we ever receive about his past. Here are some of the details that were included:

Name: Zhen Feng Jiang

DOB: November 6, 2015 (his date of birth was attached to him upon his arrival)

·            He is living at the Baby Care Institute of Jinjiang City in the Fujan Province of China.

·            He has bilateral cleft lip and palate and in April of 2016 had his lip repaired.

·            He has a good appetite (which you can see in the photos as he is a chunky little boy)

·            He is active and has a ready smile

·            He likes to have fun

·            He is a clever child

After we took some time to let the news sink in, we shared the photos with our 3 ½ year old daughter. She thought he looked cute and looked like her Papa (who is my father). When we asked her why she thought that she said it was because he doesn’t have any hair. I don’t think either of us will forget that response. She asked a few other times throughout that night to see his photo and now she has a printed one in a frame beside her bed. She already lovingly refers to him as “my brother”. The next several hours were spent on the phone calling family and friends and filling people in on our amazing news.

The next day we received a package from Children’s Bridge that included the same information we received in the email and some very important documents we needed to fill out with our Adoption Practitioner / Social Worker. These documents needed to be sent back to Children’s Bridge in Ottawa ASAP as they needed to be translated and sent to China within a few days. Our Adoption Practitioner came to see us on Sunday to finalize everything on our end. The most important documentation that we signed that day stated that we were accepting this child as our son. The whole process seemed a bit informal; I feel like there should have been some trumpets and fanfare in the background while we signed but it still felt very special.

In the coming weeks, several different authorities need to sign off on our documentation to make it official. We are hoping that in the New Year we will find out when we will be able to travel to China to bring our son home. The estimate we were given was likely March or April. To most of you that will seem like I long time, but right now we are still enjoying the fact that we finally know who our son is! Something we have been waiting on for a very long time.

For any friends or family members that would like to see a photo of Zhen Feng please email us, we would love to share it with you.