IT'S A GIRL!!!!!!!!!!
01-May-07
We have a girl!!!!!!!!!
Name: Yong Xiao Xiang soon to be Bella Marie Xiang
Birthday: 9/10/2006
Province: Hunan Province Doaxian Welfare Institute
As of 03/06/07:
Weight: 16.4 pounds
Length: 61 cm
I will let you all know more when we know more!!!!!! We are over the moon!!!!!!!!!!
Love,
Brittany and Jamie
Please take a minute to welcome Bella to our family by signing our guestbook.
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WE'RE NEXT!!!!!
16-Mar-07
Well, well , well.....It has been quite a while since I last posted,
I'm not even sure if you guys are still following this journal but here
it goes..
Last month we missed the cut off for our referral by 3 whole days!! It
was very frustrating and I mourned for a few days, then reality set in,
WE ARE NEXT!!!!!!!!! There is a VERY good possibility that we will get
our referral the first week of April. The referral will introduce us to
the child that the China Center of Adoption Affairs has chosen to
complete our family. Let me refresh your memories. Jamie and I
requested a healthy baby of either gender no older than 12 months old,
as young as possible. I know that the likelihood is that we will get a
girl, hence the name of this website! But here lately people have been
getting more and more boys from the People's Republic of China. We will
be thrilled with either gender but are very excited about possibly
getting referred a boy, wouldn't that be something!?! Not knowing the
gender has made the wait twice as exciting and nerve wracking. We are
prepared to be referred a girl though as the majority of orphans in PRC
are female. We had no idea when we started this process, 24 months ago
this April, that the wait times would increase so drastically. Things
have changed so much with the adoption program in China that it looks
like we will not be eligible to adopt from China again. This saddens us
both tremendously but maybe we were meant to only have one child. We
have already made the call list to let everyone know the good news. I
will post here once we have more information. I will be setting up a
yahoo group for people to join should you want to follow our journey to
meet our baby.
That is it for now but hopefully in a couple of weeks there will be
more activity on this website! Please take the time to sign the
guestbook and send us some cyber support.
Your Friends,
Brittany and Jamie
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100 Good Wishes Quilt-Bai Jia Bei
05-Jan-06
Hello friends and family!
We hope this finds you all happy and healthy this new year! As most of you
know, Jamie and I are awaiting the adoption of our child from China. We have
been notified that our wait may be as long as November 2006. To fill the
time we have decided to make a 100 Good Wishes Quilt or Bai Jia Bei.
What is a 100 Good Wishes Quilt?
To welcome and celebrate a new life, there is a tradition in the northern
part of China to make a Bai Jia Bei, or 100 Good Wishes Quilt. It is a
custom to invite friends and family to contribute a patch of cloth with a
wish for the baby. Part of the patch of cloth goes into the quilt for the
baby, and the other part of the cloth can go into a creative memory notebook
with the wish for the child. The quilt contains the luck, energy, and good
wishes from all the families and friends who contributed a piece of fabric.
The quilt is then passed down from generation to generation.
We are inviting you all to participate in the making of our child's 100 Good
Wishes Quilt. If you are interested this is what we will need from you:
-Find a 100% cotton fabric that you like. This does not have to just be new
fabric. This can be a piece of a favorite shirt, blanket, or other
meaningful fabric, be creative!
-The fabric should then be washed and pressed.
-Then cut the fabric into a 7" x 7" square if
using a quilters roller; 8" x 8" if using regular scissors.
-Come up with a wish: This can be a Chinese Proverb, Bible Verse, Poetry
Verse, or general thought. Something that has meaning to you and indicates
what you would wish for our child.
- We will need one 7x7 or 8x8 square piece of fabric from you all. One
square will be for the actual quilt. The other thing we will need is a
small swatch of the fabric you have chosen, this and your wish will be
placed in a memory book for our child.(see below)
- Sign the wish and attach a piece of your fabric to the wish. This can be
done on fancy
computer paper, regular cardstock with color ink, scrapbook style, or
whatever inspires
your creativity.
