LOA!!!!!

Our Letter of Acceptance arrived from China today, day 89. It's been a long three months. This letter is the final approval from China for our son. Now we need the U.S. to process his visa, but barring unexpected acts of God he is our boy!

We were waiting for the LOA to talk with Gus about him, since the wait will still be around 3 months before we can travel. We told him that he had a little brother, that we would all be going on a big trip to get him and bring him home. He wanted to know if I would be sleeping in his room too, and we said no, just your little brother. He seemed pretty chill with it.

Now we will also share his name. He will be Josiah Junwei O'Donnell. And in keeping with the 3-letter nickname rule of the house (if you don't have a three-letter nickname, you can't get in, apparently), the names in this house will now consist of Jim, Reb, Gus, and Jed.

What happens next: another whole series of paperwork.

Tomorrow we stop by the agency to sign the LOA and have our I-800 proofread, then send it to USCIS. The I-800A (application to adopt A child) has been approved; the I-800 is the approval for THIS child.

Once that is approved, USCIS sends our file to the National Visa Center, which processes his visa papers. They will cable that information to the US Consulate in Guangzhou. However, the Consulate will not do anything until we send them a hard copy of the letter which the NVC sends to us confirming the paperwork. This is stupid and redundant, but unfortunately we can't fix that. The Consulate will review the paperwork and issue an Article 5, which goes to the Chinese government and then they issue a travel approval. Once we have that, our agency can schedule a Consulate Appointment and we schedule our travel around that. Travel in July sounds realistic, barring unusual paperwork holdups.

Please, if you haven't yet contacted your senators about the immunization issue, please do. Also, if you live in Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Vermont, or Indiana, your senators are cosponsors and may be able to push the vote to sooner rather than Christmas.