Hotel

Here are some pictures of our hotel and room. Marybeth, these are for you in planning your trip to Taiwan, hopefully soon. :) The Agora Garden is a beautiful hotel. The staff is over the top and the accomodations are wonderful. It was a little rainy today so we didn't get a good picture of the outside. But we have a 2 room suite with 2 balconies, one in the bedroom and one in the sitting area. It is nice having this much space to move around in, especially when we will have 4 of us in here tomorrow. We did check out the pool today. The adults have a lap pool and the kids have the coolest pool, but Natalie did not want to go in. I didn't blame her because the kiddie pool was a little chilly. The lap pool wasn't bad, so I held her as she swam laps. I didn't get a picture of her with her swimming cap on, but next time.

We Made it!!

After a very long trip we finally made it to Taipei, Taiwan at 830pm Taiwan time on Sunday, which is 830am your time, except for Judy. We would have updated it then, but we were all wiped out from the long trip across the world. I can't say that it is something I would do anytime soon because it was soooo long. Natalie did awesome. She colored and played games and just entertained herself all the way here. She did sleep alot on the last leg from LA to Tokyo and Tokyo to Taipei. When we got to the Hotel she was a little more awake than Joe and I. The flights were great and the food was good. I was surprised alot of penne pasta was being served, I would have thought it would have been Chinese food. All was good, they kept us fed. :) The Hotel we are staying at is amazing. The room is huge, it is actually two rooms and Taipei is so clean. Today we are going to venture out and see what is out there because tomorrow is the big day!

New Pictures

Finally, recent pictures of our son. What a sweetie he is and how blessed we are to get such a perfect little guy! We cannot wait to meet him on July 14th. Natalie especially loves the picture of Nicolas picking the flowers because that is one of her favorite past times. Soon we will be posting pictures of all 4 of us.

How Big is he Really?!?

Yesterday we received a new medical update on Nicolas. He is 34 lbs and 40 in tall. Not too bad for a 3 yr old. He is 5 lbs heavier than Natalie and 1.5 in taller, so just about the same height and weight for being 10 months apart. At least we have a start on what size clothes to get him, so we are off to shop today. The rest of his medical was great. He is normal and healthy from all aspects. It said that he likes to ride a bike (with training wheels) and he loves to play with the other kids in the foster family and he loves to share his snacks. That's a good thing, because Natalie loves to share her snacks.

It won't be long until we have our son, and brother and sister will be together. I guess then the fun begins. :) Right!?!? Two is better than one . . . .isn't it?!?!? We can't wait!

We have our TA

We got the call today to say the we have our Travel Authority. We will be getting our son on July 14th, GOTCHA DAY 2009. The process is really quick. We are told we need to be there on 7/13 and we can head home on 7/16. Once we finalize travel we will let you know. Nicolas, here we come!!

How Our Journey Began

I wanted to add a post to let you know how this journey started. We adopted our beautiful daughter Natalie from Jiangxi, China in 2005 and had one of the best experiences of our life. After completing an adoption you have to wait 1 year before you start the process again. That was a good time frame for us because we wanted to make sure that was what we wanted to do again. Before the year was up, we decided that was the route we were going again because we didn't want Natalie to be an only child. We put our paperwork in the China chase and we were logged in on 1/31/07. But the wait kept getting longer and longer and we weren't getting any younger so we decided to start looking on the waiting children sites. In July 2008, within weeks of asking for any listing, our Agency sent us a couple of boys to review. One had more SN than what we were ready for and the other one didn't have any. Besides the fact that he also had some similarity features like Natalie we were smitten. This little boy was from Taiwan, an island off the coast of China. Taiwan's process is a little different from the China process, which, to our surprise, was less painful. We submitted our name in August 2008, sent a letter to the mother and some pictures and waited for the mother to choose. On Sept 30, 2008, we got the call. We were chosen to be Chia-En's parents. We were over the moon with excitement. At that time, we were told the process would be 4-6 months. Needless to say, here we are 9 months later and we still don't have our precious son. BUT, we are much closer and we have learned that waiting is not necessarily a bad thing. And hopefully, as you can see from earlier posts, we will get our TA this week.

Baby Pictures

Here is our son when he was a baby. We were fortunate enough to get these pictures in January. Isn't he the cutest?? Hopefully, we will get some 3 yr old pictures before we go get him.