China Links Support Group

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Internet Sites and Links

On this page we will provide links to information about China adoption, travel or adoption in general.  Anything worth passing on to those that follow will end up here.
 
What you will find on this page:
 
Local sites
Shopping related sites
Our Family sites
Adoption related sites
China related sites
Adoption camps/language camps, etc.
Attachment issue sites
Travel related sites
 
 
 

Local Sites:

Adoption Links World Wide

Back to Guangzhou - Omaha Restaurant

Chinese Language and Cultural Exchange Association (CLACEA) at University of Nebraska-Lincoln - Amy forwarded me a web site of an organization at UNL. It is a non-profit and non-political student organization of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This organization, founded on June 18, 2003 by Jeanne Kwan and Shu-Ren Chang, is committed to provide free service for those who are interested in learning Chinese Language and understanding Chinese culture. Our major activities are a. Chinese conversation program, b. Chinese culture forum. Both traditional and simplified Chinese will be introduced for each individual' needs. Conversation program We will have weekly conversation groups either for experienced groups or for beginner groups. The tutors are all Chinese natives. The conversation covers cultural aspects. Weekly meetings in Room 230 and 234 Mabel Lee Hall 14th and Vine St. University of Nebraska-Lincoln City Campus Monday 8:00-9:00 PM Free Parking On-street parking plots are free after 6:00 PM. Meters nearby are free after 7:30 PM All of the instructor, advisors, and tutors can enjoy free membership. The membership fee is $10 per person per semester and is non-refundable. It is due at your 2nd lesson.

FCC Heartland Chapter

Lincoln Chinese Culture Association

Lincoln Freinds of Foreign Students: Offers support to international students by hosting them (not housing them). You offer them support as they transition. Just be a friend! (Amy)

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Shopping Related Sites:

A Quilt of Wishes site. A new children's book being advertised about a 100 good wishes quilt being made for an awaited adoption.

Adoption baby books: You choose the fabrics. Binder covered with fabric that has parchment type pages with an image of the Great Wall ghosted behind it. All info is geared toward adoption. (Mary M)

ChinaSprout - Shopping for Chinese products/books

Creative Kids Stuff has a set of Chinese pretend food. Before I could only find Japanese sushi set. This set is by Small World Living and is called Good Fortune. It includes: rice, soy sauce bottle, soy sauce dish, chop sticks and stick rest, tea cup, dim sum steamer with dim sum, spring roll, dumpling, lettuce leaves,shrimp, fortune cookie. Very fun.

ethnicgrocer.com This looks like a great site! It has all kinds of foodsincluding Chinese.

Equilter has many many different asian fabrics to choose from. I'm guilty of buying several for Alia's quilts from this site. If you are working on a 100 Good Wishes Quilt this is a good place to find Asain themed material.

Gotcha Day CD. You can listen to 2 minute segments of most of the songs. I love the one about being a Chinese American baby called "Happy Family", it really made me laugh! For adults and kids and the songs are about the whole Chinese adoption, from abandonment on. If you follow the link to her home page you can find all the lyrics and some great Chinese photos. http://www.annpencemusic.com/ But BEST OF ALL, some of the proceed of the sale of the CD go to HALF THE SKY!

Lakeshore Learning Company - source for multi-cultural skin-tone color crayons, markers, paints, and pencils. I've checked out the internet catalogue and these look so COOL! Put multicultural in the search and it comes up with about 200 items. (Frymark)

Mandys Moon -- adoption, multicultural and personalized items (Vortherms)

Many Shades of You Online source for multicultural and multiethnic books, toys, gifts, and resources!

Project Lifebook - An internet site that sells lifebook products. They have some nice Asian baby and family watercolors and little copies of some of the folk paintings that I used in my books. (Frymark)

Scrap and Tell - Internet scrapbook and lifebook shopping. She carries many items related to China (Frymark)

Snapfish - Many different products - Parents-to-be have been using this site to make picture books to send ahead to their child after referral(Millers)

Stork Avenue--custom announcements for adoption (Vortherms)

Great site for doing your own adoption announcements. The software is easy to use and uploads were very quick. We did 5x7 announcements for a reasonable price (25 for $24.95) and found that this site had wonderful templates and an option to create your own. There were so many options we couldn't decide on just one. We recieved the prints and both my husband and I were thrilled with the quality of the color and crispness of the prints (they used Kodak paper). But the great find is that the site allows true scrapbook options where you can set it up with multiple pictures and captions. The software even tells you which size options you could select based on your photos - they have the traditional sizes you could use as well as sizes such as 8x8, 8x10, 8x12, 12x11. This site is nice if you want to do a couple of special pages using format options.

