17 months old today!

Happy 17 month old birthday, Hannah En Ming! With any luck, we'll be seeing you right after you are 18 months old! Well, the past week has gone pretty quickly. Riley finished kindergarten and exited her school proudly carrying her "Perfect Attendance" certificate high over her head! We are very lucky to have such a healthy and determined child. She found out that her 1st grade teacher will be Mrs. Conley and her report card was stellar. We're extremely proud. Riley also had her big ballet recital at the Paramount Theatre in Middletown and did a great job as a "Broadway Baby". Yesterday, Riley and I headed to the Build-a-Bear Workshop to make a brand new stuffed animal for Hannah. Riley chose a purple and blue hippo which she named Ming Ming. She also generously purchased matching fairy outfits for her own "I love you" bear and Hannah's hippo. Very cute. Today we spent the 97 degree day swimming at the lake with friends, which was the right call! Rob is busily working on "Spiderman", "Meet Me in St. Louis" and a play in Massachusetts all at the same time. So, business as usual for him. I am loving the fact that Riley have little to no obligations right now and am simply trying to go with the flow. So far, so good. I do, of course, have that tiny bit of anxiety about my baby waiting for me in China always in my subconscious, though, so I think I won't truly be at peace until I've got her. I shall post again when we finally get Hannah's translated referral.

Pictures of Hannah's orphanage

Hi! My very dear friend Lisa has done some wonderful investigative internet work and found a site that has some good pictures of the Dongguan CWI. So, if you're interested, you can go there and see where our Hannah is right now. The site is a few years old but you do get a sense of the place from the pictures. Go to www.myadoptionwebsite.com/ourkaty and click the bottom yellow bar, then "trip to China", then "September 16" and all the pictures will come up. No word yet on travel approval but we don't expect to hear until July. Riley and I did some shopping for Hannah En Ming at BabyGap yesterday before her piano lesson and got the cutest swimsuit, dress and a pink onesie with "Unforgettable" printed on it (too perfect - Ming means unforgettable!) Riley was intrigued by the concept of onesies. The bedroom is coming along - furniture is moving, clothes are being set aside in the 12-24 mos size range and the booster seat is already in place at the kitchen table. Very exciting. I probably won't be able to post again until next week because of Riley's big ballet recitals this weekend and the dress rehearsals leading up to them, so Happy Start of Summer and here's hoping the next 6 weeks fly by!!!

Hannah in full color

Happy Father's Day!!!! Here are the full color amazing photos of adorable Hannah En Ming! We enjoyed a wonderful Dad's Day showing off our new baby girl's pix at church and at Katie's cousin's BBQ. It's so fantastic to see how excited everyone is about the new member of the family! Still no word on travel dates but this week we tackle the "making room for the baby" project in Riley's room. Should be very interesting. So far, Riles has been very accommodating. She even took her beloved racecar track apart yesterday so there will be space for the crib. What a good sister. Well, we'll write more soon. Enjoy the cutie.

What a week!

Well, I think the Bissingers have finally come down(somewhat) off our collective "Hannah high"! What a crazy emotional week since we got the big news!! Rob promised to scan the color photos of Miss Hannah En Ming at work today so that we can post then here. He has been extremely busy with "Pirates!" opening at Paper Mill Playhouse and continued work on "Spiderman". It's looking good that he will be free to travel in August, though, which is fantastic. Katie is wrapping up all her dance classes following a great couple of recitals and looking forward to only working weekends at Cathryn's for a while. Riley has checked off recitals for piano, tap, and musical theatre. She has her gymnastics show on Saturday and her ballet recitals next weekend. All this and she just lost her first tooth! The Tooth Fairy was very generous with an Abe Lincoln bill. Rob and I seem to recall only getting a quarter but I guess inflation is at play. We are now hoping for an August 1 departure date for China which would give us only 48 more days to wait. 7 weeks to prepare for a toddler in the house - I can absolutely manage that! I have to admit that I have already ordered dipes & wipes, bought some cute clothes at Target and pulled out the Riley hand-me-downs from storage to go through. It's hard to hold back now. I also found some pictures of Hannah's CWI(orphanage) on the internet. I'll try to post those with her color pix.

