Sink-washable underpants and one small, padded envelope of love.

Time is doing that thing again. You know, where it just keeps right on moving and makes you feel at the end of each day as though there really should be more than 24 hours...or at least that there should be an ability to put sleep on hold for a while. I mean, I guess I know the sleep part is somewhat discretionary, though given what I've heard about the typical adjustment period we're approximately a month away from, sleep hardly seems something to be messed with right now. So I say all that to say that I'm behind on blogging. Sigh.

Anyway, where we are. Our visas arrived via FedEx on December 31st. Our agency sent the signed referral acceptance documents for our travel group back to China that same week. Our dining room table is a mass of sink-washable clothing (even Kennedy has crap from REI already...), medications, a variety of small and/or collapsible items, a few carefully selected toys, paperwork, and more sink-washable clothing. (Don't even get me going about Dan's new underpants. Okay, I'll get myself going a bit by giving you their big selling point--the line in a BIG font on the front of the package--17 countries. 6 weeks. And 1 pair of underwear. Makes you just wanna go out and buy a pair, doesn't it?!)

So now we wait for Travel Approval from China. Hopefully that will come in before Spring Festival (a.k.a. Chinese New Year) because the CCAA closes for a week during the Festival. We are still hoping, hoping, hoping to be on a plane by mid-February. (You'd think we'd be used to waiting by now, but once we saw her face, any bit of patience we had before was gone. Totally gone. Patient people no more. All zen, go with the flow, all things in their time, BLAH BLAH BLAH...gone.)

We spent some time this week putting together a small package that we mailed to Kennedy Yu An's orphanage on Saturday. I've been collecting some things here and there for this package for a long time, but when the instructions came from our agency, it seemed my idea of a "small package" well exceeded the actual definition. Basically, in order to increase the likelihood of the package actually being delivered to the orphanage, it is best to send it in a padded envelope. Given that Kennedy's orphanage is rural and most postal workers in rural China deliver packages by bicycle, it makes perfect sense. So we decided to keep our package very simple--and small--in the hopes of its successful delivery. Our agency gave us typed letters translated in Chinese and personalized to us to include with the package. One letter thanked the orphanage staff for caring for Yu An, the other included several pages of questions about Yu An that we hope they will answer and give to us when we meet in China. These letters were great and very thorough, but I just couldn't get it out of my head that I wanted us to write them a thank you card ourselves. It's hard to explain, but these are the people who have made it possible for us to be Yu An's parents, and she to be our daughter. They are the ones caring for her now. I wanted to send them a handwritten card--a card that would express in our words how much we love Yu An already and how much we appreciate their loving and caring for her. So we went out and picked out a blank thank you card and wrote our message on the left side in English. And then on Thursday I met with a translator named Chen who translated and hand wrote our message in characters on the right side of the card. I had such a great time meeting her and talking with her. She was so excited to see Kennedy Yu An's pictures and, after pondering her face a moment, said that Chinese beliefs say that her high forehead is a sign of great intelligence, that her generous ear lobes (ha!) are a sign of good fortune, and that because she is born in the year of the Golden Pig she will have "GREAT fortune!" We talked for a while about adoption, about today's China, and about language. (The company Chen works for is a Chinese language institute where we hope to take family classes.) I left feeling like I had made a great connection. And the card was so beautiful. I sat in my car and stared at it for a minute--with its English on the left and Chinese on the right--and thought about these 2 languages, so completely different, looking so beautiful together on one card.

In addition to the handwritten card and typed letters, we included 2 disposable cameras with a sheet of instructions for their use. The letter asked that photos be taken of her, her friends, caregivers, the building, her crib, and anything else that those who know her best think she should have for later. We hope these cameras will be returned to us--full of pictures--when we meet Kennedy in China. We took the cameras out of their packages and taped tiny pictures of Kennedy's head to the top of them for easy identification. (Yes, we are dorks.) We also included a baby photo album with pictures of us, her grandparents, Hank (yes, it's a nice, cuddly kitten type photo--no hissing face or anything), and her cousins. Dan even hand-wrote the descriptor characters on little tags that I bordered in red paper and glued to the photos. (Remember above when I asked where the time went?! It's all coming back to me...) Anyway, we made 2 identical albums and will take one with us to China, too. And we included some 'made in Milwaukee' caramels for the caregivers all wrapped up in red tissue and ribbons. And that's it. Envelope stuffed. It seemed like such a tiny envelope for all the time that went into it, but it felt great to take it to the Post Office Saturday and send it on its way. And now we pray that it gets there.