Ding! You are now free to move about the country

Wednesday was pretty quiet. We were scheduled to have our visa interview at the US Embassay for Maia. Although we have adopted her she is still a Vietnamese citizen at this point and needs a visa to enter the US. We decided to do a little shopping before our appointment and started the day with a little breakfast at Highland Coffee. Maia enjoyed some watermelon. The waitresses there love her and we have yet to make it through a meal without one of them coming up and borrowing her for a while. It still amazes Laurie and I how well these little children adapt to their adoptive parents and still remain extremely social in the process. We knew we had to be out this afternoon, and I stayed in with her to nap while Laurie did a little shopping. She found Maia a cute little elephant with a straw hat. Maia woke up and hugged it right away. She wanted to take it with us to the embassay.

We went with the Schellhorn family and little Emma to the Embassay. This is our last appointment in Hanoi before we are cleared to leave the country. Emma is actually older than Maia. Her birthday is January 15, Maia birth certificate is February 19. Go figure.

We were a little nervous about the interview. Turns out once we were in they processed our form and we paid and waited for our interview. The nice young man called our name and we approached the window. His first question was a dueszy. "Do you swear everything on this form is true to the best of your knowledge?" The second was even worse. "Can you sign here?" He then stated "Come back after 4pm for her Visa, thank you".

Wow! just like that we were done. Maia is ours to bring home, we have permission to let her leave the country and Uncle Sam has given her the ok to come hom to our country.And come home we are.

We left the Embassay, headed over to EVA Airlines to make sure our flight had been changed, got our confirmation. We get to leave on Friday and travel back in time. We leave Taipei at 6pm Friday and arrive in LA at 1:30 pm Friday four hours earlier after spending 11 hours in the air. We have to layover overnight in LA. but land at O'hare around noon on Saturday. After getting our flight straight we headed back to the Hotel to wait for Plan to drop off our daughters visa.

Dinner at Al Fresco's again landed us next to a table with three families who were also adopting. It has been wonderful crossing paths with so many other families going through this wonderful but difficult experience.

It took me 2 hours of rocking to get Maia asleep enough to lie her down in her crib. She was tired, but she had her own dad to take care of her.