Nothing starts your day better than ....

New pictures!! Yesterday we received pictures of Isaiah's birthday celebration and this morning we woke to some surprise pics from ICC's Christmas celebration.

Most of the birthday photos we received were pretty blurry, but the ones from Christmas were very clear!

Here is our little man with his birthday cake. We were told he had 32 babies and toddlers at his party!

These are the ones we received this morning ... they were taken just yesterday! This was the Christmas celebration on the ICC baby floor. They said Isaiah had a great time. If you look closely (i.e. zoom in and inspect every inch of him, like we do!), you can see 2 little teeth coming through!

We can hardly wait to get this sweetie in our arms! Come on March!

LOA!!!!

We woke to a wonderful email this morning from our agency - our LOA is on the way!! Day 62 - right at average!! We have several more steps to complete before we get our Travel Approval, if we continue to track with the average, we should be looking at getting our TA in early March and traveling mid-March or so. There are several holidays between now and then that might slow things slightly, but hopefully not by much!!

A great way to end the week!!

Happy Birthday sweet girl!!

Happy Birthday to our big 3 year old!! Here are a couple pictures of our big girl.

Happy Birthday sweet boy!

Today is Isaiah's 1st birthday. We actually celebrated last night, since China is 14 hours ahead of us. We went out for Chinese food, then came back and had a small cake and sang happy birthday him. We recorded it for him, just like we did for Anna on her 1st birthday.

There is a family in China right now that should be visiting Isaiah's SWI tomorrow. We are hopeful they will able to take pictures.

Here is the birthday care package we sent to him last week -  thanks to Aunt Julie, Uncle Brad and cousins for the cars, books and outfit & thanks to Nana and Grammie for the cake. We are also hopeful the SWI will send pictures of his party soon.

We are now really in the realm of possibility to get our LOA. I'm actually praying that we may even see it this week ... but we're trying not to get our hopes us (ha!). Today is day 59 of our LOA wait and the average wait people have had in the last month is 62 days ... not that I'm obsessing over this chart or anything!!

"In Process"

It's a small step, but any step is a step closer to our baby boy! Yesterday was day 47 of our wait for our LOA.

The process of getting our LOA goes in a couple of steps - 1st is dossier translation, which is where we were for 47 days and 2nd is "in process", which is where we are now! That means our dossier is now out of transation and basically just waiting for approval.

Currently the average wait for LOA is about 70 days ... our agency said last night that they expect it in the next month. Our prayer is to have our LOA by Christmas. That will put us on track for travel in March if all of the remaining steps keep with their average.

Last night we ordered Isaiah his birthday care package. He will turn 1 on Dec 12th. We should get pictures of him celebrating with the cake we sent. There is also another family getting ready to leave next week to bring their daughter home from Isaiah's SWI ... she is going to try to take pictures and maybe video for us while she is there!!

Last weekend we found Anna in Isaiah's room (which is a work in progress), she said she wanted to sleep next to "baby brother". She talks about him all the time and everytime we are shopping somewhere, she wants to buy 2 of everything - one for her and one for "baby brother".