Expired Fingerprints and Travel Approval

Did you know that your fingerprints expire?  According to the U.S. government, they're only good for 15 months.  Our fingerprints are scheduled to "expire" on February 4, yet we're looking at returning home on February 12.  That's that not going to work in the government's eyes.  So Chris and I showed up at the USCIS office at our designated appointment time and had our "biometrics" retaken.  It was a relief knowing that this is all a formality and this time around we're not waiting for any approval or clearance.  And unlike every other step in this process, it was free of charge!

The woman taking Chris's fingerprints asked him the ages of the children we're adopting.  He got the usual reaction we get when folks hear we're adopting a two-year-old and nearly three-year-old.  After patiently listening to how much work that age is, he waited for just the right moment to deliver the news that we're well-acquainted with the age group since we also have a three-year-old and a five-year-old at home.  "You're crazy!" she cried with both disbelief and enthusiasm.  Yes, perhaps we are.

Back at work, I finally received the exciting and very much anticipated confirmation that we received our Travel Approval (TA) from the Chinese government.  The document had arrived in our agency's office in Texas yesterday afternoon.  My China adoption Facebook groups have been abuzz since the day after Christmas with news of Travel Approvals being mailed out, but since our agency was closed that day, no one could confirm for me whether or not our TA had been issued and was on its way.  There are a couple of us on the exact same timeline as we come down the homestretch, and we celebrate each other's progress and lift each other up during set-backs.  The CCCWA had announced a month ago that they'd be shutting down their computer system the week after Christmas to complete a system upgrade and all of us waiting our Travel Approvals have been hoping the CCCWA employees would want to clear their desks before the big shut-down.  Miraculously, that seems to be what happened.

While it's super exciting to receive TA, the computer shut-down is putting a damper on us moving forward with travel plans.  We need to request not only a consulate appointment (CA), but also the dates in province when we pick up Matteo and Kiera.  The timing of all three appointments has to line up.  We can't request our provincial dates because of the shut-down, our agency said they wouldn't request our CA without the provincial dates confirmed and we can't book our flights until we have all these dates confirmed.  

I pushed back on my agency to at least schedule our consulate appointment.  That's what everyone else's agency is doing and I'm worried about getting an appointment on the day we want.  If not, we'll have to request one the following day, and if the not that, the next day and so on.  One woman got her third choice, which means an extra two days in China.  That's an extra two nights of hotel, two days of meals, two days of guide fees and so on.  Our agency is motivated to wait until they can schedule everything at once so they don't have to reschedule, but despite risking aggravating the people at our agency, I'm very motivated about saving money.  They relented and are requesting February 10, which will allow us to fly home on February 12.

Last Christmas Waiting For You

I've never spent a Christmas waiting for a child.  My first two were fall babies, so the Christmas prior I had no inkling I'd have a nearly-three-month-old the following year.  This Christmas was of course different, as has been seemingly everything during this adoption process.  We originally thought we'd have our children home well before Christmas and then we faced the depressing reality that we wouldn't meet them until 2015, for a process we began in 2013. 

Putting aside the circumstances I couldn't control, I vowed to enjoy the season with the family I have with me here now.  It felt like the busiest Christmas ever as we simultaneously stayed on track with the final stages of the adoption process and hosted our au pair's mother, so some things simply didn't get done due to not enough hours in the day.  Yet when I think about the memories from this past month, I know I made time for what was important. 

I don't know what Oliver and Soren will remember from this Christmas, perhaps very little of what exactly we did.  But I do hope they remember that it was fun.  Because that's what it was for me.  We baked gingerbread cookies with friends, learned the lyrics to our favorite carols at Dawn and Drew's annual Carols and Cocoa party, visited Santaland at Macy's (thanks Dan and Nan!) and read Christmas book after Christmas book from the collection we've accumulated over the years.  Although this Christmas will go down in our memories for being a brown Christmas, we still enjoyed winter activities like Soren's first try at downhill skiing and tubing for Oliver and me.

And then there was the usual big, boisterous Chesla Christmas Eve gathering.  Oliver and Soren had a blast playing with their cousins and opening presents and even got to stay up until (gasp!) 10:00 p.m.  It was wonderful to see my husband's family embrace Marcel and his mom on a holiday they were spending so far from home. 

