Were going to China!!!

We are SO excited to share the good news with you that we have received our travel approval today and we are ready to book our flight to China!!!!  We are leaving in two weeks!  WOW!  I (Angie) can not believe the time is here!  I think that through all of our adoption paperwork and process this past year and 3 months, a part of me has never really believed with all my heart we would ever make it.  Maybe it is a defense mechanism to protect myself if and when bad news came.  So, now, here I am thinking about ALL the things that need to be done, all the final preperations, and I can't sleep.  I am just too excited!  We just received the call from AGCI tonight about 6:30.  I have been laying in bed trying to go to sleep, but sleep just will not come right now.  It is too bad, I have to be up before 5:00 in the morning.  But, I have been waiting to post this post on the blog for 15 months and it is finally here.  I have to share the news before going to sleep with you all that have been waiting on this news for so many months.

We will leave around March 20th headed for China.  Greg and I will fly first to Beijing and spend 3 days sightseeing, getting over jet lag and enjoying each others company.  Then we will fly to Nanjing on the weekend and be united with Xin Ping for the first time on Monday, the 26th.  We will spend a week in her province taking care of adoption appointments and paperwork and then fly to Guangzhou for the last week to finish the process.

We just received an update on Xinping and found out that she weighs 19lbs and she is almost walking.  She can walk if she has something to hold onto.  
I can't wait to be with Xin Ping.  I can not wait to get to know her, her likes and dislikes, what cute thing she does when she is tired, what facial expressions she makes, to watch her sleep, to hold her, to count her fingers and toes...
Yet, I am also anxious.  It has been my prayer that God prepare our hearts for the arrival on Xin into our family and also that He prepare her heart for our family.  Even though God communicated to me more than a year ago that we had a daughter waiting for us on the other side of the world, I still wonder how those first moments and days will be as we are getting to know each other.  Oh, I pray for peace for her little heart.  One of the required classes Greg and I took to prepare us for adoption asked us to imagine how we would feel if we were dropped off with strangers who don't look like us and don't speak the same language as we do and we can't understand why we were left with these strangers.  And these strangers keep smiling at us and getting really close to us, all up in our face and then start touching us and examining us all over as if to make sure we had all fingers and toes.  I get homesick just thinking about it!  The food we will cook for her will be different, the smell of our home will be much different, she will leave behind all familiar faces and her favorite nanny and her best friend. 
This is why we decided we would not change her name.  Her name will be the only thing she gets to keep that is familiar to her.  We decided we couldn't start calling her a name she has never been called after all the other difficult changes.

So, there is so much to do and so little time, and I am so excited to finally start packing and finishing up the rest of the details here. 

Please pray for God to work in Xin's heart and our hearts a divine bond and attachment to each other from the very first moment she is placed with us, like she has known us and we have known her all her life!

We love you guys and our Lord, who has blessed us with a daughter!