"stupid tax"

So today was our first full day in China. We woke early because we are still on east coast time, but we made use of the time, skyping the boys and getting breakfast early. Our breakfast buffet was so yummy and interesting I decided to take a picture. This is when I noticed that the battery was not in my camera. We soon discovered that not only was it not in my camera but it was actually still in Delmont plugged in on the kitchen island where I plugged it in Tuesday night. Oops. So, since we had no plans till 3 today, we decided to go find another battery. We walked around Beijing for nearly 2 hours looking for a market we never found and decided to get a taxi to take us to a tech market we had been told about. Well, we chose the wrong taxi driver, and he charged us ten times what he should have . Then we paid too much for a charger and battery. Approximately one hundred dollars later we are wiser in the ways of Beijing taxi hailing and fully equipped with our camera gear. We have paid our "stupid tax" for the day and hopefully for the trip. In case you are unfamiliar with the term, it just means that you were stupid and it ended up costing you money. That was us today!



We did finally make it to the Temple of Heaven, which is a very old temple compound here in Beijing. We took many pictures. Hope to be able to post some pictures here with the camera equipment that I remembered, the iPad/sd card converter. We also saw an awesome acrobatic show this evening. Those were some crazy flexible people.

I think all of us are getting antsy to meet our kids. It has been nice getting to know some of the other families , but I am ready to be done here and meet Grace. We bought a jet lag liquid formula and it must be working because even after our really busy day we feel pretty good. Tomorrow is the Great Wall of China. Should be awesome.

Love to all.

 2 more days till Grace.

We have arrived!

Well, after a late start in Pittsburgh due to a mechanical issue, and a run through Chicago O'Hare airport to make our connection, we were on our way! I was slightly overcome with emotion as the plane lifted from the ground, knowing we were leaving our safe comfortable life for something totally new. That nothing would ever be the same again.

The boys did very well this morning, with very few tears shed. Jude was tired and went back to bed.

The flight was long but relatively smooth. We were on the plane with 5other adoptive families, two that I have been connecting with online for sometime, Georgette Poppelmeier and Kelly Bloomquist.  We had lots of time to chat! There was also another Bethany family and another family from CCAI adoption agency. So exciting.

 We arrived in Beijing about 3am EST, 3pm Beijing time. We catnapped on the flight, but any substantial sleep is nearly impossible. It took over an hour to get to the hotel after meeting with our guide, Tom. Beijing is a big city covered in smog so thick you cannot see for more than a few miles ahead of you. It makes me a little sad for the people here and for our global environment. I pray that things will eventually change here the way they have changed in the States.

The people have been very friendly. We went to dinner with the Bloomquists at a local Chinese restaurant (Around the corner and down an alley). Food was good. We got 4 dishes to share and had 4 drinks, including 2 beers and the total was around $35.00. There is a Cuban cigar shop right next door to our hotel (you know who you are who was asking me about bringing Cuban cigars home).

We were in bed by 9, unable to stay awake any longer. I expected to sleep longer but we were up at 5, bodies still adjusting to this time zone. Not a lot planned today, which is good because rest will probably be on the schedule. We meet with our in-country coordinator at 3pm to talk about the details of our time here and see an acrobatic show at 4:30.

Thanks for all your prayers, facebook posts, and love. It is more appreciated than you can know.

Three more days to Grace!

Well, approximately 17 months of prayer, planning, paperwork, waiting, more prayer, more paperwork, more planning, and more waiting has culminated in this week: we leave tomorrow morning for Beijing! We spend a few days touring Beijing and allowing our bodies to adjust being on the opposite time schedule. We will be exactly 12 hours ahead of Eastern Standard time (2pm is 2am and vice versa).  We will see the Forbidden City, the Great Wall and several other historical sights (see itinerary attached below).

On the 29^th, in the afternoon, we meet Grace.  It will be sometime in the middle of your sleep Sunday night. We covet your prayers. Our sweet girl will be leaving all that she has ever known, with people she has never met, seeing and doing things she never imagined. It will be a time of major transition and most likely grief. Please pray for us and for our little girl. Pray that we can meet her needs with love and patience and Grace! Pray that she can come to trust us quickly and we can somehow communicate with her well enough to comprehend her needs.

God is so good. He has led us here and we can’t wait to see what the future holds for us and Grace.

Keep watch on Facebook or the blog. We will try to post updates if at all possible. We’ll be back on November 8. We plan to cocoon ourselves for at least a few weeks to give her a chance to process her new life, her brothers, and what it means to have them and this Mama and Daddy as her family.

Much love.

Christine

CHINA ITINERARY

Christopher & Christine Klemstine

Thursday  October 25, 2012             Arrive in Beijing via UA851@2:40 p.m.  Airport pickup.  Stay at Jianguo Hotel.

Friday        October 26, 2012             Orientation meeting at 3:00 p.m.  Acrobatic show at 4:30 p.m.

Saturday    October 27, 2012            Visit the Great Wall, Cloisonne Factory, Bird’s Nest.  Lunch included.

Sunday      October 28, 2012             Visit Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and Hutong Tour. Lunch included. 