We will get started as soon as we have enough squares to begin. We hope to
hear from you all and we also look forward to introducing our newest
addition in late 2006.
Much Love,
Brittany and Jamie
"An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet,
regardless of time, place, or circumstance.
The thread may stretch or tangle, but will never break."
--An ancient Chinese belief
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OUR TIMELINE SO FAR
28-Sep-05
04-07-2005 We hired Nathanson Adoption Services to conduct our homestudy.
05-03-2005 We filed our I-600A with BCIS
06-04-2005 We completed our homestudy and were approved!
06-15-2005 Hired Harrah Family Services to facilitate our adoption
07-12-2005 Got fingerprinted in Charlotte for BCIS
07-22-2005 We received our 171H, which is BCIS's aprroval for us to adopt!
09-27-2005 Finally mailed our dossier to Washington, DC for the courier to finish up the final details
10-07-2005 OFFICIALLY DTC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10-27-2005 Our offical Log In Date(LID) with the China Center for Adoption Affairs
Rumor has it that the CCAA is restructuring and our referral could now take up to 10 months. That would mean an August referral and October 2006 travel. Let's hope it is just a rumor, I'm not sure I can wait that long!
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One large step in the process
28-Sep-05
Well, after a couple of frustrating months, we have finally sent our dossier documents to be authenticated. Let me fill you in on some of the hold ups we have had. First, we received Jamie's passport and had to send it back to have the name corrected. Then, Jamie's doctor used two different color inks on Jamie's physical form and I had to have that redone, China is very specific about documents and our dossier consultant thought it would be best to just nip that in the bud. So, finally, we got to the point where we request our completed, notarized, and final draft of our homestudy, we recieved it near the end of August. The final draft had errors in it and had to be redone. This made us miss our first anticipated date to send our documents to China. So, we sent it back and got the corrected version and it was in order. From this point I had to take everything to the North Carolina Secretary of State and havethe documents verified. Jackie went with me and she was a big help! We were sure we would make the next deadline two weeks later on September 23rd! Well, the Secretary of State would not verify our Jamaican marriage certificate. We thought we could send it to the Jamaican Embassy but it turns out that the Embassy does not accept documents that are more than 12 months old. So, we'd have to go through Jamaica to get a recent certificate.We love Jamaica and would live there if we could but, when it comes to getting something done fast there, you can forget about it, that's just island life. Lucky for us, we have a little angel in Jamaica. Our friend Thelma Gray, who arranged our wedding there in 2002, helped us with everything. We can't thank Thelma enough for all she did! If only the Jamaican courier was as dependable as Thelma! The courier held on to the package for 3 days before delivering it to Thelma, thus we missed our next deadline, Sept 23rd. We got our document from Jamaica on September 27th and I promptly overnighted everything to a courier in Washington, DC. It looks like we will also miss the October 7th deadline, due to the fact that our marriage certificate will need to go through the Jamaican Embassy before heading off to the State Department and then finally to the Chinese Embassy. We had a very slight chance of making the October 7th deadline but the Chinese Embassy is closed on October 3rd which makes the deadline impossible. So we are now shooting for the October 21 deadline.
This has been a grueling process that I thought would be much easier than it really was. I guess I just didn't figure on the comedy of errors that we hit along the way. It is nice to finally have all the paperwork out of our hands. There is nothing we can do now but wait for our wonderful agency to send our documents to China. With luck our DTC date will be 10-21-2005. I looked back at past trends and it looks like we should get a referral in late May, early June 2006 and most likely be traveling in July 2006. This gives us a little more time to save up money and get things done around the house. I will post again when our stuff is finally in China and the wait for our child has really begun!
The pictures posted are as follows: all those papers are our dossier. The baby's crib that Mom got for us. Our kitty, Lefty, who has now been banished from the crib and finally me, Abbie and Jamie at David and Anna's wedding.
UPDATE: We just got an email from our agency letting us know that we are now officially DTC today, October 7, 2005. We don't know how our courier and dossier consultant pulled it off but they did, thank you!!!! We can't wait to meet our baby!
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