Travel Itinerary

Here are our official travel plans for our trip-

Wed. March 26- Flight leaves Greenville at 9:10 am to Detroit, then to Tokyo, Japan for a 4 hr. layover, then fly to Beijing. Arrive in Beijing at 9:30 pm on March 27. The time is 12 hours ahead so it will be 9:30 am on Thursday EST.

Friday March 28- Temple of Heaven tour in Beijing, lunch at Jai Dai Cun Restaurant, Chinese Acrobat Show in the afternoon.

Saturday March 29-Tour Beijing including Great Wall of China and the Forbidden City.

Sunday March 30- Fly to Shenyang City in the Liaoning Province. Clare's home city.

Monday March 31- This is it! The day we get Clare. Gotcha day.

Tuesday April 1- Complete official adoption paperwork.

Wed. April 2 to Sun April 6- Free days in Shenyang.

Monday April 7- Another paperwork day (hopefully not all day)

Tuesday April 8- Fly to Guangzhou, China. The American Consulate is located here.

Wednesday April 9- Medical exam and visa photos for Clare.

Thursday April 10- American Consulate Appt. at 9:00 am

Friday April 11- Take oath at American Consulate Office and farewell dinner

Saturday April 12- Flight to Home Sweet Home- Arrive in Greenville at 7:10 pm on Sat.
April 12, flight 3729 on NW airlines. It takes 24 hours to fly home
but we go backwards in time zone so we arrive home the same day.

We have travel dates

Finally as of Friday 2/29 we have our plane tickets for our trip to China to bring Clare home.
We are leaving on Wednesday March 26 at 9:10 in the morning and a mere 24 hour later, after a stop in Detroit and Tokyo, Japan we will arrive in Beijing! We will tour Beijing for a few days and on Sunday 3/30 we will fly to Shenyang, China where we will meet Clare on Monday 3/31. It's the Final 4 Championship Game Day- first time in over 20 years John and I will miss the final game! It will be our "Gotcha Day" as they call it in the adoption world.

We'll post further info on our itinerary in China in a day or two. We will post pictures and updates while we're in China on this site so stay tuned!

The picture to beat all pictures!

What do you think- is she an extrovert?

New pictures

We received new pictures of Clare late yesterday. How wonderful! You can see she is very healthy and happy. She has been with a foster family for awhile now to get her ready for family life. Obviously, she is being well taken care of.
We are still waiting for our travel dates. We should find out any day- but the days are dragging on now. We're ready to go!

Clare photo

Thank you so much to Forrest and Robin for sending us this picture of Clare taken last March. They traveled to Shenyang last March to pick up their daughter from the same orphanage and they were the only two girls in their group of children. We hope to meet up in the future since we both live in the Southeast.
We can't wait to see her- she's no doubt changed since last March!

Family of 3- until March!

We had hoped to travel to China by December and have a family of 4 for Christmas. Looks like we will be a family of 4 by Easter though. Finally! Here is a picture from Christmas this year- our last one as a family of 3.

It' Official!

Last Monday on 1/21 we received a phone call from Leslie at Children's Hope notifying us that our LOA(official referral) had finally arrived! This means in 6-8 weeks we will definitely be traveling. Since Jack is going with us it will work out great that one of the weeks we will be in China will be his Spring Break. Things have a way of working out.

We received this picture on April 18 from Childrens Hope International- our adoption agency. In her file, her personality was described as extroverted and happy. We can definitely see what they mean. Look at that smile!

Here she is! Shen Wen Chi- soon to be Clare Chi Ann

This is it- the first picture we saw of Clare. A few days later the adoption agency called to ask us if we wanted to review her file. We said "Yes" and the journey began. We started a long spring and summer of official paperwork that need to be done and sent to China to be logged in. This is known as the dossier.
Since I am the ultimate procrastinator- it was a very big challenge. I had hoped to be done by July 15- but it was not submitted until October 1.
We received word a few weeks later that our dossier was logged in on 10/19/07.
This is when the wait began. Now we wait- and hope things move along as quickly as possible.