TA and Living in Denial

Travel Approval. I'm not sure exactly why, I suppose it has to do with the whole Communist nation thing but before you can travel to China they have to give you approval to travel. So that's another set of initials us crazies who wait and wait and wait to actually go and get our adopted children blog about and make excited phone calls over.

We also use everyone else's timeline of events to gauge our own. Miraculously, in our sleepy burg of Hays there are two other couples also going through the same process of adopting from China. The whole trip takes a good year from starting the paperwork to actually traveling. All three couples are within a month of each other in the time frame pipeline. All three couples are tied to the hospital as some source of income. None of us knew each other beyond names/faces until just a couple months ago. We'd be telling someone our story and they would say there's another couple who just told them the same thing. So, now we get together every week and wait together. It certainly passes the time. And I'm excited that each of our daughters will be living and growing up with two other kids who have the same story as theirs (which is remarkable for the fairly homogeneous place Hays is).

Now to my point. Couple number one just called to tell us they received their travel approval to go to China. They expect this means they will be heading over there on May 7. They'll be there two weeks. So, by the end of May there will be one more person coming to our weekly get togethers. Couple number two should have their referral pics in hand before couple number one leaves. And all of this increasingly freaks me out. Baby Joy has been a concept for months. A concept that has been fairly easy to keep removed from my current reality. This mental floor exercise was less easy when the wife was pregnant with the boy. But as our friends all jump out of the plane ahead of us (figuratively speaking of course and let me apologize for mixing so many metaphors but it does emphasize the point I'm trying to make - I'm going crazy and you all keep coming back for show!) my pulse quickens and palms get sweaty. I have this mixture of joy and panic as I share the thrill they must feel but reality hitting home with me can be a bit much. I mean, little girl clothes cause my heart to murmur. So, I will try to live in denial for as long as possible.