Here is our correspondence from the beginning of our trip. You will notice the tone change on later posts.

"We are really enjoying Vietnam and also the company of Susan and her mom Faye. I know it is almost midnight your time, so I don't expect an answer till tomorrow. By then I might have the answer from Anna, but please reply anyway, just in case we still have not heard from her.

Neither Susan nor we have heard from Anna yet. Don't worry; none of us is panicking or getting frustrated -- just as you advised. We've been following all your advice so far (taking taxis from the airport when we weren't met, or in Susan's case, getting a ride from a friend who lives in Vietnam; resting, relaxing, locating the shopping malls, and exploring the area around the hotel, etc.) What we'd like to know is if we can expect to hear from Anna before the day we will go to Vung Tau. Since it is nearly noon here, and since it is a two hour ride to Vung Tau, we are starting to think we won't go today (February 22nd). Do you know what adoptive families have generally experienced? Do you know what time of day she is likely to call on the first day we hear from her? Today, since you indicated we would hear from her, we are hanging close to the hotel just as you advised, but we are wondering if we haven't heard from her by 1:00 or 2:00pm if we can risk leaving the hotel to see some sites. We absolutely don't want to miss her call because we don't want to miss our chance to go to Vung Tau. What do you advise? For now we'll stay in the hotel and wait to hear.

By the way I promise you I'm not asking you to try to "make things happen" from the States. I'm not worried about that -- I know things will happen when they happen, and I am surprisingly comfortable with that. I just want to know if I can go see the War Crimes Museum or the Cathedral without missing the chance to meet my daughter. You know which one is more important to me, of course.

We are definitely enjoying ourselves and taking lots of pictures. This is a great country!"

I just wanted to send a quick note that we arrived in Vietnam after 28 hours of travel. It is HOT! We are having a lot of fun. We've been shopping and exploring and taking pictures like crazy. Tomorrow, we get Lily. We are pretty excited. I will write more soon.

We are off to try to get a picture of a whole family on a moped. Most people drive mopeds here instead of cars. You see whole families (mom, dad, three kids) on one. We haven't captured this on film yet, but I'm determined.

More homemade Photography. We will get back to the stories...eventually.

Back home

Lily is home from Veitnam and we are resting up before going back to work. We have lots more cute pictures like this on the way.

Why is my towel always out of reach when I need it?

So the travel date came sooner than we expected and with a shorter notice than we planned for. We got the word Friday that we needed to fly to Vietnam on the following weekend. I begin to realize I don't have all my things together. I haven't gotten any bottles! I haven't finished reading the 6-12 month chapter in the parenting book I got a few weeks ago! Some of my vaccinations aren't scheduled till after that! My FMLA isn't approved to start till later! How am I supposed to have documentation of the adoption before I can travel to DO the adoption! I have to go get some special bug repellent to prevent "dengue fever" or some other scary hemorrhagic fever type thing my doctor says I can get from the "day-time biting mosquitoes" or the other thing from the "night biting mosquitoes"! The bugs are working in shifts to get me! 32 hours of flights to get there! Tickets cost WHAT! It rains how many inches there? What do you mean FEET not inches! IPhone wont be out for 6 months! My name isn't Luke and I'm certain your not my father! Where is that towel? Get me some duct tape stat to keep it around my head for the next 18 years...

Recreating paperwork

There are tremendous amounts of paperwork to get for an adoption in order to create a dossier. I'll post more on that later. Most of it requires official originals, which must be notarized. These must then be taken to the Secretary of State to receive an official appostille, meaning the Secretary of State certifies that the notary is valid. Once that is complete, all of this is mailed to the Vietnamese embassy to have them authenticate the Secretary of State's stamp. Once this giant stack of paperwork is sent back, you send it to your adoption agency, and it goes off to Vietnam. In theory if all was fine with said dossier, we should have had our referral and been to and from Vietnam before Tet week (which starts Feb 17). However after all of this stamping and authenticating, and after checking multiple times, our I-171H form "didn't arrive." (The I-171H form is yet another story). I personally don't believe this as I have 5 copies of the dossier that were made at Fedex/Kinko's right before I stuffed the mailer with the dossier. The adoption agency received the dossier. Their Vietnam counterparts recieved it. The orphanage received it, and we received our referral. But at the last minute the document suddenly "didn't arrive." Since they received every other document, and all the documents travelled in a bundle, this sounds like lost-in-process to me. Nevertheless it's not to be found. So we have had to repeat the notarization, apostille, and authentication process for this document. We needed to send updated medicals (getting those are their own story) and criminal-records-statement from the local chief of police (the easiest part to get by far), so we would have repeated this chase of notarizations, certifications, and authentications anyway, but still it was frustrating to lose this document. Its loss means we probably won't travel till March, rather than February. This week I got a certified copy of the original, notarized it, and apostilled it, and tomorrow I will FedEx it so that we can finally get our travel date assigned. We think 3-4 weeks, and we'll have this. I'm going to encourage Julia to post a story about our freaking out about taking care of a baby once we realized "What do we know about taking care of a baby!" or maybe "The reason to NEVER use a UPS store to overnight anything critical."

The Beginning

Two weeks ago on Dec 18, 2006, we received our referral for adoption. Here, we are going to tell the details of how we got to this point and what it was like going through this process. There will be more to come, and in 3 months we expect to travel to bring Lillian Grace Thuy-Van home with us. So be patient while we learn how to put this up here in a sensible form. In the mean time here is a picture of Lily.