Of all the things one has to do as a parent, sorting baby clothes of all shapes and sizes, not to mention gender affiliations, has to be at the top of the drudgery list, especially when one doesn't have the actual company of the babies for whom all of these clothes are being sorted.
But, nonetheless that is what I found myself doing tonight. My sister, Kathy, would be proud of my efforts at organization. We have several outfits for each of them, including "dress-up" outfits for the G & R ceremony and for our embassy appointments.
It's a good thing too, since we now have finalized our flight arrangements, and we'll be flying Korean Air non-stop to Seoul, Korea from Chicago and then on to Hanoi from Seoul. It seems like a much better arrangement than flying to San Francisco first, and it will be much easier on the return trip to have only one change of planes. We have confirmed bassinets on the return trip, but alas, no foot rests. We'll have to make do with the extra relaxation afforded us by the moments of sleeping babies.
We fly out of Chicago around noon on March 16th and our G&R is scheduled for the 19th so we'll just miss meeting Maisie and Luc on St. Patty's Day; we even have an outfit for each of them with green shamrocks, but they will have to wear them after the fact. Hey, if Tet goes on for weeks, why not celebrate St. Patrick's Day for a few extras as well?
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Things we didn’t know we would ever need to know
One of the strangest aspects of this whole adoption marathon, journey, adventure, or whatever you want to call it: I know too much now about all kinds of strange things involving international adoption and travel, and a few other things, as well, that I never thought I would ever need to know.
Take cell phones. Our US Cellular phone would not work in Vietnam, I discovered. Too bad I just renewed the plan and bought a new phone. As our brother-in-law Tom, who works for Motorola, explained, the international standard is GSM technology. He explained that I would have to buy another phone if I wanted it to work in Vietnam. To buy the correct phone, I would also have to find out what bands they use in Vietnam. There are six band wavelengths for cell phones, and different countries use different bands. What's more, different phones are equipped with different bandwiths, as well. Tri-bands are good, with three different bands. Quad bands are better, with four. But among the three or four you have to have the right one. For Vietnam, the main bandwith turns out to be primarily 900, and so I would have to buy a GSM phone that worked on that band. It is also important to get an unlocked phone. Yes, he said, I could buy one from Ebay, as long as I could trust the phone would have the right band. Three days later I had in my hands a phone that I bought on Ebay for $50. Then I purchased a SIM card, basically a computer chip which makes the phone work and buys the phone access to a Vietnamese mobile network, for $70. With their confirmation email the company that sold me the card, Cellular Abroad, offered a $10 discount if I put a link to Cellular Abroad on my web page. That was actually the impetus to set up this blog. By the way, we could have simply purchased a phone and SIM card for Vietnam from Cellular Abroad or another vendor, for a bit more money. It remains to be seen, of course, whether our phone will actually work in Vietnam. With the more expensive phone package we might be a little bit more certain that it would work, but if we'd done that I would not know as much about cell phones.
Presumably we now have a phone number in Vietnam and a phone that will work. Incoming calls are free for us, but you will have to pay your American rates if you call.
Tonight we talked through our options on the phone (our home phone) and on email with Todd Gallinek, a travel agent in Boulder, Colorado who has specialized in adoption travel for ten years or so. On Travelocity I found various itineraries that would cost in the $3,000 range for the two of us. There were seemingly lots of flights from Chicago to Tokyo or Hong Kong, then a connection to Hanoi. Our agency said to book a return for a three-week stay, but it is important to buy an open ticket that would allow for changes in case the process takes longer than three weeks—or perhaps, if it is shorter. Todd seemed impressed with some of the options out of Chicago, except for the open-ended return. If you buy the ticket online, he noted, there’s no one at Travelocity who is going to help you make the changes you might need to make—and the airlines won’t be very helpful if you bought the ticket at Travelocity. Itineraries that piece together flights from different airlines are also dangerous because if you have to make a change and pay penalties, you might have to pay penalties to each airline. Still, I found some trips on Korean Air that seemed to work for us, especially because they flew Chicago to Seoul, then Seoul to Hanoi, in about 20 hours or so. Todd said he would check on those flights for us.
