Allllmost leaving. Allllmost home.

We are supposed to travel about a month from today. If all goes as our agency expects, we'll need to be in her city (Wuhan) by Monday, August 18th to meet her. To take her with us. To start caring for her in person, with our actual hands and feet. It's like that part of a mega roller coaster where it's ratcheting up the hill, jerking and clicking along, building anticipation in the region of your lower abs.

I watch the videos on YouTube. Search "China Gotcha Day" on there and pull up a box of tissues. I really love the ones that show the people become a family and then go on to show the next year of the new member's life. The changes in their bodies, their health, their lively eyes. The way they become at home.

What will our day be like? Will she cry and struggle to get away? I imagine my boys would have, had they been handed to a foreign family just months before their second birthdays. I can't go too far down that road, actually, or I get weepier still.

We're going to cheat and bring her treats, bring ipods, bring all sorts of distraction tools. Someday when we look back, I wonder already which things will stick out. Which will be important because they showed the core of her personality from the start? It's a lot to have entrusted to a couple of average parents. I'm so grateful we'll have a lot of years to wrap our minds around the depth and richness of that blessing.

Here she is! Matching outfit, beautiful little human.