LOA

We are so thankful: our LOA arrived! We had just been told last week that most families were currently waiting 90-120 days for LOA...and then ours arrived at day 52 (the exact same timeframe as Maren's)! We know God has a timetable that surpasses all of ours! It was overnighted to us and delivered Friday. We then took it to Danial to sign and went to the post office to overnight LOA (plus about 30 pages of documentation)) to Texas (where immigration paperwork is sent). We now know we will travel in January or February; realistically leaving the U.S. on January 10th, but hopefully the 3rd if the rest of the paperwork were to move on target or early.

Adoption includes a massive paperwork trail. The rest of the paperwork trail to get to Maeve:

1) I-800 approval document: comes from U.S. immigration (typically 2 weeks from sending it to Texas).

2) Article 5: comes from the U.S. consulate in China (typically 3 weeks from I-800 approval document; however, currently they are taking longer to process).

3) TA (travel approval): comes from the Chinese government giving us approval that every single document is completed and processed and we can go get our sweet girl (typically takes 2 weeks from Article 5).

We will not know when we get to travel until approximately 10-15 days before we leave for China. Because of all the upcoming holidays in the U.S. there is a chance we could get bumped to February. Will you please join us in praying for quick processing of each of these 3 documents? We are trying to rest in God's will and sovereignty as the best plan (instead of our plan); however, there are times we fail.