In the meantime, he put together a package on Eva Air, apparently one of his favorites. We’d fly Chicago to San Francisco, then San Francisco to Taipei, then Taipei to Hanoi. With the layovers, it would be about 27 hours total, and we would fly coach. But the return trip—the one with the two babies—held the jewels. On the long Taipei to San Francisco leg, we would fly Evergreen class, which gives us a foot rest, a head rest, and a personal television. Many of the airlines offer baby bassinettes for the long flights, which are apparently sling-like hammocks where the babies can sleep, but many simply note the request and you find out for sure if you can get one once you arrive to check in at the flight. Eva, however, confirms the bassinettes with your reservation, and he would call them first thing tomorrow morning.
We will be traveling, remember, with two five-month-olds. Confirmed bassinettes and foot rests sound like a very good feature to us.
Yes, Todd agreed, flying direct to Asia from Chicago, without a West Coast stop, might be a good thing. Korean Air is not a carrier he’s worked with, but he was willing to give them a try. He’d check into our options for changing the return, if necessary, on Korean Air. He thought he should be able to get the same fare that I was quoted on Travelocity. And while he was pretty sure they would have the bassinettes, he would check whether they would confirm the bassinettes.
I suspect we will be flying Eva.
Finally, of course, we’ve also learned a lot about international adoption—practical matters, like negotiating the process with the Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration Services, as well as philosophical and ethical matters, like why so many Americans choose to adopt from China, Vietnam, and Russia. A discussion on Paula Zahn’s evening news forum program on CNN in January created an uproar in the internet adoption community when a panelist complained that people who were adopting from China and Asia wanted high achieving, motivated, cute, porcelain doll babies, rather than darker skinned babies available through domestic programs. In fact, however, domestic adoptions, while worthwhile and rewarding, are also fraught with complications and uncertainty. Birth mothers and fathers can reclaim their children even after the adoption has been in place for years. International adoptions are much more secure, particularly so when the babies have been adopted as orphans.
Which is not to say there aren't things to think about when it comes to Americans traveling the globe to adopt babies from poorer countries. On the one hand, our adoption adventure is a remarkable testimony to the smallness of our new world, where a camera can take a picture of Maisie and Luc and we can get the pictures over the internet that day or the next. On the other hand, we are told that immediately upon leaving the airport in Hanoi we will be confronted with the poverty of Vietnam--and we will therefore have to confront our own privilege.
We have only just begun to learn about what it will mean to be adoptive parents. We have been to classes at the Family Resource Center in Chicago where we have learned about matters of attachment and developmental delays for babies after institutionalization.
We now know a lot about all kinds of things that I never thought I would know. And of course it still isn’t half of what we will know in a couple months—or even after we return from our trip in April.
Take cell phones. Our US Cellular phone would not work in Vietnam, I discovered. Too bad I just renewed the plan and bought a new phone. As our brother-in-law Tom, who works for Motorola, explained, the international standard is GSM technology. He explained that I would have to buy another phone if I wanted it to work in Vietnam. To buy the correct phone, I would also have to find out what bands they use in Vietnam. There are six band wavelengths for cell phones, and different countries use different bands. What's more, different phones are equipped with different bandwiths, as well. Tri-bands are good, with three different bands. Quad bands are better, with four. But among the three or four you have to have the right one. For Vietnam, the main bandwith turns out to be primarily 900, and so I would have to buy a GSM phone that worked on that band. It is also important to get an unlocked phone. Yes, he said, I could buy one from Ebay, as long as I could trust the phone would have the right band. Three days later I had in my hands a phone that I bought on Ebay for $50. Then I purchased a SIM card, basically a computer chip which makes the phone work and buys the phone access to a Vietnamese mobile network, for $70. With their confirmation email the company that sold me the card, Cellular Abroad, offered a $10 discount if I put a link to Cellular Abroad on my web page. That was actually the impetus to set up this blog. By the way, we could have simply purchased a phone and SIM card for Vietnam from Cellular Abroad or another vendor, for a bit more money. It remains to be seen, of course, whether our phone will actually work in Vietnam. With the more expensive phone package we might be a little bit more certain that it would work, but if we'd done that I would not know as much about cell phones.
Presumably we now have a phone number in Vietnam and a phone that will work. Incoming calls are free for us, but you will have to pay your American rates if you call.
