Heading out soon to China!

It's definite - we are leaving this Wednesday at 12:00 Noon for Beijing. Our flight will last 13.5 hours, which doesn't seem as bad as we expected. Of course, we don't have our 14 month old yet, when the minutes will pass like hours. Coming back from Guangzhou to Beijing will be around 5 hours - with a five hour layover before flying back home - and the flight back to Virginia from Beijing will be 14 hours. Long day to say the least.

We'll be in Beijing for three days - time to see the Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City and Tiananmen square, Old Beijing (this is the first day!), Great Wall tour, Ming Tomb (day two) and the Bird's Nest and Water Cube (day three) on the way to the airport.

Nanjing - fly in on Sunday, receive our baby on Monday! - December 8th, stay for four days, fly to Guangzhou on Friday. We hope to relax and spend time getting to know one another in Nanjing. Depending on Timothy's temperament, health and energy level (as well as his parents) we aren't expecting to do much other than be together in the hotel. This is when he'll start giving us lessons in how to take care of him most effectively, and hopefully we won't be too slow as learners.

Guangzhou - our consulate appointment is on Monday, December 15th. Here's the rub - our renewed fingerprints were mistakenly sent to Hanoi by the State Department. Because our documents were marked correctly we didn't realize this mistake until the US Consulate informed us just before Thanksgiving that they don't have our updated fingerprints. Greg has made many calls and written a number of emails just to track our documents down, and Monday we're hoping to try to resolve everything and stop by Congressman Moran's office if need be. Sigh. We may have to stay an extra week in Guangzhou if we can't get them to fix this in a timely manner. Of course it was Thanksgiving week when we found all this out so we lost a few days and no consulate officials have been around to help us.

If all goes according to plan, the way it's supposed to go, we'll leave Guangzhou on Wednesday Dec 17 for Beijing and connect to our flight back to the US.

We'll keep you updated during our trip hopefully with lots of pictures. Today my friend Kate and my sister Lori are throwing us a baby shower. We've been packing, repacking, doing laundry and trying to sleep at night while we still can. Greg's done an amazing job organizing all of our paperwork. Getting lots of practice operating with little sleep.

We are a little overwhelmed but very excited! We are still a little unbelieving at this point. I don't know if it will hit us until we actually get our little guy next Wednesday and when we get to leave with him. This has been a long long road.


I'm showing the map to indicate the province where our little guy is from - JiangSu. He was born in Lianyungang, in the upper right. It's a port city. We are to meet him the first time in Nanjing, once the capital of China. It's an ancient city, with an infamous past when the Japanese invaded during WWII many residents were tortured and killed, estimates range from 300,000 to 400,000. Some American missionaries worked to protect the Chinese with a 2 mile parameter safety zone and managed to protect about 200,000 people at great personal cost. The documentary, "The Rape of Nanking" is a great source of information about this genocide. Just a tiny bit of info - not to be depressing, but to provide context.