Last Day - Returning Home

Well, mission accomplished. Today we went, along with probably 50-75 other families, to the U.S. Consulate and gave our oath that the information we supplied was true and thereby, received a single entry USA travel visa for Emily on her Chinese passport. Her Chinese passport is under her name given at the orphanage, Wei Ming Su. After 45 days, we should receive her certificate of citizenship for the U.S.A. and with that apply for her social security card and U.S. passport. All of this under her new name Emily Mei Snyder.

Today was quite quick and painless, aside from the bus ride over there and herding everyone up 5 stories.

We took it easy today and we're all packed ready to come home. We're actually waking up in the morning 5 a.m. local time, eating breakfast and leaving for the airport around 7 a.m. We're taking a flight from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, then to San Francisco (this is the rough leg), and finally back to DFW, arriving around 4 p.m. CST. So, while you're sleeping tonight, we'll be on a jet plane. And man, do I ever hope we're sleeping too.

I want to remind you of the photos I uploaded yesterday at http://www.flickr.com/johnnysnyder. There are over 2000 for this trip alone. Also, you might be interested to know that we had around 500 different people to view the blog with over 1300 different visits altogether. So that averages over 2 visits to the blog per person (computer). We realize there are many households that have more than one person reading.

Also, I want to thank everyone for posting comments. We had fun keeping in touch with you by this means and really appreciate the encouragement given.

I'm sure I will give an update upon our return home.

There's a couple of stories that I've wanted to convey to you in the blog along the way and I, for whatever reason, keep forgetting to post it at the time. Anyway, at this point, I can only remember one of them and think it's a little amusing.

The other day when we had to take Emily, along with other adopted children, to the clinic for the routine exam in applying for the visa, we were waiting outside the clinic for a moment and an adopted young boy, with his new parents had pulled up the zipper on his jacket and the folds of the skin on his neck had become stuck in the zipper. Well, as you can imagine, there was a little panic, not much, but a little. It's not every day you get your skin stuck in a zipper. Anyway, in it all several of us came over to offer some assistance and in it all and me trying to offer a calm word to the situation blurted out, "oh, it's probably worse than it looks." The adopting mother stopped, turned and just looked at me. I did not immediately realize what I had actually done in saying completely opposite of what I had intended on saying. Well, to say the least, after all of the humiliation had passed, we had a good laugh about it. Oh, and the boy was fine, without a scratch.

Seeing as though we're getting up early, I better get to sleep.