Tonight we talked through our options on the phone (our home phone) and on email with Todd Gallinek, a travel agent in Boulder, Colorado who has specialized in adoption travel for ten years or so. On Travelocity I found various itineraries that would cost in the $3,000 range for the two of us. There were seemingly lots of flights from Chicago to Tokyo or Hong Kong, then a connection to Hanoi. Our agency said to book a return for a three-week stay, but it is important to buy an open ticket that would allow for changes in case the process takes longer than three weeks—or perhaps, if it is shorter. Todd seemed impressed with some of the options out of Chicago, except for the open-ended return. If you buy the ticket online, he noted, there’s no one at Travelocity who is going to help you make the changes you might need to make—and the airlines won’t be very helpful if you bought the ticket at Travelocity. Itineraries that piece together flights from different airlines are also dangerous because if you have to make a change and pay penalties, you might have to pay penalties to each airline. Still, I found some trips on Korean Air that seemed to work for us, especially because they flew Chicago to Seoul, then Seoul to Hanoi, in about 20 hours or so. Todd said he would check on those flights for us.
In the meantime, he put together a package on Eva Air, apparently one of his favorites. We’d fly Chicago to San Francisco, then San Francisco to Taipei, then Taipei to Hanoi. With the layovers, it would be about 27 hours total, and we would fly coach. But the return trip—the one with the two babies—held the jewels. On the long Taipei to San Francisco leg, we would fly Evergreen class, which gives us a foot rest, a head rest, and a personal television. Many of the airlines offer baby bassinettes for the long flights, which are apparently sling-like hammocks where the babies can sleep, but many simply note the request and you find out for sure if you can get one once you arrive to check in at the flight. Eva, however, confirms the bassinettes with your reservation, and he would call them first thing tomorrow morning.
We will be traveling, remember, with two five-month-olds. Confirmed bassinettes and foot rests sound like a very good feature to us.
Yes, Todd agreed, flying direct to Asia from Chicago, without a West Coast stop, might be a good thing. Korean Air is not a carrier he’s worked with, but he was willing to give them a try. He’d check into our options for changing the return, if necessary, on Korean Air. He thought he should be able to get the same fare that I was quoted on Travelocity. And while he was pretty sure they would have the bassinettes, he would check whether they would confirm the bassinettes.
I suspect we will be flying Eva.
Finally, of course, we’ve also learned a lot about international adoption—practical matters, like negotiating the process with the Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration Services, as well as philosophical and ethical matters, like why so many Americans choose to adopt from China, Vietnam, and Russia. A discussion on Paula Zahn’s evening news forum program on CNN in January created an uproar in the internet adoption community when a panelist complained that people who were adopting from China and Asia wanted high achieving, motivated, cute, porcelain doll babies, rather than darker skinned babies available through domestic programs. In fact, however, domestic adoptions, while worthwhile and rewarding, are also fraught with complications and uncertainty. Birth mothers and fathers can reclaim their children even after the adoption has been in place for years. International adoptions are much more secure, particularly so when the babies have been adopted as orphans.
Which is not to say there aren't things to think about when it comes to Americans traveling the globe to adopt babies from poorer countries. On the one hand, our adoption adventure is a remarkable testimony to the smallness of our new world, where a camera can take a picture of Maisie and Luc and we can get the pictures over the internet that day or the next. On the other hand, we are told that immediately upon leaving the airport in Hanoi we will be confronted with the poverty of Vietnam--and we will therefore have to confront our own privilege.
We have only just begun to learn about what it will mean to be adoptive parents. We have been to classes at the Family Resource Center in Chicago where we have learned about matters of attachment and developmental delays for babies after institutionalization.
We now know a lot about all kinds of things that I never thought I would know. And of course it still isn’t half of what we will know in a couple months—or even after we return from our trip in April.
A real date
Peggy got the call today from World Child while at work. Our G&R will be March 19 or 20. They want us in Hanoi by March 18. We should plan on a three-week stay.
Peggy and I took a walk to the Kinko's Fedex and put our visa applications in the mail.
I just sent our passport names and spellings to the travel agency!
We'll try to fly out on March 15th.
Peggy and I took a walk to the Kinko's Fedex and put our visa applications in the mail.
I just sent our passport names and spellings to the travel agency!
We'll try to fly out on March 15th.
A tentative date for travel
We now have a tentative date for travel: Monday, March 12. It is not a for certain date, but we will send off a visa application today asking for entry to Vietnam starting on March 12. We've been told not to book a flight yet. But we will have a more certain date soon.
We might be meeting Luc and Maisie on Saint Patrick's Day!
