New Pictures of Our Sweet Macy

My best Christmas present this year came on December 19th when I received new photos of Macy.  We were in Barcelona at the time and I was checking emails at the hotel when I found an email from Ann at Red Thread.  We have been working with Ann to send a package of Christmas gifts to Macy.  As part of the service she was able to get the updated photos for us.  

It has been more than two and a half months since we were matched with Macy and it looks like we still have another three and a half months to wait.  Hopefully we will be able to send some other packages and get another set or two of photos to help us make it through the next few months.  To me Macy already looks older and it makes me sad that we are losing so much time with her, we've already missed so much.  The photos at least give us some contact with our beautiful baby girl and as we have learned through our experience adopting Nina, we just have to focus on getting to Gotcha Day when Macy will be part of our family forever more.

As far as adoption processing goes, we are making slow and steady progress.  Our homestudy is complete and our application was received by USCIS on December 10th.  We have our fingerprint appointments this week (January 15th) and we should get our approval shortly after that.  I hope.

Once we get our immigration approval we then file with the US Consulate.  This takes about 10 days.  Then we wait for our Article 5 to be delivered to the CCAA.  This can take as long as 6 weeks (but I am hoping this might be quicker since all of the other steps with China have been way ahead of schedule (fingers crossed...the only hitch is we are getting close to Chinese New Year and all prosessing is sure to slow down). Anyway about 2 weeks after the Article 5 comes Travel Approval and then finally about 3 weeks later we depart for China!  So all together it looks like we are still 14 weeks away from travel (sigh), which puts us back to about April 25. Well at least the weather will be warmer.