Our Journey Begins...or should we say, begins to end?!?!

Still feeling fresh in the Chicago airport...

It's Wednesday morning and we are sitting in the Chicago Airport waiting for our connecting flight to Tokyo, then on to Hong Kong. We have started our journey to get our baby girl and bring her home.

Well, most of you know we started this journey over 3 years ago, so now we finally begin to come to the end!! We are so thankful to be on our way to London--not the place--the baby!! Yan Ying Lin will becom London Mei Yi Visser.

The last 2 weeks have been a whirlwind of chores, planning and organization. We tried to get all of the "non-fun" things out of the way first, like clipping Max, the dog, and sifting through our huge files of adoption paperwork to figure out what we might need while in China.

Then came the "very fun" stuff, like what clothes to take for London and how to best set up her room. This has been such a long, complex journey with so many traumas that we all had to emotionally detach from the situation a little for the last few months. It fees great to let ourselves really get excited now!!

We are hearing a lot of comments around our house like: "Wow! I can't believe we are really going to have a baby here in our house!" Or, "I can't believe this is really going to happen!" Maybe all of the ups and downs of this process have helped, but we already feel a love and joy for this little girl--soon to be ours!!

Last night I (Sara) even felt a little torn. It is always hard for me to leave the kids at home, so I was going through all of that, but also feeling the pull of needing to get over to London and have her with us. I now know I don't like having kids in 2 different continents, so I hope they all remember that as they grow up and move away!!

While we are looking forward to the next few days of being alone with London and getting to know her, we are already looking forward to arriving home and introducing her to the rest of her family.

Here is our schedule for the next few days in case you plan to follow along:

• Arrive in Hong Kong on Thursday night. Stay with friends in Hong Kong and then play in Shenzhen with friends until Sunday evening when we will fly to London's province, Changsha.
• Sometime on Monday--the BIG event--London becomes part of the Vissers! I think it will be afternoon since it is a 5-6 hour drive for her from her home town. So, those of you in the States, think of us when you wake up on Monday morning, and pray that London will not be too scared of these two strangers taking over!!
• We will stay in Changsha for 5 days while all of the paperwork is completed for the China side of the adoption.
• Friday the 12th, we will fly to Guangzhou to the US Consulate. This is the Consulate in China all US-bound adoptions go through, so there will probably be quite a few others there with their cute little ones.
• While in Guangzhou, we complete all of the US side of things and will leave to fly home on June 17th. We overnight in Tokyo, so we'll arrive back in the States on the 18th.

We'll be posting regularly, so stay tuned...

(I did hear that currently all blogs are blocked in China, so hopefully that will be fixed by the time we start posting next week)

Here We Go...

When these days pass and our family is back to just the 2 of us, I want to look back and remember all the wonderful times we shared over the years. So, here we go...I'm starting to blog.