Providence in travel companions

In my previous post, I talked about some of the milestones that have to be reached before we can actually plan our travel to China.

At some point in there, we'll have a conference call with our agency's other adopting families who are traveling to adopt from the same orphanage, as we will all travel together in a group. We think there will be six families, though our group could be combined for some part of the trip with another group if the itineraries overlap.

In what is a HUGE answer to prayer, we have already made contact with one of the families that will be traveling with us, and they will be bringing their 6-year-old daughter with them on the trip, just as we will be bringing Sydney with us! It is such a huge blessing to know there will be another child on the trip with whom Sydney can play and spend time, and to have a little girl so close in age is nothing short of an amazing providence!

We are praying, and would appreciate your prayers too, that the trip would be a fun and smooth one for Sydney, and that she and the other little girl would be able to make the trip more enjoyable for each other despite the jet-lag, long hours of travel, and long hours of not doing much other than sitting in a hotel.

Ready? Set! Set! Set! Set....

What a funny place to be. After three and a half years of mostly just waiting (if you start when we began filling out paperwork for this adoption), we are suddenly scrambling to get details knocked out, knowing we will travel in something like 5-8 weeks. However, we have no idea what the dates will actually be, and there is so much we still can't do.

• We can't book tickets, all we can do is run what-if scenarios to see what tickets might cost.
• We can't notify co-workers about when we will be out, only provide rough approximations.
• We can't make any plans beyond about 4 weeks out, because when the dates are set, we'll have about a week to buy tickets and drop everything.

Amy remembers this as being the hardest part of the process, where we finally have a face, a name, a place, but we have to wait on so many other people and agencies before we will have a date and will be able to go bring her home. I remembered this as the exciting time of making preparations, but it is hard, to be sure, to have so much left unknown. We would drop everything tomorrow and go bring our daughter home if we could, but it's not up to us...

Here's a brief list of what I understand needs to happen (I may be missing some steps...)

1. We sent back our signed letter of acceptance to our agency via FedEx Overnight service.
2. Once they get that, they will send it back to the CCAA (Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs, iirc)
3. Once it is received in China, some agency will give us a Travel Approval, basically saying they approve of us coming over to adopt our daughter.
4. Once we have the Travel Approval, our agency will request an appointment with the appropriate people at the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou for the appropriate processing to meet the U.S. government's requirements.
5. Once we have an appointment date, all the other dates fall into place quickly, and we are left with about 10-12 days (we hope) to buy tickets and get ready to leave.

Did you notice that in all those steps, the only involvement Amy and I have until the very end is already done, and the rest is out of our hands? There is peace in knowing that it is in God's hands, regardless of what all those individual agencies think.

More Photos of our daughter

Today we received the package in the mail with medical information and other details that were read to us over the phone yesterday. Along with that package, we got two new photos, shown below.

Still in a state of amazement!

Match Day!

We got the call!

At 12:16pm today, our agency called and let us know we have been referred a baby girl from China!!!

Her Chinese name (given by the orphanage workers) is Yang Fu Ya. Yang is a surname taken from the name of the county where she lives. Fu means good fortune and blessing, and Ya means elegant and refined.

She was born on June 29, 2008. This is probably a best guess by the orphanage workers, but we will find out more about the circumstances in which she was found and brought to the orphanage as we proceed through the process and get more details from China.

Below is a photograph of her, taken at around six months of age.



Join us in thanking God for this wonderful news!

More to come as we go through this process.

Tomorrow will be The Day!

Our agency has confirmed that they have received the referral packages for their families! They are translating the information about *our child* as I type, and we will get "The Call" tomorrow sometime during the day.

The excitement is setting in for sure now!

I'll be working from home tomorrow until we get "The Call", and will try to post the info as soon as I can.

More to come, real, real soon!

Let's Give it a Go!

Ok, new trial starting today. If you tried to hit www.bredenbergs.com, you should have been directed here. For now, this is the site we will be using to post updates, particularly with respect to the upcoming adoption (see below). If all goes well, I'll tie this back to the bredenbergs.com domain name, but I'm not ready to do that just yet.

Come back often!

Tick-tock, tick-tock

Referral phone calls have reportedly started happening in other countries, which means the referrals should arrive sometime soon in the US for agencies here! At that point they will have to have things translated, and then the phone calls will start happening. There are confirmations from other countries that people whose LID's (logged-in-dates) are the same as ours have gotten calls, so it looks like we will definitely be getting a call and hearing about our new little one SOON!

Can you believe it?

I can't.

It's only been three years... I'm not sure I'm ready... ;)