118 days into the wait...

Some new updates for everyone. Last Thursday Sonja (the China program director from our agency) called us. She said that the CCAA (China Center of Adoption Affairs) was requesting another copy of our updated I-171 form, because they apparently misplaced it since we sent it to them in September. The I-171 is the USCIS (otherwise known as Homeland Security) who runs a background check on us to verify we are still ok to adopt. This form expires after 18 months. Why do they have an expiration date? Probably because it's another way for our government to get money out of us. The processing fee is around $500 if I'm not mistaken. So we had to pay that twice. That's all besides the point. Anyway....so I took our form down to the agency so she could fax it to China immediately. (They are 15 hours ahead of us.) Sonja said that the CCAA said that was all that they needed to process our travel approval. So I guess that the good news is that they are working on our file now. Another plus is that they only lost one page of our entire file. Looks like we should get our travel approval sometime this year! Maybe even "soon" or "any day now".

Have I mentioned how cold it was this weekend in the desert? We had an overnight low of 19F! Not even kidding a little bit. On Sunday the high was 46F. We're suppose to be atleast in the 60's. That's why we all live here. We need a vacation ... like maybe to China...it's in the 60's there.