WE ACCEPT!

Well, we went to our travel meeting on Saturday and met one of our facilitators in China - Grace Chang- and also many of the couples that we'll be traveling with to China. It was a chaotic, emotional, highly charged meeting to say the least but clearly everyone was in a joyous daze. It was so exciting to see everyone else's baby pix and the ages ranged from 7 months to 2 1/2 years! We were surprised to find out that our travel group received referrals from 3 different provinces! So we are all going to fly to Hong Kong together in August(hopefully the first week) and then split up into 3 groups to go claim our babies!! Our province, Guangdong, has 3 or4 other couples traveling together - Amazingly, another couple's referral picture showed their daughter Lily wearing the exact same outfit as our Hannah! Clearly they are friends who share each other's clothes. :) We did hear ominous news that Guangdong may be soon requiring adoptive parents to stay in country for 3 weeks instead of 2. This would be particularly sad for Riley who is going to be very eager to meet her new sister and probably will not want to wait an extra week. Hopefully, this will not transpire. The best news of the whole meeting for us (besides getting Hannah's photos in full color - will post soon) was finding out that we are going to be staying at the "White Swan" hotel in Guangzhou for all but one night that we are in China! This is great because it is usually the "4 star treat" that adoptive parents get at the end of their trip to China but since our Miss Hannah En Ming lives in Guandong, we get to be there the whole time!! She's bringing us good luck already!! Grace Chang also informed us that Hannah's favorite toy is a jingle bell, she enjoys walking around in walkers, and LOVES TO EAT!!! She is most certainly not a picky eater as her favorite foods are chopped meat,rice, eggs, chicken,vegetables and fruit. Is there anything left? Grace told us to stock the fridge before she gets home! We're thrilled. She is so perfect! I am still walking around on air and can't really focus on anything but Hannah and China. Rob and I made a first attempt at learning Cantonese and we are pitiful but to be fair it's REALLY hard. We plan to learn "I can't understand you" and probably use that more often than not. Well, about 7 more weeks and we'll be on a plane. Unreal and so exciting! Please pray that our "travel approvals" come through quickly. We are psyched!!

More details

I did some research on the Chinese characters of Hannah's name and discovered that En Ming(that's her middle and first name respectively) means unforgettable kindness. How completely perfect! So, we're thinking that her name will be Hannah En Ming Bissinger. I am still on cloud 9 today. Rob is at a Father's Day Tea at Riley's kindergarten and I can't stop staring at Hannah's pictures. We are all blown away by how amazing life can be. We are off to Pennsylvania tomorrow to our agency for a travel meeting. We will meet the 20 other couples that we'll be traveling with to China. Just a tip - don't book any flights from Guangzhou to Newark any time in August. 20 babies on their first plane trip - makes you want to run right out and adopt, doesn't it? :)

IT'S A GIRL!!!!

Introducing the newest member of the Bissinger family - Hannah!!!




Her Chinese name is Guan En Ming, her birthday is January 26th,2006, so she is a little over 16 months old and she is currently at the Dongguan Children's Welfare Institute(an orphanage) in Guangdong Province. We hope to go get her in late July/early August and bring her home to Cold Spring! We waited 19 months to the day from our log in date in China and wow is she worth it!!! We are in love!!!! Enjoy the adorable photos!

Any minute now....

Hey everybody! I can't believe I actually created our own blog. See what you can do when you're forced to sit at a computer anxiously waiting for an email from your adoption agency? That's right - we got "THE CALL" yesterday at 12:45 PM letting us know that we received a referral!!! Trouble is we haven't seen any specific info about our new baby yet and I am LOSING MY MIND!!! Rob is insanely happy and I feel like I just gave birth and the nurses ran out of the room with my child before I could see him/her!!! I don't think that I have ever been this anxious in my life. I thought callbacks for Broadway shows were stressful - I was wrong. I've created this blog so we can get all the info out to all our family and friends quickly. Cross your fingers that it happens today. The email should arrive today and the Fedex package with all of the baby's info should arrive tomorrow. I'm so excited that we will finally be a family of four!!!

Katie