30 days closer!!

 

Tonight we celebrated the fact that we are 30 days closer to bringing our daughter home from China! It has been one month since all of our paperwork has been logged into the system in China. We are currently waiting for our LOA (Letter of Acceptance) from China. We cannot go any further in the process until we get our LOA. Now, LOAs usually come anywhere from 2 months to 5 months after being logged in, with travel another 3 months after that. Of course we selfishly are hoping for the shorter end of the time frame. For us, it is the unpredictable part that is hard. If we were told that it would take 5 months for our LOA we would wait and not expect it any sooner than that. But knowing it could be 2 months, or it could be 5 months, or somewhere in between is really hard to wait through. So, for us we have decided to celebrate that we are one month closer to our daughter, whether we have to wait 4 more months or 7 more months to meet her, we are one month closer! We plan to celebrate every month that passes until we get our LOA and maybe until we travel. We wanted to celebrate to keep our spirits up, otherwise the passing days with no news will make me feel a bit crazy.

We started the night with a prayer for our daughter and for our LOA. We also prayed for the other amazing adoptive families we have met on this journey that are waiting too. We celebrated with some Chinese food for dinner and frozen yogurt for dessert. And the kids got to have POP! They very rarely have pop so getting pop to drink with dinner is very special for them. The kids and Joel love spicy food so I made spicy beef with shrimp and bok choy (I did cut back on the spicy ingredients when I made it)-- it was great!

I also made hot and sour soup as well as egg drop soup. The soups were great as well.

And our dessert frozen blueberry yogurt

We had a great night celebrating our family and praising God that we are 1 month closer to our beautiful daughter!