Christmas Day itself was much quieter, with much-needed downtime.  After opening presents at home, we enjoyed a light lunch at Dan and Nan's and opened yet more presents.  By Christmas night we were already researching and designing plans for a custom Lego table, because yes, with a five-year-old in the house, this Christmas could be described as the "year of the Lego".  We have this crazy dream of not having our house overrun with tiny plastic bricks. 

During all of this, Kiera and Matteo were always on my mind and in my heart.  I did end up spending this Christmas without them, but I'll remember it as the last Christmas waiting for them. 

And Now Some News From Shenzhen!

The same care package service that sent us an update on Matteo was finally able to get us an update on Kiera too.  Angela from Lady Bugs and Love is Chinese and lives in China, so she is the one who personally calls the orphanages on behalf of adoptive parents to ask for updates.  She e-mailed me to let me know to check with our adoption agency for the update, because the orphanage had insisted on sending it through the agency and wouldn't release answers to our questions directly to Angela.  However, they did pass along a message, which Angela relayed to me in her e-mail:

The orphanage staff told me Kiera is doing so well.  She's totally healthy now.  She had mild cerebral palsy when she entered the orphanage.  But after therapy, she's fully recovered.  She's even better than the children who are sent as "healthy referrals"!  She said just tell her family no worries, no concerns, she's doing well.  

Since you can't "cure" cerebral palsy and we haven't received any mention of therapy before, I still question whether Kiera actually has CP and am bracing myself for a surprise diagnosis of something else when we get home.  Until then, I'm rejoicing in the reassuring words of "she's doing so well." And in the videos we received with the update, she does look healthy and happy. 

Kiera's update describes her good emotional development with examples of how she can exchange back-and-forth gestures with others, as well as back-and-forth sounds, smiles and other gestures with caregivers.  She likes dolls, cartoon movies and blocks.  She can draw circles and lines and the numbers 1 and 2.  We were last told that she's quiet and introverted, but our latest update describes her as lively and outgoing.  I can't wait until I find out for myself what her personality is really like. 

She's still super tiny - not even on the growth charts.  I had been concerned about her size earlier, but given that she's living with a foster family, looks healthy and appears to be on target developmentally, I'm not really worrying about it anymore. 

I'll leave you with two of the videos the orphanage sent of Kiera.  I believe both were taken within the past week or two in the playroom of the orphanage. 

• Kiera plays basketball
• Kiera draws

Carols and Cocoa

After a two-year hiatus from Carols and Cocoa, we made it this year!   Every year we crowd into my friend's living room to sing Christmas carols accompanied by a piano.  Except two years ago it snowed enough the afternoon caroling was planned that I couldn't even manage the short ten-minute drive to her house.  Then last year their daughter came down with the highly-contagious Hand, Foot and Mouth disease. So I was thankful that this year the weather cooperated and everyone was healthy. 

My friend's husband played the guitar while his sister played the piano and everyone who wanted to sing sang along.  Adults took breaks in the kitchen to sip hot cocoa or tea and munch on seasonal treats while the kids alternated between joining us for a carol or two and then disappearing to the kids' bedroom to play.  Oliver's favorite song right now is Frosty the Snowman.  Both kids liked ringing the bells we were given for a raucous rendition of Jingle Bells.  It was a wonderful way to spend a winter afternoon.

Thankful to Those Around This Table

I was so excited to have the honor of hosting Thanksgiving this year. I love big family gatherings and I got more than a bargain with 15 of us around our dining room table...and three cards tables lined up at end.  The result was a dinner table that stretched from the dining room to the other end of our living room.  It was cozy, but we all fit.

Once table was set and our guests seated, everyone was anxious to dig into the turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole and all the other Thanksgiving foods they look forward to enjoying at this annual feast.  But first I asked everyone to say what they were thankful for.  Oliver was one of the first to answer the question.  Because of this picture I had found earlier that week among a pile of artwork he brought home from preschool, I anxiously awaited his answer. 

"I'm thankful for Dad," he began, then paused, but finally finished with, "and Mom."  Whew!  Glad I made the cut!

Soren happened to be next and his answer was the same.  This shouldn't be a surprise since he copies everything Oliver says, but I at least have him officially on the record (with 14 witnesses) as being thankful for good old mom. 