Responding to another email on the Yahoo Vietnam Travel Group last night, I mentioned that we'd been given a tentative travel date. I got two emails back right away from other World Child clients who are waiting for travel dates to go to Lang Son. All of us were told we would hear something "after Tet." Well, Tet ended on February 25--so all of us translate "after Tet" into February 26, of course. And for us it was. Quite possibly, though, these are the people we will travel with in two weeks.
We might be meeting Luc and Maisie on Saint Patrick's Day!
Responding to another email on the Yahoo Vietnam Travel Group last night, I mentioned that we'd been given a tentative travel date. I got two emails back right away from other World Child clients who are waiting for travel dates to go to Lang Son. All of us were told we would hear something "after Tet." Well, Tet ended on February 25--so all of us translate "after Tet" into February 26, of course. And for us it was. Quite possibly, though, these are the people we will travel with in two weeks.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Our pictures of Maisie and Luc
Where are they, you might be asking? We know that many adopting parents post their referral pictures on blogs and web pages when they get them. But it is our understanding that technically we are not supposed to do this. We do not yet have legal responsibility for the babies.
We’ve sent photos to family and friends by direct email. We can send them to you if you email us.
The pictures mean a lot to us right now because they are all that we have. Last night we were coming home from an evening out and we listened to The Cure song about “Pictures of You.” We forgive them for selling it for that commercial.
It won’t be long now before we won’t be having as many evenings out. And we will have our own pictures of Maisie and Luc to post here, then, too.
Final Stage of Waiting
Well, it is early Sunday morning, February 25th. The waiting has had many stages since November, when we got our first pictures of Luc and his medical information. The last weeks, in particular, have had some ups and downs.
Most recently things have been pretty relaxed. Peggy has tried to keep busy with work. She’s also writing many draft pages of her master’s thesis which she must complete by mid-May when we return. She will have a one-quarter leave from her job to finish her program at the University of Chicago, which will include taking two classes. I’m never as busy and productive as Peggy. Thinking we would travel in January, I took the semester on leave from my teaching job at Saint Ignatius—although I am still coaching our track team now in the afternoons and will continue to do so when we return. That’s been my busy work. There have been some things to do for the adoption, but I’ve also been using the time to do various things that I’ve put off or thought about doing—including digging into the backs of some closets.
I still have more of that to do, and less time to do it in now, as we’re about to hit another stage. The lunar new year Tet holidays are over in northern Vietnam, and we are told that the government officials in Lang Son province go back to work tomorrow—or maybe even today. As early as the next few days, we hope to get a date for our Giving and Receiving Ceremony. That is the official event in which the babies are given over to their adoptive parents, attended by government officials and, in some cases, by the birth parents. We will leave that ceremony with the babies in our care. All the other paperwork follows, and all the following appointments with the U.S. embassy get scheduled around the “G&R” date.
Once we get our G&R date, we also book our flights and hotels, and the ball really starts rolling. It can happen very fast, apparently, and the last days can be a rush. It is a strange thing to hope for, right now, that we could in fact be traveling to Vietnam in just over a week—without having made any travel arrangements whatsoever. It could happen that fast, and we want that to happen. Yes, all you planners who book ahead for lower fares must be asking, this makes the travel costs an issue. But we have made contact with a travel agent. His name is Todd Gallinek and I think he works out of Boulder, Colorado, where he specializes in adoption travel. He can get us something reasonable in terms of fares, with an all-important open-ended with no penalty return ticket, since we will travel to Hanoi without a firm date for our return. We found him through internet contacts and email groups about adoption from Vietnam. That’s been one of my preoccupations—reading emails and blogs from people who have already made the trip. If you are interested, here’s the address of another blog: http://www.avalinh.blogspot.com/.
The waiting has given us time to get comfortable with these kinds of details—including starting this blog. We’ve collected some packing lists from our internet friends, along with lots of helpful information about what to expect in Hanoi when we get there. We know what we can buy there (diapers, formula, umbrella strollers), and what we cannot buy there (bottle liners, clothes). We’ve had phone calls and emails full of advice from people who have already made the trip, like the Connors-Kos family who gave us the pictures of Lang Son on our blog. A parent of one of my students, a former flight attendant on international routes, even, gave us detailed suggestions for taking care of the babies during the flight in case of distress. It is about a two-day travel trip door to door, with most of that, of course, on a jet full of people. Our sense is that as difficult as this will be, the euphoria of completing the adoption carries people along pretty well as an extra resource. Either that or it is so terrible people don’t talk about it.