Monday     October 29, 2012            Flight CA1351 (8:00-11:15) to Guangzhou.  Airport pickup.  Stay at the China              Hotel (Marriott). Receive your child in the afternoon.

Tuesday     October 30, 2012            Adoption registration and notarization.

Wednesday October 31, 2012          Apply for passport in the afternoon and medical exam.

Thursday     November 1, 2012        Visit White Cloud Hill Park.

Friday         November 2, 2012          Visit Guangzhou Zoo. 

Saturday     November 3, 2012         Afternoon meeting to prepare consulate documents.
             

Sunday       November 4, 2012         Visit Guangzhou Folk Art Museum or Safari Park with Shelley
            

Monday      November 5, 2012         Visa appointment. 8:30am

                

Tuesday      November 6, 2012         Pick up child’s visa in the afternoon.
              

Wednesday November 7, 2012        Free day. Shopping with Ann 10:30 starting at the Holiday Inn Shifu.
               

Thursday     November 8, 2012        Depart Guangzhou via NH934 @ 9:15 a.m. Arrive PIT 6:41pm.

Anxiety??...and travel itinerary!

Anxiety is the result of envisioning the future without Me. So the best defense against worry is staying in communication with Me. When you turn your thoughts toward Me, you can think much more positively. Remember to listen as well as to speak, making your thoughts a dialogue with Me.

If your must consider upcoming events, follow these rules: 1.) Do not linger in the future, because anxieties spring up like mushrooms when you wander there. 2.) Remember the promise of My continued Presence; include me in any imagery that comes to mind. This mental discipline does not come easily because you are accustomed to being God of your fantasies. However, the reality of My Presence with you, now and forevermore, outshines any fantasy you could ever imagine.

From ‘Jesus Calling’ by Sarah Young

This is a great devotion for me and my cohorts in the adoption community. It is a crazy, anxiety producing time. But we are oh so excited. We got our travel itinerary yesterday (see below)! We now know that we will be Grace on Monday November 29^th in the afternoon after our flight down from Beijing. I am imagining quite a crazy after noon. Arriving with all our luggage from Beijing, checking into our hotel, getting transported somewhere (or will she be brought to us??) and then the signing of all the paperwork, and then meeting Grace and bringing her into our family. This will happen in the middle of the night for you, as you are sleeping Sunday Night. So, if you think of us, please say a prayer before you sleep on Sunday. We will try to update when we can. God is so good.

October 25, 2012                 Arrive in Beijing via UA851@2:40 p.m.  Airport pickup.  Stay at Jianguo Hotel.

October 26, 2012                 Orientation meeting at 3:00 p.m.  Acrobatic show at 4:30 p.m.

October 27, 2012                 Visit the Great Wall, Cloisonne Factory, Bird’s Nest.  Lunch included.

October 28, 2012                 Visit Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and Hutong Tour. Lunch included. 

October 29, 2012                 Flight CA1351 (8:00-11:15) to Guangzhou.  Airport pickup.  Stay at the China Hotel (Marriott). Receive your child in the afternoon.

October 30, 2012                 Adoption registration and notarization.

October 31, 2012                 Apply for passport in the afternoon and medical exam.

November 1, 2012              Visit White Cloud Hill Park.

November 2, 2012              Visit Guangzhou Zoo.  The rest of your group arrives in Guangzhou this evening.

November 3, 2012              Afternoon meeting to prepare consulate documents.

November 4, 2012              Visit Guangzhou Folk Art Museum .

November 5, 2012              Visa appointment.

November 6, 2012              Pick up child’s visa in the afternoon.  

November 7, 2012              Free day.

November 8, 2012              Depart Guangzhou via NH934 @ 9:15 a.m.

Travel Approval!

We are so excited to tell you that we have been granted our travel invitation from China! It came today to our great surprise. The officials in China must have cleared their desks last week before they started their big mid Autumn festival week, thank you Jesus! Because even the US Embassy is on holiday this week, we will be unable to get a confirmed consulate date until after the US holiday of Columbus Day, so that will be October 9th. We plan to take a leap of faith and book our flights anyway trusting God that our consulate appointment will be scheduled either the 5th or 6th of November!

Thanks for your continued  prayers. We cannot believe that we will be leaving for China in 23 days!

Grace and Hope...and travel dates?

People have been asking if we know our travel dates, and the answer is “maybe!” But first a story (it's kind of long)

;

Way back in August I was looking at children on waiting child sites. These are mainly children that have been overlooked because their special need is too great or too unknown. There was a beautiful girl listed as “Kimmie” with another agency. I was smitten. She has the best smile! Chris and I talked and prayed about her. We knew she had a heart defect and had done lots of research and thought we could handle it. We asked a cardiologist and my cousin Steven (a neonatal surgeon) to review her file. The cardiologist never responded and before Steven could, we told them we wanted to know more about how to submit a “letter of intent” for her, basically saying we wanted to move forward for her. The very next morning Steven called with a devastating review of her condition. We decided it was too much for our family to handle. Sobbing, I called back the agency and told them we could not move forward.

