Two weeks to go...

We have two weeks left here in Japan! We are so happy and excited to get back to the States and get ready to bring Sydney home.

We FINALLY received our I-171H notice of extension letter today from USCIS after 7 months! We need to have this to bring Sydney home from Taiwan. Living overseas means we have to use an overseas USCIS field office. The initial application in 2007 went through the office in Hong Kong, and it went pretty fast, only took about 3 months. That office closed since then and we had to go through the Bangkok, Thailand office for our extension. We applied for it at the end of November and it took them this long to process our request. We had to resubmit EVERYTHING, too! Anyway, that is all over now and we just have to make sure AIT has our information.

I mailed out our second and final care package to St. Lucy's for Sydney today. I think have we sent enough stuff in these two packages. We are not restricted to a one gallon bag like some families from other agencies were, so I just packed everything into a small box, as our program coordinator said that would be ok. So far we have sent two small photo albums, some clothes and socks, bib with an attached pacifier, two rattles, an Oobie and a stuffed animal. I think she is good to go for a while!

We have not heard anything on our court process yet, which means there have not been any issues to report. Our dossier left for Taiwan on May 18th and should have been logged into court sometime in the last week of May, so it has probably been 5 weeks or so now that it has been in process. We are hoping to hear something by the end of July about our first ruling. Cross your fingers for us!

Tokyo Trip

We went to Tokyo for a short holiday this past weekend. We figured we could not leave Japan without visiting Tokyo and we had to have one last vacation before Sydney comes home. We love to travel and usually take a trip somewhere once a year. We realize we won't be doing that for some time :) We decided our next big trip will be either back to Australia or a Caribbean Disney cruise, depending on where are stationed in 5 years.

We had a great time. Tokyo is definitely crowded, but it was very clean and it was easy to find our way around. The Japanese are very gracious and patient with us foreigners. They are polite and respectful of personal space-which is not an easy task in one of the most populated cities in the world. I have to say that I don't think I was pushed once, something I can't say for Londoners. It was kind of a bittersweet trip because we had planned on going before we moved back to the States, so this trip really meant our time in Japan has come to an end. As much as I can't wait to get back to the U.S. there have been some nice things about living in Japan which we will miss. Things like heated toilet seats and awesome 100 Yen stores!

I have been working with the website Picnik to make some really cute collages. Almost all of the pictures of Sydney that I have put on the blog have been done at www.picnik.com. They have more than just baby ones too ;). I highly recommend it if you would like to put together some really quick, easy and good looking photo collages. You can do really cool picture editing as well.

June update

We received our monthly update today. Sydney is growing wonderfully and becoming really beautiful (in our humble opinion)! She is almost 26 inches tall, weighs 15 pounds and her head is 16 inches. She is starting to learn to eat solids and has been practicing creeping around on her tummy. We sent a care package to her about a week and a half ago, but she doesn't have anything from it in the photos. Maybe the next photos will show something we sent her. Hopefully she gets it, but I won't worry about it too much.

It is so amazing to look at her photos and think "that is our daughter!". We are so happy that our long, long wait led us to her. It was definitely worth it. We have not heard anything as far as the court process goes, but I think that is normal at this stage. Hopefully the process does not go too fast though (??!!) because we just sent all her nursery stuff to Maryland yesterday in our first shipment before we move! We send everything else on the 22nd and leave Japan on July 10th. Ugh...then comes another homestudy update. Oh well, we do what we have to for our little ones, right? We just have to remember that all the hurdles and difficulties we go through make the results all the more special.