“When are you guys going to China?”

“How long will you be there?”

“When is Alexander coming home?”

Answers below…

We really are coming down to the home-stretch. To re-cap, the Chinese government has accepted everything, and as far they’re concerned, Alexander is our son. So that’s awesome.

We’re waiting on US immigration now. We’ve got all of our paperwork in, and we don’t have any reason to expect there will be any hold-up. One of the final immigration steps will be a meeting at the US consulate in Guangzhou. Once our paperwork is done here, we’ll get an appointment in Guangzhou, and we’ll build the rest of our trip around that.

We’ll fly to Beijing and get on to China time (the whole country is one time zone, if you can believe that). We’ll do some touristy things while letting our circadian rhythms readjust. Then we’ll take a domestic flight to Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province. On our second day or so there, we’ll finally have our son!

We’ll have a few appointments and logistics to take care of in Shanxi, and then we’ll take another domestic flight to Guangzhou… for more appointments and logistics. We’ll be there for around a week before the long flight back to Chicago. The good news there is that it’s just one leg to get back home.

All of our completed immigration paperwork should be delivered to the Chinese government by the end of next week, at which point we’ll be issued our official Travel Approval. Time starts ticking from the day the approval is issued, and at that point, we’ll have to travel within 90 days.  We don’t plan on waiting any longer than we have to– we’re almost there!