THE SURPRISES KEEP COMING!

We all had a wonderful and unexpected surprise in our email inboxes.....updated information and PHOTOS of our beautiful children!!  I think we were all in shock and amazement at how much they have all changed!  Our little babies from the referral photos are now toddlers!  We are all anxious to discover their little personalities to match the photos!  Just one more week until we are in China with our little darlings!  All of our group 53 families will be on the way to Nanchang this time next week preparing for our little ones arrival to the hotel on Sunday!  It is hard to imagine the great adventure that lies ahead for all of us, but one thing we know is that we are ready to finally have those darlings in our arms!!!

It's Almost Time!!!!

Group 53 finally has travel approval and plane tickets!  We are departing on Thursday July 28th with the exception of the Caffarelli family who are going to do a little sightseeing around Beijing earlier in the week!  We will all end up in Nanchang on Friday night and see our beautiful daughters and son for the first time Sunday morning!  It is hard to imagine what that day is going to feel like. Words just can't express how excited we are to finally be taking this journey.  We are hoping with all of the planning, paperwork and packing that these next two weeks will go by quickly.  It is so surreal that after all this time we are finally getting ready to leave for China.

CELEBRATIONS!!

Group 53 has so much to celebrate this month!!  The arrival of our referrals, all of the girls first birthdays and of course Father's Day, made June a very special and memorable month for all of us!  We are all somewhere between panic over our growing To Do lists for China and still floating on Cloud 9.  Either way we are enjoying celebrating every single milestone of this wonderful adventure!  Hopefully the next week or so brings another major milestone....our anxiously awaited travel approval from China to come get our beautiful babies!!!

THE "BIG 10"

We all knew this day could be coming soon but most of us were thinking July or August and trying not to get our hopes up!  If there is one common thing we have learned as a group...it is how to manage expectations!!  Early rumors started to trickle in saying that The CCAA was going to match families logged into China by June 30, 2006...That was us!  We wanted to believe it was true but as always we were managing expectations and emotions, as we have learned to do over the past several years.  We spent several days of riding the "are we in or not" roller coaster through a long holiday weekend!  Every person in our group has thought "Can something just go our way for once" at one time or another over the past several years and finally on June 1, 2011...it did!!!  In keeping with the tradition that nothing about our adoption experience has been the norm up to this point, in the largest batch of referrals China has produced in YEARS, (lovingly dubbed the Big 10) we finally received our referrals!!  Three beautiful girls and (surprise!) one of the most darling little boys you have every seen.  Once the shock wore off we were all overcome with such emotion that these little ones that have lived in our hearts for so many years are finally going to be part of our families! Our dreams have finally become reality.  Every piece of paperwork, every hoop jumped, every shed tear was all worth it once we saw their little faces.  I am very sure that each and every one of us would wait another 5 years if it led us to each of these angels!