The Road To Ren

Our adoption journey to our son Ren William.

Musings by Elaine and other Blitherings. This blog was origonally intended to document our China adoption journey to our son Ren. Now we are home and this blog is about our family. I would love to have you sign my guest book.

Scroll to bottom to see slideshow pictures.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Getting Closer! We got our golden ticket!

This is how I feel.
Well we received the last paper for our dossier yesterday! The infamous I 171-H, translation: our permission from the United States Immigration Office to adopt Ren and bring him home! It is our Golden Ticket, LOL! This is a huge step in completing our side of the process. For every step closer it makes GUESSING (and I stress guessing) when we travel easier, it narrows down the window. We are thinking we might travel in November. We are hoping to travel in November, God willing. We still have a couple of steps, but we are thinking we will have our dossier to China in August and then we wait for travel approval. Travel approval is averaging anywhere from 90 to 120 days to be issued. Who knows, but for those of us adopting we take quite seriously all the work that goes into our wild speculating.


November would be good for several reasons. #1. The city of Nanjing where we will be staying is called one of four "Furnace" cities in China! :-O Jiangsu Province has four seasons with winter being cold and summer being extremely hot and rainy. Hence it is better to visit in the spring or fall. #2. The trade fairs are in October, they will be spaced out over 3 separate weeks. That means the hotel and air fares will be doubled and even tripled during those weeks. Also the trade fair means tons of more people and even more crowded. So even though we would like to travel sooner we are trying to look at the bright side of having to wait till November.

Friday, July 18, 2008

News Bits

I have made a few changes to my blog. The most obvious one is it now has a playlist with some of my favorite songs. Because of this it may not be work safe for some of you. You can turn off your volume before logging on or scroll to bottom and turn the playlist off.








For those of you who know my son Caleb, I have added his travel blog. He is in Japan for a study abroad program studying Japanese language. You can find his link on the right hand side of my blog in interesting links. http://calebsdayoff.blogspot.com/








On another note we received another update on Ren. I have hesitated sharing this news because I do not have all the facts yet. I have decided to post this because I covet your prayers for him. It appears that he was hospitalized for 3 weeks but is out of the hospital and doing fine. He had a low blood platelet count and developed bruising under his skin like a purple rash. From what I can tell from my research this could have been a reaction from his immune system to another virus like chicken pox or something. I am leaving out all the boring medical terminology for now. We are waiting for another update and I will post as soon as I hear something. The good news is that he is doing well now. I am still processing the fact that he was in the hospital and I knew nothing about it till after the fact. I realize that this could be a blessing in disguise. It is one more reminder that we are not in control of this process. I thank God that he has a plan and IS in control.
Jeremiah 29:11 (The Message)
"I'll show up and take care of you as I promised and bring you back home. I
know what I'm doing. I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you, not
abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for." God.