Since I last wrote, we had Bethany's 2nd birthday party - we had one on her actual birthday with family, and then one a week later with 3 of her friends (plus their parents). We decided to keep them separate as she doesn't like big crowds of people, and she seemed to enjoy them both.
My birthday was a bit quieter - we had lunch at Mum's (combined with Mum's birthday lunch too!) and then Jerome and I went to the movies while Bethany slept in the afternoon at Mum's. That makes 2 times to the movies this year!!
In October we went on a camp with the parent support group Families with Children from China (FCC) to Philip Island. It was a good chance to meet others who had already adopted from China and make some new friends. We also got to see the penguin parade, which Bethany loved. All the penguins were called Mumble (from the movie Happy Feet) and she wanted to invite them all into the gift shop later (she kept saying "come, come" to the penguins whose nests were up near the shop).
In relation to our adoption process, we finally received our draft report back from the Department of Human Services (DHS) last week. We have written our comments and given it back to them, and we should receive the final report back within 2 weeks. (We were approved by the way!) At that point we will also receive a list of all the things we have to get ready to send with our file to China (updated financial records, medicals, birth certificates, etc etc).
We may still get our file to China before Christmas, but it depends on if a batch of files is ready to go. All files are sent to China in batches of around 5-6 files, so if DHS already as 4 files when we get our paperwork to them, then it will probably go straight away. But if we've just missed a batch, then we may have to wait awhile until a few other files are ready to go.
Home Page