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Good Morning! It's "GOTCHA DAY"! I can hardly believe that we have made it to this day! Only by the grace of God did we sleep so well last night. We are all just waking up (it is 7:00 am here) and the butterflies are multiplying in our stomachs. We are now 9 hours and counting till we have our son! It really does feel like I'm in labor! I remember those last few hours before Ben and Callie were born and all the emotion we had. We were nervous, excited, and overjoyed all at the same time and it is no different this time. All I can think of is Caleb is just waking up and I guess they are giving him breakfast and getting him ready to meet his "forever family". I can't imagine what is going on in his sweet little head. We pray that God will cover him with peace today. It is going to be a long 9 hours. 7 of the families in our group are adopting baby girls from the same orphanage which is about 3 hours away and they will all fill out their paperwork at 10:00 this morning, us and the other family are adopting from different orphanages and we will fill out our paperwork after we have our children. We are the only family in our group adopting a boy. Rosa said that in all her years of helping adopting families, she has only witnessed about 20 boys being adopted. We will all get our children together at the Civil Affairs Office this afternoon. We have all been given permission to visit our children's orphanages, but that won't be set up till after "Gotcha Day". I will let you know when that will be as soon as I know.
It was funny as we touched down in Guangzhou last night, everyone erupted into cheers! We have gone from "vacationers" to expecting parents. We are all on the same floor of the hotel, floor 31, and checking in our rooms and seeing the cribs set up brought tears to our eyes. It is almost here! After we got checked in, we headed down to Pizza Hut! We have KFC, Pizza Hut, McDonalds, and Starbucks right next to our hotel. Yeah! American food! Our hotel is beautiful! We are staying at the Asia International Hotel, which is the tallest hotel in Guangzhou. There is a revolving restaurant on the 45th floor and the view is amazing. Guangzhou is a huge city, but compared to Beijing, it seems much cleaner, more westernized. We are also very relieved to know that they don't cut the air conditioner off at night here. We slept in a nice cool room! Maggie and Rosa told us that the Chinese like to be warm. Thank God for the USA! Even our flight yesterday seemed like an oven. That was a long 3-hour flight!
Thank you all for your encouraging messages and especially your prayers! It means so much to us to know that everyone is praying for our family! I do know how you feel being on that side of the computer. When all my friends were here adopting, I think I checked the computer 100 times a day just waiting for information. I promise that I will post pictures as soon as I can. We get him at 4:00 (if anything changes, I will let you know) and then I don't know how long it will take to get back to the hotel, but we should have pictures posted by the time you wake up. We miss you all so much and can't wait to share the joy of our new son with you! Stay tuned and we'll post those long awaited pictures soon!
In His Mighty Grip!
Matt, Allison, Ben, and Callie (very soon Caleb!)
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