Almost there

I have updated our timeline blog about where we are in our adoption process and what future dates look like. We now have plane tickets purchased and a vague itinerary of when we are going to China and how that trip will look.  We are waiting to pay for our in country travel package so that we can see how things are looking financially.

Right now though we are focusing on spending time as a family of 5 and thinking about packing for a 2 week trip to China.

People sometimes don't realize what a tremendous thing this is for Liam. He isn't winning the lottery. This isn't Little Orphan Annie. He's a real kid that has been well taken care of around friends and nannies who have loved him for the past 7 years.  He's about to leave all that he knows and have to learn a new family, culture and language.  Is it better for him in a family? Absolutely or we wouldn't be doing this.  Is it going to be easy? For him and for us, the answer is no.

We ask for you to understand if you don't see us around that much this Summer.  We will come home and be working on the hard battle of attachment and bonding.  We won't be attending church right away. We will be going to lots of doctors and trying to get him ready to start the 1st grade.  We love our friends and family and want you to meet him but the reality is that he needs to get used to just us first.  Hopefully, the transition will go well and we will be able to introduce him to our lives quickly but we just don't know what it is going to look like right now.

Many people have asked if he knows English or how our Mandarin is.  He does not speak any English that we know of.  We have been working on basic Mandarin phrases but we are not fluent.

And then the question comes, "How's that going to work?"

It is going to work through love.  We are going to do our best.  We are going to use technology and hand gestures.  We will figure it out and children learn quickly when fully immersed.

We need your prayers. We need peace.  We need safety for our trip.  We need Liam's physical and spiritual heart to stay strong.

Thank you to each one of you that is part of this story.  We will not be putting much publicly on social media during our trip so if you want to follow along, please follow our Facebook group.