Consulate Date? Check. Plane Tickets? Check.

I feel like a Mastercard Commercial:

Four new passports- $$$
Chinese visas- $$$$
Six plane tickets to the Yunnan Province- $$$$$
A family photo on Gotcha' Day with all five of our children- PRICELESS.

At least that's what I keep telling myself. Otherwise I'd hyperventilate.

On July 1st I saw our little boy's sweet face for the first time. I gasped, just as I did when I first laid eyes on Cholita. The difference was, with Cholita we were actually planning an adoption. With Yun Xi, there was no plan at all. I saw his picture by chance, on a website visited by hundreds of people every day. Through an amazing series of events, we were able to lock his file. And then, naturally, I panicked.

Excluding the time when I went to the store to buy dog food and came home with a miniature dachshund puppy, we are not impulsive people. Cholita's adoption was literally years in the making. We had planned. We had saved. We had already finished our paperwork. None of that had happened when we said YES to adopting Yun Xi. And yet, in those early days, we were blessed with so many signs affirming that we had made the right choice. When I worried about adopting a boy who would be nearly 4 years old, I met a man at my kid's swim lessons who introduced me to his delightful six-year-old son who had been adopted from Yun Xi's province only two years before. When I worried about money, somehow every time we needed it, the funds were there. When I worried that I didn't really know him, I got an e-mail from someone who had met him in China. "He's such a good boy," they said. When I found out he hadn't been in foster care as I'd assumed and worried that he'd have no concept of family, I met his "big sister", who had loved him in the orphanage from the time he was a baby.

Nearly eight months ago we submitted our letter of intent to adopt Yun Xi, looked at our calendar, and thought, "Wouldn't it be perfect if we could travel over Spring Break and bring the whole family?" I even wrote down our ideal travel dates and circled March 28th as our Gotcha' Day. Looking at averages, we knew that was unlikely. Looking at the averages, it would most likely be summer. But when I planted daffodil bulbs in September, I did it to welcome our boy home in the spring.

Well guess what? We'll be meeting our little boy on March 28th. The whole entire family will be all together in our baby's birthplace--Kunming--otherwise known as The City of Eternal Spring. I'd say it was meant to be.