I grieved the loss of her, sad that it would not be us to be her family. My close girlfriends grieved with me, including my best friend of the last 20+ years, Shelley Carson. The adoption worker from "Kimmie's" agency thanked me for the information on her condition and said that perhaps God would use our fact finding to locate the family that was ready for “Kimmie”. I prayed it would be so. Chris and I continued on in process with the agency we had started with (not “Kimmie’s” agency) and waited for our homestudy to be finished so that they could “match” us with a waiting child with a less serious need. Meanwhile, I prayed for “Kimmie”.

Several months later I got a call from Shelley. Her voice was wavering, heavy. When I asked her what was going on, she confessed that she and her husband Kevin had submitted a letter of intent to adopt a little girl they would call Hope, that same little girl that was advocated for by the name of “Kimmie”. They felt God clearly calling them to her, feeling as though God had allowed them to spend 21 years of parenting in preparation for her and her special needs. I was shocked. Happy for them. Thrilled for Hope.  Quite honestly, I felt a little bad that I didn’t have a constitution strong enough to say yes to her 3 months before. But ultimately I knew that God really had used the information we had obtained for “Kimmie” to lead her to her forever family. And it was Shelly and Kevin Carson (and their 7 biological kids)!

Fast forward a year!! The Carson’s paperwork took longer than expected because of social worker screw ups. Their dossier didn’t make it to China till May 2012. Chris and I had our dossier in China in February, but due to website foul-ups and other constraints, we were not matched with our Grace until June 7^th. At that point, the Klemstines and the Carsons were both waiting on our “Letter of Approval” from China, which can take anywhere from 30-130 days, with the timing sometimes being quite random. Surprisingly, our LOA (letter of acceptance) came first on July 23. Hope’s came exactly one week later on July 30.

At this point we began to dream that we could be in China at the same time, picking up our girls. Then the Klemstines got a letter from US immigration stating that we needed to file a supplement to our application because Grace was older than we had asked for (by 23 days!!!) on our original application. This added 3 weeks to our timeline and we were now hopelessly behind the Carson family’s paperwork. Still we prayed God would work it out.

Wednesday, September 25, Shelley called to say that they had booked tickets for October 12 returning October 25. They had decided they could not wait for us since Hope is so fragile (she needs surgery pretty immediately) and they already have their travel approval from China. I called my agency and found out that if our travel approval comes as it should in about 9 days, we could be leaving for China on the 25^th,  with a US consulate date(the last step before you can leave China with your child) on November 6. We would miss them by days. They wanted to change their dates by a week to catch us but feared they could not because they had already sent off for their Chinese visas and since Shelley is a church employee, China will only let her enter the country for a very brief time (30 days from the time the visa is issued!). Confused yet?

Thursday, September 26, I called Shelley and found out that due to a “Sugar Trade Fair” in the town of Fuzhou where she will pick up Hope, there are no hotel rooms to be had for 2 weeks from her original travel plan. She thankfully was able to stop the visa process and her agency set out to find her a new consulate date.  The new date….is November 6^th. And the morning after this new date was confirmed, Shelley got the update on Hope that she has been waiting on for ten months! It says that Hope has been healthy since her last surgery!! Comforting news to a worried mama and papa.

What this means is that not only may the Carsons and Klemstines be in China together, but we may also be able to be at the US consulate together, watching our girls become US citizens. I say “may” because the Klemstines still do not have our “travel approval” from China, which is needed in order to set up our flights, hotel reservations and consulate appointment. In addition, we will be in a town called Guangzhou during the last week of a major trade fair, which will jack up the prices of everything significantly (up to double!). It will also make reservations hard to find, especially since we probably won’t have our travel approval till October 12 ,because all governmental offices will be closed from 9/30-10/7 for a weeklong national holiday!!!

So, do we have travel dates? We hope so. We are praying that God will continue to bless our process in order to allow us to get our travel approval in time to travel with our agency’s October travel group and that the costs won’t be so skyrocketing high that we won’t be able to justify the cost. God has already shown Himself able and we trust Him to continue. In just the last week, our church allowed parishioners to contribute through them for our adoption and over $1300.00 was donated to date, good friends have offered us an Ipad in order for us to be able to communicate with Grace through some translation apps, and other sweet friends have offered us airline miles, which we hope to be able to use to reduce or eliminate our international flight costs. God is good. All the time.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! Your prayers for the last few weeks and remaining details of our process are greatly appreciated!! For over a year God has been working on my heart and my strong will to allow Him to be in control and to trust Him with the details of everything. And so it continues. I choose to continue to trust that He has the best plan for me. I am so glad He is so faithful to continue to grow and mold me into the person he wants me to be! Pray for Grace. Pray for Hope. Pray for the Carsons and the Klemstines as we get ready to bring two scared little girls into our lives and homes.

By the way, did I mention their similarities?

Grace’s birthdate :5/15/2007                                      Hope’s birthdate 8/15/2007

Grace’s weight: 28 pounds                                          Hope’s weight: 30 pounds

Grace’s height: 35 inches                                              Hope’s height: 38 inches.

I can’t wait to see them together!! How about you?