busy busy busy

Wow, it's been a whirlwind of a week. I'm almost ready to mail off a care package to Lucie's SWI in Dianbai. I've decided to send a disposable camera (to take some pics of Lucie with her caretakers, etc), a cute little soft stuffed puppy (Lucie was born in the year of the dog), a baby photo book with pics of our home and family, and some little candies for the nannies. I just need to print out some labels in Chinese, so they know what's what.

In addition to that, I've been running around for the past few days trying to get everything together that we will need for the trip (shop-shop-shop). I think I have most of the important things. There's a few odds and ends that I need to attend to. I've also been trying to figure out the whole "visa" thing. It's quite complicated really. But with a lot of help from my cyber friends, I think we've got it figured out. I am hoping to get some passport pics (for the visas) taken of the kids tomorrow (we took some extras when we had our passports done two years ago, but the kids are barely recognizable they have grown so much!). Then I need to pick up some cashiers checks (one for the embassy and one for the courier) at the bank on Monday. Then it should all be ready to take to the FedEx office and ship off to a courier who will then walk it into the Chinese Embassy for us. It takes about a week to get our visas back.

Next week I plan on attending to our "money" needs. There are some very specific cash requirements for the orphanage fees, etc. I am going to enlist the help of our financial institution. I also need to make a visit to the pediatrician to make sure we have all of the drugs and medications that we need to take with us (apparently American meds are very hard to find in Asia!) Hubby is working on getting Lucie on our health insurance policy and all of that rigamaroll.

Then I think I will need about a week to collect and copy and organize all of the official documents we need to take to China with us. By then we should be really close to receiving our TA and it will be TIME TO PACK! Really, I think the time is going to go by pretty quickly. The kids are finishing up the school year and so there are a lot of parties and field days and stuff. On top of all that, there's all the stuff to do around the house to get things ready for our absence...cleaning, and stocking the freezer, and yardwork, and bills, and yada yada yada.