Official Update from Sarah's Orphanage and LOA!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! I feel like I might have a little bit of the luck of the Irish with me today because we received some new pictures of our cutie patootie this morning, and the answers to our five questions. They answered every single question. That is amazing!

I feel like I know just a little bit more about our sweet little girl. We know her finding spot now, we know she has never been hospitalized, we know that she sucks her thumb (so cute!), we know that she loves all of her nannies and she has a best friend.

Every single thing I learn about our Sarah is a blessing and a gift. Can I say how happy I am that we are finally on the countdown to China?! I realized today that I do not have one item of clothing for our girl. Lucky for me, this is a challenge I am definitely willing and excited to take on!

Can you stand how cute this girl is? - Even with the dirty clothes.

Love how the other girl is in focus and Sarah is blurry - oh well, so happy to have the smiling picture!

UPDATE:

This has been an amazing day. Around 5pm we got notification that we are LOA now. Things are starting to move!!!!!!

Soft LOA!

We received a soft LOA yesterday, or an electronic LOA. That took 55 days. Hooray! (Our wait for John was 114 days.) That means 10-14 weeks until we are getting our little Henan cutie. I sent the next step of paperwork in to my adoption agency so that as soon as they get the hard copy, we can really get things moving quickly. When we adopted John we never heard of a soft LOA, so I am excited but still a little unsure of exactly what that means. We are so excited to be able to say more definitively now that we will be traveling somewhere between May and July.

Our agency will ask Sarah's orphanage 5 questions from us. I keep wondering what to ask. The questions I want to know, I don't think anyone will be able to answer, and most of what we were told about John ended up not being true with us at all (not that they were untrue before us, but once he came into our family he threw everything  he knew out the window). So ...  I'm thinking about asking these questions:

1. Where was she found? (We knew this with John but not with Sarah).
2. Has she ever been hospitalized? (We found out with John that he had been hospitalized a lot)
3. Who is her favorite nanny?(I want to know the names of those that loved her in China)
4. Does she have a favorite sleeping item?
5. Does she have a really close friend?

If anyone can think of something better to ask, please let me know. All adoptive parents - especially when adopting from China - want to be able to piece as much of their child's life together as possible. The trick is no one really knows, so finding out any information about our children's lives before us is priceless.

Pictures of Our Sarah!

Another new friend took these pictures of our Sarah. It feels like it has been forever since we have seen her or had an update. This brings some peace to my heart. She is 19 months old and growing up through pictures so quickly. What a great way to start our day!