New Pictures!

I just love being part of the Yahoo Chat Group for those adopting from Zhongshan (the orphanage Brayden is at)! I get to follow other family's journey to adopt their children at the same orphanage, find families who are adopting Brayden's friends, see pictures, and make new friends. One lady, Gretchen, is there right now bringing home their daugher Makinley. Today she visited Z (as we call it) and took pictures of all the children waiting for their families to come and bring them home. Because she was able to fit the visit into her schedule, we were able to get a couple new pictures of Brayden. He has the hood on his head and looks very happy. In the second picture, the boy he has his arm around, I met his mom on the chat group. She lives in Washington but has also lived in Tulare when she was younger! How crazy! She has 2 biological children and has adopted a girl from China in 2008 (the same year we adopted Kennedi). Anyway, it looks like the boys have a great friendship and since we don't live too far from each other, the boys can stay in contact with one another!

We Have a Home Study and a Name!

We finally received word today that our home study is officially complete! With all the holidays and people being "out of the office", it really held things up a bit. Unfortunately this caused us to not meet the December 31st deadline for the Show Hope grant. I was really hoping to meet this deadline because Show Hope has a long process and wait time before you hear anything back from them. We can however still apply and their next deadline is February 28th; then it takes 90 days after the deadline date to hear anything back. That will put us at the end of May before hearing anything from them. With the other organization we are applying to however, JSC Foundation, there is no deadline date and you hear back within 3 weeks. We will mail our application tomorrow. I have heard quite a few people have received good size grants from this organization so you can be praying for this over the next 3 weeks if you think about us.

Now on to the second half of this post title...we have finally settled on a name. Some of you may think we are crazy with the whole name specifics. Honestly we did not plan the whole 7 letter name thing when we named Katelyn and Bradley, it just turned out that way. So when we added Kennedi to the family, we figured we needed to keep the tradition going, and we can't stop with her. We had many suggestions of 7 letter B names for Zhong Yong but we kept going back to Brayden every time. Plus it sounds best with Yong. So his name will be Brayden Yong Salvador. Hope he likes it.

So with our homestudy done, the next step is to have everything certified by the state and then authenticated. We also apply to homeland security for the right to adopt internationally. This is all government stuff and so the timeframe for this part of the process is always up in the air and sometimes frustrating. Best estimate would be mid-March and then all this paperwork heads to China for their official approval. As long as we keep moving forward...it's all good. :)