Steps of Faith: September 3, 2012

Today was our day to officialize TingTing's adoption on the China side!

We had a wonderful surprise about it. We had our Civil Affairs and Notary appointments this morning. Here is where we fill out the paperwork to get our adoption decree and all of the items she will need for us to get her into the states. Normally this is done on one day and then you come back a few days later to pick up the actual paperwork and red book. The surprise was that we would be coming back in the afternoon to pick it up! One trip!

So in the wait, we had our guide drop us off at a restaurant. We just LOVE real Chinese food! We are so in heaven over this delicious food! After lunch, we took a walk and explored and decided to get some coffee at Starbucks. We met back up with our guide around 2 and went back to the Civil Affairs and Notary offices and picked up all our paperwork.

TingTing giving her handprint in red ink. We also fingerprint our signatures in red ink.

It's official!

THE red book

(I'll fix the decree later...for some reason it's not showing up in Iphoto and my battery is about to die and the girls are napping in the room...)

Lunch

Starbucks

Then it was the long trek back to SFCV. What should have been about 3 1/2 hours turned into about 4 1/2. We thought we were almost back when we hit Langfang...except that the driver's GPS kept getting him lost on dead end alleys! At one point, I was giggling so hard I was crying. He kept on driving as if nothing was wrong. Never letting on that he was lost, but we knew about how far Tianjin is from Langfang and knew he couldn't get there. After finally calling Sara, we made it home. We made it just in time to see Aaron off. Aaron was an intern here this summer. He has been here 3 summers in a row and has a special bond with out TingTing. (They even share a nickname. LOL) He rearranged his flights just to be here when she became part of our family so we really wanted to be here to see him off as he headed back to the states last night.