Our prayers have been answered

Today has been a great day.  Really great.  We got a phone call this afternoon telling us we received an adoption grant.  This grant has now put us over the hump for the last of the money needed to fund our adoptions.  Mike says that now I can relax and sleep at night.  That just shows what he knows......now I will lose sleep waiting to get Molly in my arms and make Zach our son forever.  The waiting is hard. 

Now I'm watching one of my favorite movies "The Blind Side".  I love Sandra Bullok's character Lou Ann Toulley.  Mike and I agree that she could be my sister, seperated at birth.  I just love her and my very favorite line of the whole movie, now that we are adopting, is when her friends tell her that she's changing "that boy's" life and she says "no, he's changing mine".  Amen to that,  we have been saying from the start that we need Zach as much as he needs us, and we are learning so much from him.

I've been running the numbers on our time line- the adoption agency gave us a handy dandy chart for this last part of our process, after our LOA (official approval from China to adopt).  From LOA it's about 3 weeks to our Provisional Approval (and it was three weeks exactly), then about 1 week to wire all our paperwork to the US National Visa Center in China (and it was 9 days),  then 3-4 weeks for the NVC to turn that Provisional Approval into our Article 5 (this is were we are now, today was 3 weeks, so we are waiting to hear this step is done), then we have 2-3 weeks for China to issue our Travel Approval.  We should travel within 2 weeks of getting our TA........... we could still make it home in time to register the kids for school the week before school starts..........Please, please, please........

We are still waiting for Zach's passport to come back to us.  We had to send it in to the Grace Children's Foundation for them to renew his medical visa.  Without that passport back, our travel date could be held up, since obviously he can't travel without it.  Again, please, please, please let that come back in time to not throw off our earliest possible travel date........