3/16/08

Hello everyone, thanks for checking in! Today was a great day. We started by attending a church service at the Beijing International Church Fellowship. It was amazing to be able to come together with so many other people to worship and praise God! The service was for 'foreigners' only, so you had to bring your passport, but the theater was packed, I'd say close to 500 people in all. It was a bilingual service, so we sung songs in both English and Mandarin. The most amazing moment for me was listening to hundreds of people around me singing "How Great is Our God" in two languages...it was encouraging and brought hope to our group.

Next, we checked out of our hotel and visited a pearl factory. It was basically a five story shopping mall with a very famous pearl shop. I didn't buy anything there, but did find a strange little souvenier that I couldn't pass up. It was a little brass turtle with 4 baby turtles, all kind of stacked together. Hard to visualize, I know, but was meaningful to me as tomorrow, I'll have 4 babies...how amazing is that?

For lunch we had a wonderful Beijing Roast duck. It was delicious and great to just enjoy each other's company for a couple more hours. After lunch, we headed to the Beijing airport. Four families (including ours) boarded our flight to Chengdu, while the other families headed out to their various provinces. It was hard to believe that when we come together next Friday, we'll all have our babies (finally!). Many of you may have heard about the terrorist threat that occured in China last week. Rest assured, we are just fine. This only created mass airport chaos as officials tighten security, and long lines of angry folks who aren't used to these measures. We kept our eye on the future though---it's not about the inconveniences, it's about completing our journey to Leila Grace.

So tomorrow....Gotcha Day! I'm nervous, excited, ready to go. We are told we'll leave the hotel at 8:30am and head to Leila's orphanage. Out of the four couples in our group, three of us will get our girls at the orphanage, and the other will travel to the Civil Affairs office as their baby girl is in foster care. Of us three, only Jason and I are already parents. The others are our now good friends Elissa and Kyle from San Antonio, adopting Lily and Jeannie from Charlotte, NC adopting Riley. Should be an eventful day, to be sure...keep checking in!

Love,
Alissa