We received a fourth set of pictures of Luc and Maisie last week, the best ones yet. When Sherrell Goolsby from World Child International, our adoption agency (http://www.worldchild.org/home.htm ), sent the pictures, she gushed about how cute and healthy they appear to be. Out of thoughtfulness for us, she noted that one picture seems to show that Luc’s head is slightly flattened, but added that this is not an uncommon thing and easily treatable when we get Luc home. I wrote her back that we’ve been through international adoption classes at the Family Resource Center in Chicago (http://www.f-r-c.org/) as part of our home study process, so we are familiar with developmental and health issues for babies in orphanages. As we understand the set up in Luc and Maisie’s orphanage in Lang Son, the babies sleep on floor mats. The pictures seem to show Luc and Maisie on their mats.
In fact, World Child has a foundation project (http://www.worldchild.org/holiday.htm) to raise money in order to provide stainless steel cribs for that orphanage. And here is one of the best stories about our wait: Peggy’s students in the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools’ 7th grade organized several fund raising events, including a buy roses for your special friend event for Valentine’s Day, to collect money to buy the cribs. Peggy just sent a check off toWorld Child for $500, which will provide two cribs, and one family contributed a crib on their own.
So our waiting has been productive in many ways. But we expect it to be over soon, replaced by hectic—even insane—activity. We have visa applications ready. We’re making plans about what books to bring for the flight—and we’ve backed up the music from Peggy’s Ipod on the computer so that we still have it if we lose the Ipod. We’re reading our “Rough Guide to Vietnam Travel,” and other books about Vietnam. I just found this morning a very recent article about Hanoi in the New York Times Travel Guide, http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/travel/18hanoi.html. We will have some time to do things in Hanoi as we wait for paperwork to process. We’ve looked at maps of Hanoi and learned that we can probably go for a jog around Ho Hoan Kiem, or the Lake of the Returned Sword, which is near our likely hotel site in Hanoi’s Old Quarter. We discovered that the lake used to be called “Luc Thuy,” or green waters, and so we connect the lake to Luc’s name.
The waiting time has also allowed us some time to look back and reflect. We have talked about the loss of our infant son, Declan, now two and a half years ago, the event that really brought us to this adoption process. Our photos of Declan now share a wall with photos of Maisie and Luc. Soon Maisie and Luc will be here sleeping in the room that was going to be Declan’s room.
Right now, where it is night time in Lang Son, they are probably asleep on their mats.
Most recently things have been pretty relaxed. Peggy has tried to keep busy with work. She’s also writing many draft pages of her master’s thesis which she must complete by mid-May when we return. She will have a one-quarter leave from her job to finish her program at the University of Chicago, which will include taking two classes. I’m never as busy and productive as Peggy. Thinking we would travel in January, I took the semester on leave from my teaching job at Saint Ignatius—although I am still coaching our track team now in the afternoons and will continue to do so when we return. That’s been my busy work. There have been some things to do for the adoption, but I’ve also been using the time to do various things that I’ve put off or thought about doing—including digging into the backs of some closets.
I still have more of that to do, and less time to do it in now, as we’re about to hit another stage. The lunar new year Tet holidays are over in northern Vietnam, and we are told that the government officials in Lang Son province go back to work tomorrow—or maybe even today. As early as the next few days, we hope to get a date for our Giving and Receiving Ceremony. That is the official event in which the babies are given over to their adoptive parents, attended by government officials and, in some cases, by the birth parents. We will leave that ceremony with the babies in our care. All the other paperwork follows, and all the following appointments with the U.S. embassy get scheduled around the “G&R” date.
Once we get our G&R date, we also book our flights and hotels, and the ball really starts rolling. It can happen very fast, apparently, and the last days can be a rush. It is a strange thing to hope for, right now, that we could in fact be traveling to Vietnam in just over a week—without having made any travel arrangements whatsoever. It could happen that fast, and we want that to happen. Yes, all you planners who book ahead for lower fares must be asking, this makes the travel costs an issue. But we have made contact with a travel agent. His name is Todd Gallinek and I think he works out of Boulder, Colorado, where he specializes in adoption travel. He can get us something reasonable in terms of fares, with an all-important open-ended with no penalty return ticket, since we will travel to Hanoi without a firm date for our return. We found him through internet contacts and email groups about adoption from Vietnam. That’s been one of my preoccupations—reading emails and blogs from people who have already made the trip. If you are interested, here’s the address of another blog: http://www.avalinh.blogspot.com/.
