Verners

Date: Saturday, December 2nd

Time: come anytime from 7:30-11:30 A.M.

Location:

Our home
623 Concord Pl.
San Marcos, CA 92069
760-798-1616

Cost: donation

Description:
Your donations will be used to help bring Faith Verner home to us from China. As many of you know our adoption paperwork is now in China waiting to be matched with our precious little girl.

The breakfast should be a great time for all. We plan to have a jumper for the kids and opportunities to learn more about China. We’ll do a Chinese craft for the kids, listen to some Chinese music and teach them a few words from a native speaker!

Stay as long as you would like and catch up with us on this amazing journey.

We hope to see you there!

FedEx shows that our Dossier was delivered to China on October 23rd at 12:13 P.M.!! We also found out that we are group 284. Having a group number is significant because it connects us to several other families who are very close to us in the process and who may end up traveling with us to China! So if you are in group 284 (or right around there), please let us know so we can meet, encourage and pray for you… We are excited to meet you.

After nearly 4 months of paper chasing, fingerprinting, certifications, authentications and anything else you can think of, we finally have a completed Dossier in the mail to America World (our adoption agency).  Crissy was up in L.A. most of the day at the Chinese Consulate picking up paperwork and preparing our Dossier.  Carlos (Crissy’s Dad) was a big help going up there with her and helping to get everything off to FedEx.
Today was the culmination of countless hours of work and is a big relief.  If all looks well with the documents, they will go to China on Friday.

The next step is to get a log in date (LID) from CCAA (Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs).  Then comes a very long wait to get a “referral” and finally a travel authorization (TA) to meet our daughter!  Exactly how long the wait will be is TBD.  It could be a year or less, but will likely be longer.  Referral wait times are presently running 14 months.  There is some speculation that they will go down some and many rumors that it may be longer.  For now, we are one step closer to meeting our Faith, and that is very exciting.

Ok, well, slight adjustment on the recycling project. We carted 60 POUNDS of cardboard to the recycling center and received $1.00!! Our Explorer was completely full with barely enough room for the boys to fit in their seats! Obviously we’ll loose money if we keep doing that.

However, we received $16.00 for the plastic (water bottles, milk cartons…). So we’ll plan to keep recycling those, but I told the boys that they will need to do some additional fund raising if they hope to meet their goal.

Let us know if you have any fundraising ideas for Levi and Luke. I just spoke with a friend whose kids ran a highly successful lemonade stand a couple of weeks ago. They are adopting from Russia.

And lastly, Aunt Marina donated the money to get the boys their passports. That will be a big help in getting them to China.

Levi and Luke thank you in advance for your ideas.

We have great news.  We received our immigration papers to bring a daughter home from China (the I-171H form)!!  We were so excited that we hugged and gave high fives.  The form was not expected for another week or two so we were very surprised to find it in the mail today.  This process can take up to 2 month in some areas so San Diego was very quick with only a week wait time.  We have a very efficient local government!  The letter reads: “ Notice of favorable determination concerning application for advanced processing of orphan petition.  It has been determined that you are able to furnish proper care to an orphan or orphans…”

These papers will be guarded with our lives.  We’ll need to fly with them to China to bring our daughter home.  We may stop by Target tomorrow and pick up a fireproof safe!

And some of you may have noticed in the subject of this post that we have chosen a name for our daughter – Faith.  We also plan to keep some part of her Chinese name.

Yippeeeee!

Our boys really want to go to China with us to pick up their sister. For a couple of months they’ve been asking if they will be able to go to China, and we’ve been giving vague answers like, “we want you to go, we’ll see” and “it’s a lot of money, we’ll just have to see”…

Well, that wasn’t good enough for Levi. He recently asked us if he’d be able to go to China if he paid for his plane ticket to get there. We were a little surprised and said, “probably”. He now has begun a wide scale recycling campaign to raise the money for he and Luke to fly to China. He’s been recruiting helpers, including me. I’ve been asked to carry home cardboard boxes from work. Grandma, Grandpa, Aunts and Uncles are saving their empty cans, plastic bottles and milk cartons. Our porch is full and the car has trouble fitting in the garage lately.

It’s a lot of work and a slow process to earn that much money recycling, but I think the boys are up to the task. I’m proud of them. Wish them luck and feel free to drop some bottles by our house if you’re in the area!