A little more about travel

We had our travel meeting with the agency Tuesday via: conference call along with 14 other families. We found out a bit more about our travel plans.

The next step in the process is that we will receive our "signing" date from the Vietnamese governement. The date refers to the date that we will have our Giving and Receiving Ceremony. This is the ceremony where the Vietnamese government "gives" you the child and where you "receive" the child. At this point, as far as the Vietnamese government is concerned, the adoption is final. This ceremony occurs the first full day we are in Vietnam. Once the Giving and Receiving date is assigned by the Vietnamese government our agency will contact us and we can start making our travel plans. We'll need to have visas issued, our airline and hotel arrangements made, etc.

We will be staying for two weeks in Ho Chi Minh City at the following hotel:

www.somersethochiminhcity.com

We'll have a two bed two bath apartment that is fully equipped with kitchen, laundry, etc. The hotel has a restaurant, a store, room service, laundry service, etc. The flight will take a long time, probably a minimum of 24 hours and it could be quite a bit longer depending on our route and layovers, etc.

Our flight will likely arrive late in the evening and then early the next morning we will go to the orphanage to pick up the girls. We'll then leave the orphanage to make a string of official appointments, all with the goal of having the passports ready as soon as possible. For most of the two weeks in Ho Chi Minh City we will be waiting around for the passports, so there will be tours organized for the adopting families to sightsee and learn as much about the culture as possible. Our agency has already warned us that families with twins often cannot get it together enough to make most of the tours, so we are setting the bar low on being able to do anything other than get a cup of coffee in the morning and calling in for room service. I would probably be content to hang by the pool, and the poolside lounge. Look on the website to see what I mean!

After we receive the girls passports we fly to Hanoi for our appointment with the US Embassy. We will be staying for about a week here:

www.sheraton.com.vn

You have to drill down into pictures to see that the hotel is actually waterfront on a beautiful large lake.

Both hotels look great and have alot of amenities that should make our life as easy as possible.

Overall timing still looks like we'll be leaving in two to three months, or the end of April into May, and that we'll be in the country for about three weeks.

We also found out that the girls are sleeping together in one crib right now, that they are very small so that we should plan on bringing 3-6 mos clothing, and that the orphanage that they are in is called Picasso because it was founded by the neice of Pablo Picasso.

Our facilitor, Sandy, who is beyond wonderful, knows our girls very well and assures us they are just adorable and in good health.

Thank you to all of our family and friends who have responded so wonderfully to our news. We are still reeling a little to try to get prepared for two instead of one, but it has been so heartening that so many of you are excited for us and can't wait to meet Maia and Ilona. They are lucky, as are we, to have such a loving family and group of friends.

I'll update as soon as we get more news. We've been hearing from a few of you that you'd like to see the site update more often so once I have any more shards of information I will pass them on in this site!

Love Tina