Journey to Jia

We are beyond thrilled to finally introduce you all to our daughter! We've known it's a sure thing since October, but our agency wanted us to get to a certain point with our paperwork before sharing pictures and information.
Her name is Gang Qiu Wen and she is in Maoming City, Guangdong Pr.... a beach baby! Her birthday is January 7th, 2006. So she just turned 3!
Gang is her surname and it means Harbor/HongKong. If you look at the location on the map, you'll understand. It is the last name of all kids in her orphanage.
Qiu would be her first name and it means Autumn/Harvest. There are many kids in her orphange who share this first name.
Wen is what we would consider her middle name here. It means multi colored clouds. This name has some sort of significance to her specifically or the day she was brought to the orphanage. So this is the name that they most likely address her as.
Since she is most likely called Wen or Wen Wen in the orphanage and we really LIKE that name, we may end up calling her that... there's a theme there... A lot of our early years were all about WIN!!! Then it became all about WHEN???? and from now on it's all about WEN!!!!
We will officially name her Jiana Ellan Qiu Wen Stotts. Jiana means God's Grace and that she is. In the very beginning we looked at Chinese names and found Jia - but I thought it need to be a little more 'flowery' if you will, so I made it Jiana and we'll call her Jia or Wen, depending... Ellan is signifcant, just as the middle name of all 3 of our boys... I'll keep you guessing on that one. And I know the Qiu Wen makes it a mouth full, but her name is the only thing that she has that's really 'hers' and so we're keeping it. No, we won't yell out the full name when she's in trouble. Heck, she'll probably never get in trouble, but it will be on her paperwork. It's there if she wants it down the road.

This is the very first picture we seen of Wen... Her referal picture.

Those are the lips I fell in love with!

These are frozen shots from a video we received of Wen. The video was taken in July of 2008. At the time of this update she weighed 18 pounds and was 28 inches tall.

And this picture is within the last 2 weeks! We requested updated photo's and this is what they emailed us! I was shocked at how much her hair has grown! I hope they don't cut it again! We also got new measurements. She is currently 22 pounds and 31 inches tall. It's good to know that she is growing, but still such a peanut. On the US size charts, her weight puts her in a size 12/18 months and her height in an 18/24 months size. When I got the updated measurements, I went home and went through all the clothes I have bought. It's been 3 years, mind you! I'll have to change her 3 times a day at least to make it through all the little sundresses this summer!

We switched agencies entirely to adopt Wen, so that meant starting from scratch with paperwork and it's taking longer. Our paperwork has been submitted and CCAA has sent word that they have it. They will have to review it and send up an official LOA (letter of acceptance) to sign and then they will send us travel approval. At this point, I've seen LOA's come anywhere from 6 days to over 90. So it's really hard to tell when we'll travel. Our new agency rocks and they are really going to bat for us to speed things up!

More later....