Yivan’s passport with Visa should arrive next week, at which point we can buy our plane tickets. It’s looking like the tickets are going to end up being a little cheaper if we fly out of Shanghai instead of Beijing, but anything could change in the next week. We should have bought our tickets a few months ago but stupid Jess forgot to write down Yivan’s passport number. It wasn’t really forgetting, though, since I didn’t realize we would need it to buy plane tickets.

The only other thing left to do is get Tristan’s exit permit 30 days before we leave. The police station knows what we need and they just need us to come back, so that should hopefully not provide much of a headache.

Once we get back to Canada we hope to stay somewhere temporarily, either with family or in another form of temporary accomodation. I will get a job, Yivan will spend the first 2 or 3 months absorbing the culture and language and taking care of Tristan while he gets to know his Canadian family. I will also apply for my school in October or November, and start school in September 2012.

We’ll hopefully have our own apartment on August 1st and from there everything gets easier. The first few weeks are probably going to be hell, but we’ll make it work! ???