Saturday, August 6th

The day after our paperwork was sent to China (July 22nd), we received an email from our adoption agency. Since we are now in a new step of the process, we have a new person working with us, Jenny. She is wonderful! She is very positive and nice to talk to. She sent us several emails about the next steps. Our paperwork was submitted for Article 5 on Thursday, July 28. It is scheduled to be picked up on August 11th. Within two business days it will be delivered to the CCAA. At that point we will be waiting for TA-Travel Approval. Jenny said that it can take anywhere from 3-8 weeks to get travel approval. My understanding is that there is no rhyme or reason about why some people get travel approval quickly and others have to wait. A guesstimate would put us at getting TA in September and traveling in October. Unfortunately, I found out (from reading someone's blog) that not many people travel in China for adoptions because of HUGE nation-wide trade shows in the big cities. So big that the cost of air fares and hotels go up and a lot of the tour guides are booked. I have heard that some agencies continue to schedule families to travel and some do not. Jenny said that she was able to have a few families travel last October, and hopes to be able to schedule people to travel this October as well. She said she still has to get information on dates for a few things before she will know for sure.
This news is extremely disappointing for me since I have gone over all the best and worst case scenarios for our travel a MILLION TIMES over the seven months. The way I figured it, a conservative guess would put us at traveling the fist week of October. If I had known about the trade shows, I doubt if I would have sent the last couple of things with Fed Ex.
Jenny gets updates on the paperwork and where it is every Tuesday. Since our paperwork is scheduled to be picked up August 11th, we will not get an update next Tuesday. Bummer. We will get an update the next Tuesday, which should tell us when our paperwork was sent to the CCAA and our wait for TA began. My optimistic guess is that we will get TA the first week of September.