Sunday (9/27),
Today at breakfast, while planning to go to the park for the day with our adoption group, we were informed by our adoption coordinator that we needed to go back to the adoption center here in Guangzhou. The coordinator indicated that progress was being made and Tamra and I needed to do some paperwork for a new girl. This is the same place where our family first met Megan and obviously it is a little difficult to go back. When we arrived, we were presented with a file of a girl from an orphanage in Shenzhen, a city very close to Hong Kong. Her name is Long Shan Jing. From what we know, she had hemangioma on three different parts of her body. We think from a quick translation of her medical file by our coordinator that all three were surgically removed. Long Shan Jing was abandoned when she was about 4 months old and placed her in an orphanage. Doctors approximated her birthday to be 1-04-2008. Oddly, that is the same birthday as Megan. Tamra and I came back to hotel and rewrote a Letter of Intent, a document that is addressed to the Chinese adoption agency and states we would like to adopt a specific child. The document was then translated by our adoption agency in Beijing and then faxed over to the Chinese Adoption agency. Amazingly, this all transpired over about an hour. The first Letter of Intent that we wrote for Megan took several hours for us to write, over the course of a few days. We had specifically purchase a laptop for this trip, since we never had owned one. In the last few minutes before we left our home, I copied all of our adoption files from our home computer to our laptop, just in case. Well it worked out, because we were able to use our original Letter of Intent, modify it a little, and resubmit it. The time line for all of this seems to be stepped up one day. Since this is Sunday, people in the government do not tend to work. Our coordinator stated, that our adoption agency was able to find one person working today to get the ball rolling. The next approval that we are waiting for is our Travel Approval, which is kind of odd, since we are already in China. Once we get approval, It may be possible to met Long Shan Jing tomorrow afternoon. After that, we would need to get her a passport from China and have a medical exam preformed. Following that, we would make an appointment with the US Consulate and receive a visa. The Chinese National Day is looming right around the corner (October 1). This is a holiday period when everything shuts down for a few days. We are not quite sure we will make it out before the holiday arrives. It is not a major problem, it just will add some additional cost with lodging and airline fees. We are very much excited, but also remain a little heartbroken. We will take one day at a time. Please keep Megan, us and Long Shan Jing in your prayers.