Updates and Good Medical News

[SLC: ] The update today is that things appear to be moving forward on several fronts:

The orphanage at Fuling sent up-to-date growth and weight measurements for our daughter, which I plotted on our growth charts and found the results to be terrific news. Dr. Mason confirmed this afternoon via email that our daughter is tracking very nicely. Very Reassuring!

Our neighbor Su Yieh is currently hard at work translating our letter to the orphanage director to go in our care package. We purchased a few more gifts for the director and her staff this afternoon at the Virginia Shop on South Union Street in Old Town. The care package should be able to go out on Monday bound for China.

The three travel-companion couples are also sending cakes to the orphanage through the "Blessed Kids" site. Catherine and I should get the order placed sometime this weekend.

More Wrestlings with Homeland Security

[Update from SLC: ] Things are well! All three couples in our travel-group have accepted their referrals, and now our agency is working hard to wrest final approval of our home-studies from the US Homeland Security (US-CIS) folks. This latter issue is a real bear, as you may imagine. I spent the entire afternoon yesterday re-writing all of our personal finances reports for re-submission to US-CIS office. Keep us in your prayers!

For the record and for posterity, here (right) is the update box from the official CCAA site, which documents their processing of referrals through our log-in date (September 12, 2005) and beyond.

We have a few more pictures of the CCAA office in Beijing to post. (In each case, you should be able to click the picture to enlarge it.)

This first one is a view looking up at their building from the entrance way:

And here is the entrance to the building itself:

In the lower right of the picture above, you can see the CCAA's sign. Here is a close-up view. Can you spot the mistake in the English?

Sliding into the new year 2007

This is Yaoyao, sliding into the new year! This panda is very near our daughter, in Sichuan province. We are working on sending our daughter a care package through blessed kids.

Where is Her Orphanage?