OK, so it is Tuesday night and Thursday morning is coming quickly.  This is the first time that I have had a few minutes to sit down and collect some thoughts.  Which is more than I can say for Kelly.  She has been working tirelessly since Saturday getting everything done before we leave.  So, here are some of those thoughts:

• God is good.  The beginning of last year, we sat down as a family and put together seven unexpected expectations.  Things that seemed impossible, but that if God wanted them to come about, we were willing to accept them.  One of them was that if He wanted us to have another child adopted internationally, He would drop one in our laps.  AND, since last year had many challenges, he was going to have to figure out a way to pay for the adoption, too!  In July, our agency called and said they had a little boy.  Would we be interested?  Well, it isn’t faith, unless you step out of the boat, right?  So, we said yes.  And, within two weeks a large portion of the adoption was paid for with donations from people who love us and also have a heart for international adoptions.  Interestingly, as we have come close to our departure dates, several of our other “unexpected expectations” have shown some promise of being completed!  When you are faithful in little … God is faithful in much.  God is good.
• What is the WORLD am I doing taking my daughter and niece with me????
• Seriously?  Eight kids?
• Kelly and I feel like the neglected step child of the international adoption world!  Vietnam was pretty much a DIY sort of adoption and it appears that we are AGAIN blazing new trails as we hear the words, “you are the first family to do this!”  We should be able to manage the challenges that China will present much better than we did Vietnam!
• Why am I responsible for five people on this trip????
• A close friend of mine told me that Satan hates it when you take a child out of a godless country.  When you do, life seems to throw a million different challenges at you before you get on the plane.  I’m thinking he may well be right, but in the end, the fight is definitely worth fighting.
  
• My niece is going to HATE how restrictive we are going to be on her clothing and how little we will let her venture out on her own.  She and Brittany are just WAY too pretty to let out of our sights for too long!
• No, we are NOT flying through the great plume of death in Europe.  We fly into Chicago, then over Canada, north of Alaska over the Arctic Ocean, then we dive down through the Bearing Straight on a direct line into Beijing.
• If I don’t see the Great Wall of China, I’m going to be very irritated.  I know it isn’t the focus of this trip, but still ….
  
• Did I mention that God is good?

OK, so this is probably the last update before I update in China!  Stay tuned!

Cameron

Well, we faced a little bit of a delay in that our paperwork was a week late getting filed with the Chinese Government.  Apparently, the lady that was filing it was also filing paperwork for several other families and she thought that she had to wait for everyone’s packet to get to her and file them all at once.  That wasn’t the case, but I guess there have been changes to the way these things are handled over there and there is a little bit of confusion.

That said, everything is filed and the Chinese Government issued our Article 5 this week, which is the next step in the process.  We SHOULD receive travel authorization within the next two weeks or so.  Kelly thinks that the travel authorizations appear to be issued on Thursday, so I would imagine we would get our travel authorization by April 8th.  That would put us on track to leave around April 20th.

God continues to answer prayers.  One of our biggest concerns is leaving Nick here managing his diabetes.  But, one of our neighbors, who herself is a Type I diabetic, has agreed to be “on-call” while we are gone to manage any diabetic issues that he might have.  That really helps lift some of that burden.  Things continue to fall into place as we trust in God to work out all the final details.

Cameron Bernadsky

Another step along the path, we received our NVC letter today.  Basically that means that the National VISA Center in the US is sending our information to the International VISA Center in China.  The International VISA center puts all of our approval’s together and issue us our Aricle 5, which allows us to file all our paperwork with the Chinese authorities.  This will lead to China sending us our travel authorization.  It looks like we should be leaving in early April.

We will keep you in the loop as we move forward.  Keep in our prayers all the aspects of this trip, not the least of which is Nicholas managing his diabetes while we are half a world away;  an issue that we didn’t have to contend with when we went to get Mia.

Cameron

Just wanted everyone to know that we received our provisional approval from USCIS today in the mail … One more step in the process! Now that has to make the rounds to several places and we should receive final approval next week sometime? That has to be done before we are given our travel date.

Keep praying that the process continues to proceed smoothly and that God continues to prepare our hearts and Caleb’s heart for this change in all our lives!

Here is a copy of the actual Letter of Approval from China.  We got all the paperwork signed off and sent overnight to USCIS and to our adoption agency.  We are starting to move in the right direction!  Lots of things to get done in the next eight weeks!  Jake (3/25) and Nick (4/16) are worried about us missing their birthdays.  We will be praying that we can thread that needle!

 

Kelly informs me that we will NOT be getting any additional pictures of Caleb before going to China.  That kind of stinks!  I guess this orphanage will not send those out and will not allow us to come and see the orphanage when we are in China.  While that makes the time go by a little more slowly, at least we have a time frame of when we will be traveling and bringing Caleb home!

Cameron    

We received our letter of approval today!  That is very exciting news as it means the clock is now running and we can start making plans to head to China to get Caleb.  We are probably looking at eight weeks from right now, putting us right at the beginning of April.  Jake is worried that we will miss his birthday (March 25th) and Nick is worried that we will miss his (April 16th)!  Hopefully we can land right in the middle!

I will update you when we know more!

Cameron

OK, so I know that it has been a LONG time since I blogged anything on this site, but there hasn’t been a whole lot going on!  Our log in date in China was December 4th, I believe, and now we are still just waiting.  We haven’t had much additional contact of information since then.  I would imagine we will hear something within the next couple of weeks and then, as activity speeds up, I will update more frequently!

Hang in there!  We are!

Cameron

You remember back on August 20th when I said the home study would be done that week?  Like every other aspect of an international adoption, this, too, was delayed.  But, Kelly went and picked it up today, we packaged it (as you can see below), and have sent it off with our I-800A to USCIS.  Now we are cooking with gas!  Well, not really.  Actually, now we sit and wait.  BUT, this is a big hurdle to get over and the one we needed to get done as quickly as possible.  Now, we just need to pray that USCIS gets through it quickly.  Delay’s just mean that Caleb has to sit there longer, and we don’t want that!

Cameron

We finally were able to get all of the paperwork together and all the visits completed to finish off our home study.  We are hoping that our adoption agency, Madison, can get it reviewed and back to our social worker so that it can be completed yet this week.  That would mean that we can now file with the US Government, which is the next big hurdle.  However, God continues to be faithful and work through all the details and we are still hopeful that we will be able to get to China and pick up Caleb early next year. 

We recently sent Caleb a little “care” package.  There is an agency in China, named Red Thread, that is run by a very kind lady named Ann.  She puts together these packages and delivers them to the orphanage while trying to get additional information for the adoptive families.  We sent Caleb some cookies, a toy truck, and a photo album of our family.  OK, I said SOME cookies, but in the picture below it looks like a TON of cookies.  Hopefully he shares?

Anyway, Ann wasn’t able to get any additional information from the orphanage about Caleb, but we did hear back from Madison yesterday and they are working with their in-country coordinator to get us some new info and, hopefully, some more pictures!  As soon as we hear anything, I will post it here.

Thank you for all of your prayers and support.

Cameron & Kelly

   

This past Saturday we had our first in-home visit for the completion of our homestudy.  We did one for Mia, but because it was more than two years ago, it has to all be redone.  But, Kelly in her usual effecient manner, had all of our documentation updated and ready to go.  We have another visit this next Saturday and then should be pretty close to filing our documents with US Immigration.  Then, we have to wait on them.