The waiting has given us time to get comfortable with these kinds of details—including starting this blog. We’ve collected some packing lists from our internet friends, along with lots of helpful information about what to expect in Hanoi when we get there. We know what we can buy there (diapers, formula, umbrella strollers), and what we cannot buy there (bottle liners, clothes). We’ve had phone calls and emails full of advice from people who have already made the trip, like the Connors-Kos family who gave us the pictures of Lang Son on our blog. A parent of one of my students, a former flight attendant on international routes, even, gave us detailed suggestions for taking care of the babies during the flight in case of distress. It is about a two-day travel trip door to door, with most of that, of course, on a jet full of people. Our sense is that as difficult as this will be, the euphoria of completing the adoption carries people along pretty well as an extra resource. Either that or it is so terrible people don’t talk about it.
We received a fourth set of pictures of Luc and Maisie last week, the best ones yet. When Sherrell Goolsby from World Child International, our adoption agency (http://www.worldchild.org/home.htm ), sent the pictures, she gushed about how cute and healthy they appear to be. Out of thoughtfulness for us, she noted that one picture seems to show that Luc’s head is slightly flattened, but added that this is not an uncommon thing and easily treatable when we get Luc home. I wrote her back that we’ve been through international adoption classes at the Family Resource Center in Chicago (http://www.f-r-c.org/) as part of our home study process, so we are familiar with developmental and health issues for babies in orphanages. As we understand the set up in Luc and Maisie’s orphanage in Lang Son, the babies sleep on floor mats. The pictures seem to show Luc and Maisie on their mats.
In fact, World Child has a foundation project (http://www.worldchild.org/holiday.htm) to raise money in order to provide stainless steel cribs for that orphanage. And here is one of the best stories about our wait: Peggy’s students in the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools’ 7th grade organized several fund raising events, including a buy roses for your special friend event for Valentine’s Day, to collect money to buy the cribs. Peggy just sent a check off toWorld Child for $500, which will provide two cribs, and one family contributed a crib on their own.
So our waiting has been productive in many ways. But we expect it to be over soon, replaced by hectic—even insane—activity. We have visa applications ready. We’re making plans about what books to bring for the flight—and we’ve backed up the music from Peggy’s Ipod on the computer so that we still have it if we lose the Ipod. We’re reading our “Rough Guide to Vietnam Travel,” and other books about Vietnam. I just found this morning a very recent article about Hanoi in the New York Times Travel Guide, http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/travel/18hanoi.html. We will have some time to do things in Hanoi as we wait for paperwork to process. We’ve looked at maps of Hanoi and learned that we can probably go for a jog around Ho Hoan Kiem, or the Lake of the Returned Sword, which is near our likely hotel site in Hanoi’s Old Quarter. We discovered that the lake used to be called “Luc Thuy,” or green waters, and so we connect the lake to Luc’s name.
The waiting time has also allowed us some time to look back and reflect. We have talked about the loss of our infant son, Declan, now two and a half years ago, the event that really brought us to this adoption process. Our photos of Declan now share a wall with photos of Maisie and Luc. Soon Maisie and Luc will be here sleeping in the room that was going to be Declan’s room.
Right now, where it is night time in Lang Son, they are probably asleep on their mats.
Thursday, February 8, 2007
Waiting
So now we wait. And wait.
We have had a referral for Luc since November and one for Maisie since December. There was some kind of paperwork snafu that delayed us--then the Tet holidays. We've been told to expect travel around March 1. But all we can do now is wait for our Giving & Receiving date. We just received our third set of pictures. Born on October 10 and 11, Luc and Maisie will soon be four months old.
Sometimes we wonder if they, at least, already know each other in the orphanage in Lang Son.
We have had a referral for Luc since November and one for Maisie since December. There was some kind of paperwork snafu that delayed us--then the Tet holidays. We've been told to expect travel around March 1. But all we can do now is wait for our Giving & Receiving date. We just received our third set of pictures. Born on October 10 and 11, Luc and Maisie will soon be four months old.
Sometimes we wonder if they, at least, already know each other in the orphanage in Lang Son.
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