Christmas in China?

We adopted pre-Hague in 2007 and now are adopting under Hague. We really did not see much difference until now, post LOA. The time and paperwork to get a TA is ridiculous. The time between our LOA in 2007 and TA was about 2 weeks. Now we have to send our I-800 and I-864 to USCIS before traveling. Well we send it to the Chicago lock box, then Mei sends a notice around saying that you now need to send it to a lock box in Lewisville, TX. Too late its on the way to Chicago. We thought that would be fine, it would be taken care of under some old process. We then find out that the process is to have someone at CIS take our paperwork and send it to the Hague office in Missouri. I was told that they do nothing to it at CIS, just send it to Missouri. Are you kidding me? Then I find out it takes 2 weeks to do that. It has been almost three weeks and I find out that it has not made it to Missouri. The call taker in Missouri said that they will send the paperwork from Chicago to Lewsville, TX and then send it to the Hague office in Missouri. She said it will take an extra week for that transfer. I believe they are still using pony express for shipping. After all of this gets completed Mei has to send the approved paperwork and our signed LOA to Guangzhou for the processing that usually got done while we were in Guangzhou. Mei says 2 to 3 weeks for that process. After that they send it to CCAA and they process our TA, then we travel. Looking at a calendar that puts us in China at….you guessed it…Christmas. Living in SC and knowing that our new daughter is in north China I guess we have a shot at a white Christmas.

The Difference Between Listening and Doing

While taking Kristy to pre-school Tuesday she just blurted out that she was going to listen to the teacher today. As a little background she did not do much of what her dance teacher asked her to do last Tuesday during dance class so we have been working on that all this week. So I repeated to her that she was going to listen to the dance teacher today. She said, "and in school too." I was curious to know if she knew the difference between listening and doing so I asked her if she is going to do what the dance teacher asked her. She came right back with, "I don't know about that."