Bo Baby!

I know that we have not done a very good job of updating on Bo. We spent all of our free time in July getting our dossier ready so that it could go to China. Not sure what happened to August.

So much has happened in regards to our adoption of Bo. We did manage to get our dossier done with very few problems. We were DTC on August 3, 2007. What that means is that all of our paperwork, which is called the dossier, was sent to China by our agency on August 3. Once our dossier made it to China, our agency translated it and submitted it to the CCAA, which is the government agency that oversees adoption in China. We do not know our LID date yet. Typically it takes awhile before we find that out. A LID date is the date that the CCAA enters us into their computer.

We also received our PA. PA means preapproval. That means CCAA has reviewed our LOI (the first set of paperwork we sent over) and approved us to proceed with Bo's adoption. Of course the still need to approve our dossier. The PA does not give any indication of our time line but it is still nice to have. Our agency has advised us that it is taking approximately 90-200 day to receive an LOA or Letter of Acceptance. An LOA will be issued after our dossier has been approved. After we sign the LOA we wait for travel approval or "TA". After our TA is received our agency will schedule our travel dates and off we go. We expect to travel in late December at the earliest and March at the latest. Hope you got all of that!

Now for the exciting news. I joined a yahoo group for people that have adopted children from the Shanxi province. After posting an introduction, I received an email from China Care. China Care is a charity that works with orphans in China and they are sponsoring Bo. They sent us 142 pictures of him starting from shortly after his birth until recently. We know that he is living with a foster family. The foster family has two older girls and he is being cared for by his stay at home foster mom. It is clear from the photos that he is very well cared for and loved. He has also had both his lip and palate repaired. In regards to his medical condition, he will need to examined when he comes home and will need surgeries in the future, but at least none right when he comes home. The news did bring us some sadness in that it hurt to to be reminded of how many photos we do not have of our Maizie. We also feel a lot of sadness for Bo and his foster family knowing that our adoption will be very hard on both of them.

And here are a couple of photos for you!