As my turn approached, I looked around the table and saw what I was thankful for looking back at me.  I'm thankful for those who help me take care of my children.  For Marcel, who took a chance on our family and left his home to help us with our kids, for Uncle Andy and "Papa Danielle" who babysit on a moment's notice, for Liula who continues to be a part of our lives even though she's not our nanny anymore, and Grandma Nan and Grandpa Dan who are our back-up childcare and whose three-week commitment to taking care of Oliver and Soren means we aren't going to be schlepping them with us to China. 

Never Too Old for St. Nick

As he does every year, St. Nicholas visited our house.  He had an extra pair of shoes to fill this year.

In addition to the traditional goodies St. Nicholas brings, St. Nicholas left Marcel the book Twas the Night Before Christmas.  I guess he thought our German should have his own copy of this American Christmas classic.

Oliver and Soren were very excited about St. Nicholas' visit and last night right bed scampered downstairs to select a pair of shoes.  I have to give Oliver credit for his strategy for increasing his haul of St. Nicholas loot by choosing to leave out his snow boots and not his regular shoes.

As is the tradition in our house, Oliver and Soren also each received a book to add to the collection of Christmas books that come out each season.

Visas

Visa is the word that has defined the post-China approval stage of the adoption process.  As soon as we received our Letters of Acceptance (LOA) from China, we mailed in our I-800 application to the USCIS.  The I-800 is needed to finalize the immigration process for Kiera and Matteo.  They will fly to the United States on their Chinese passports with American visas and automatically become American citizens when they land on U.S. soil.

Here's where the simple concept of "applying for a visa" gets kind of ridiculous.  I sent the I-800 application by overnight mail to a "lockbox" in Lewisville, Texas.  If I had sent it by regular mail, it needed to go to the elusive "lockbox" in Dallas, Texas.  I still haven't figured out what this "lockbox" is.  I think it might be a black hole.

From there, the application took the standard two weeks to travel by mule-drawn cart to Lee's Summit, Missouri, where it is assigned to a USCIS officer for review.  Do not ask me why we couldn't just mail our applications directly to Missouri, because at this stage in the process, I'm terrified of making a wrong move and halting the entire adoption, so I stopped asking reasonable questions.

Once our officer approved our applications, she sent them by "two-day" mail, which was really five-or-six-day mail to the National Visa Center (NVC) in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  Day six of our application's journey was Thanksgiving, so that pushed us back yet another day.  I had already been stalking the NVC since Monday hoping to get something called a "GUZ" number.  Pretty sexy sounding, right?  Like much of this process, I do not even know what a "GUZ" number is, but I do know I need it to fill out the DS-260, which is the immigrant application through the State Department.  I filled the DS-260 on behalf of Kiera and Matt and swore to the U.S. government that my two-year-olds do not intend to engage in polygamy, are not members of the Communist party and are not terrorists, just to name a few.

After calling the NVC repeatedly before I could get something other than a busy signal and then spending 30 minutes on hold before reaching a human being, I finally had my GUZ# in hand and immediately logged into the DS-260 application.  That's where I saw they had entered my name as K-R-I-S-T-E-N.  While waiting on hold again (for 50 minutes) with the NVC, I entertained myself by ranting on Facebook and commiserating with my two fellow K-I-R-S-T-E-N friends.

This past Monday I hounded politely e-mailed the NVC requesting a pdf of the cable they send to the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, China alerting them that our applications have been forwarded.  In the age of electronic correspondence, I wasn't going to wait around for the paper copy of the cable to come in the mail.  Once my agency had the pdf of the cable and a copy of our DS-260, they sent an envelope of paperwork by overnight mail to our agency's in-country rep.  He or she will hand-deliver Kiera and Matt's applications to the consulate.  Deliveries of visa applications are only permitted on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, so we hope that as I type this, all the proper paperwork is sitting on a consular official's desk.  They take exactly two weeks to issue what is called an Article 5 letter, which certifies that Kiera and Matt meet the qualifications for an immigrant visa.  We hope to get their Article 5 letters on December 18.  That completes their visa process.  Whew!

Chris and I still need to apply for our visas from the Chinese government.  We are also waiting on travel approval from China, who won't issue that until we have our Article 5.  Once we have travel approval, we can request our consulate appointment, which will be the final step in the adoption process.  And once we have our consulate appointment, we can book our flights to China!

Because much of these final steps follow a predictable timeline, our agency is preparing for us to leave on January 22.  Kiera and Matteo, just six more weeks!