Oh.my.goodness -- LSC!!!

I honestly cannot believe that I am writing this post!! If you would have told me that we would receive our LSC (approval to travel to China) only six weeks after receiving our referral, I would have said that you were crazy! But -- the miracle of a quick approval happened and we are so very happy!

Normally, the wait between referral and travel is about six months. With Maelyn's adoption, we waited just over seven months. So, you can imagine my total and utter shock when I came home from school on Tuesday, hit the play button on the answering machine and heard our agency coordinator's voice, congratulations us on some good news for our family.

My first thought? That we were able to get new pictures of our Ailee. I kept listening and almost fell off my chair when I heard that our LSC had arrived. In fact, I had to listen to the message once more, just to make sure I heard it right. Then, I went into shock. An all-over-body, hyperventilating, barely able to talk kind of shock.

I didn't even know what to do with myself. I walked aimlessly around the main floor muttering to myself and then somehow calmly told Maelyn that we would would be going to China soon to bring Ailee home. Maelyn was very happy and said, "One more sleep, Mama?" Ummm...no, not quite. :)

I then called Paul and shared the news -- and he was equally shocked. I called my mom to surprise her with the news that we would be leaving shortly and that she had better let her head nurse know so that she could get the time off to join us on the trip. My mom was very excited! I called a few of our adoption friends, including AM, who helped to calm me down a little. All I could think about was that I had just started teaching Kindergarten and now I was going to leave the students and be letting their families down, the fact that her room and any preparation for Ailee hadn't even been started, so on and so on. That night, I didn't even have the head space to think about all the positives of going early -- such as bringing Ailee home earlier!

That evening, Paul and I sat down to madly put together a list of things that we needed to get done and prioritized them in order of importance. That helped to calm us down a little.

The next day, Paul did a fantastic job of booking our tickets and we are now officially booked to leave on November 20th! We return to Canada on December 7th. Once our tickets were purchased, the entire situation felt more real to us and we began to get very excited about meeting our little girl in 10 short weeks!

Here we come, Ailee!