McKenna Family

The waiting is over. Heidi called from WACAP and the dossier was sent today! Yea! Now we wait 2-4 weeks for our log in date. It seems like we do a lot of waiting. Hurry up and wait I guess is the theme going on. But each little step gives us encouragement and hope. Each time we move to the next stage, we feel renewed and strengthened. It would be a much longer wait, if we didn't have these little accomplishments to look forward to every couple of months. Russel and I went to the temple today and it's an amazing feeling to put our sweet little girl's name on the prayer roll and know that there will be many people praying for her along with us. We know he's watching over her which is what we hold on to through all of this.

It's been a long 3-1/2 weeks waiting for our dossier to be sent to China. We thought it would have been sent sooner but the agency is saying probably sometime this week. We are anxious to hear from them in the next day or two. The kids have just been amazing with the whole process. They are being patient even though they just want their little sister here now. Nick said the other day, "I just want Meili for Christmas, nothing else....hmm actually I just want Meili for my birthday." I was thinking oh wow, i hope we have her before then so we talked a little about how cool it would be if we could get her sooner. Then Nick got so excited thinking about Halloween and what she could dress up as. They just love her completely. At school the other day, a friend asked Abi how many siblings she had. She said "I have 3 brothers and 1 sister." Someone said "hey, she's not your sister yet." Abi told me it didn't really matter that legally she w...

YEA!!!! Today we got our I-800 approval. We couldn't be happier. We were really crossing our fingers that we would have it by mid February so this was an awesome surprise. Now we can submit our dossier to China. Hopefully the agency will be quick about that. Then it will take a couple of weeks (again hopeful) to get our log in date (LID). The LID is what everything is based on so we will be thrilled to get to that point. Meili, we are coming!! We are just anxious to get her. We know our prayers are being answered. And we know the Lord will help us get her exactly when we are supposed to. Lots of jumping up and down today!!

Today we received our notice for our fingerprint appointment. We are very excited and hope things continue to move smoothly. We are scheduled for January 29 at 9:00. We have seen some people wait up to a couple of months after fingerprints have been done to get the USCIS approval and then we saw a blog that showed a family got their approval just 10 days after their fingerprint appointment. We, of course, are hoping we get the second scenario. If we can get our approval by mid February and get our dossier to china by beginning of March, we should be at least still kind of on track to hopefully travel in August. We have also decided to change the spelling AGAIN on her name. We decided we really like Meili. So until further notice, our little angel will be Meili. We just miss her already so much. We have been getting her room ready which has been fun. We put the little boys together and they are loving the bunk bed arrangement and it's been fun to find girly things to deco...

I decided it was time to start a blog. I am not great at keeping a journal and these last few months have been truly amazing and need to be documented before I forget all the wonderful blessings and miracles that we have seen. Before I continue with our story, I want to rewind a little bit to give you a background of our experience over the last two years. We have felt like we wanted to add another child to our family and have prayed several times over the last couple of years. We prayed, fasted, and went to the temple many times but each time, the answer was no. We didn't feel like it was a "no, you are done with your family," we just felt like it wasn't the right time. I had some health problems going on and we felt like maybe we needed to get to the bottom of those first....then it would be right. So as we finally got those worked out, we prayed and attended the temple again....but once more, the answer was "no, not now." We just couldn't figur...