Tapestry Books -- adoption related books (Vortherms)

If you would like Chinese calligraphy of your daughter's Chinese name or anything else, this is a site for you. This is good for lifebooks and scrapbooks. I think the majority of their business is from people translating into Chinese for the purpose of creating tattoo image. They are easy to work with and I think $10 is fair or better. You can choose from 10 styles of calligraphy. (Frymark)

Our Family Sites

The Allen Family: www.babyjellybeans.com mia "first name" allen "last name" password: Jinmei

The Finley's : We have started a website so everyone can follow our journey with us, if desired. :) Enjoy!

Frymark's site

The Gute family travel website.

The Lowis homepage

The Schaffart's web page

Jeff and Carries travel blog

The Sems travel site

The Sems family web page

The Millers
 
Hello everyone! 
 
We leave December 23 with a Gotcha date on December 26 (but possible Christmas!) So, we really need to pack and get things ready to go.  We are coming home January 7. 
 
I have set up a Yahoo group for our travels.  If you would like to hear from us, talk to us, and see pictures, sign up, mention who you are (and if you are from one of the Yahoo groups) for approval.  Our group is Welcome An Ling.   Not  too  clever , but we couldn't think of anything else.  The website is

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/welcomeanling

Free Web hosting! Contact: info@journeytome.com Journey to Me Free for all Adoptive Families! Some features you will enjoy are: Easy uploading of photos and text day or night. Unlimited pages with unlimited text and 5 photos per page. 100% accessibility. Ability to receive emails from viewers of your journal. Baby Registry through targetconvenient for family and friends to buy gifts. Future: Free e-announcements for referrals and Gotcha Day. (Frymark I have not checked this out, I am just passing on info I received.)

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Adoption Relates Sites

A-Parents-China - Large Yahoo group with several thousand members that have adopted from or are adopting from China

Adoption Tax Credit Course: This is a free on-line course to help you understand the adoption tax credit. (Frymark)

Blessed Kids -- shopping but more important, orphanage addresses for care packages

Convert kilograms to pounds for those referral weights!

Harlows Monkey Experiencing the social experiment of transracial and transnational adoption. This is a blog by a Korean adoptee. Good stuff and very thought provoking for parents. Lots of brain food here.

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China Related Sites:

About.com/Chinese Culture: I am generally not a big fan of about.com sites, but I found this site today and have enjoyed it. I particularly like the Chinese name section.  It's fun! Amy

Brian Stuy: China Blog. Has some interesting info on culture and abandonment. This is also the guy you can order finding ads from. (Millers)

China launches a web site to teach Chinese! Free Chinese lessona and materials to promote the study and use of the lannguage abroad.

New Official Chinese Govt Website -- Adoption Page The Chinese Govt launched its new official website in English. This carries much the same news as Xinhua but it also has official government policy. There is a special page for Adoption matters at this link ...

CCAA photos for your lifebooks or scrapbooks. Also information on the process in China is given.

chinabooks.com This is a site that has all kinds of books about or related to China. They also carry calendars, DVDs and music along with art supplies.

China Connection online -- Find your DTC group

Chinese Cultural Studies: Ban Zhao Pan Chao (c. 80 CE) Lessons for a Woman Hi - I found this website and it is very interesting in the history of women in China. Pretty sad.  I thought you might be interested.  Mary

Chinese Food Website Here is a site with some authentic Chinese recipes for those that are interested! (Miller)

This site has tons of Chinese symbols that you can download and use they guide and your keyboard. EASY and FUN! I am working on a few tags and tried to copy a symbol or two from other sources with little to no success THEN...I remembered I had these symbols downloaded to my computer in WORD ready to use!  MUCH better quality and way easier!

Chinese Dancers: Wow, this is really something else. Great for the kids to watch also. These dancers are all hearing impaired. Their incredible coordination is all due to the cues they get from the people you see on the sides of the stage. This was a live performance by this group for Chinese New Year this year. This video takes approx 6 minutes to view, but it is well worth it. (Mary M)

Chinese Music - For anyone interested in collecting Chinese children's music, I found some neat sites with downloadable free music that is legal! (Mary)

more music..

Learn Chinese: language website with audio, pin yin, and directions of how to read the words. It is survival Chinese with different categories. The one I like best is when you greet a very close friend. It sounds like Hi Gomer! :-D (Millers)

Minority Groups in China: Information on Chinese Ethnic Minorities.

Multipmap:// Map website- - click on the area you want and can zoom in. Great for finding your province in China. (Millers)

Red Thread Maps: I found a great site to order a personalized map of your child's province in China. I think we are going to order one so, if anyone wants to see the "real deal" before ordering, I'll try to remember to bring it along at a meeting/get-together. Carly

TV listings: Programs related to China on tv for the week. (Mary M)

Adoption Camps/Language camps, etc.

The Chinese Villiage. A Chinese language camps for your kids put on by Concorida College in Minnesota.

Beemoo camps. Camp in China for children AND parents to learn and enjoy.

New Bright Future Premium Music Lessons & Tutoring

We are dedicated to offer your family the BEST musical and tutorial experiences in Omaha with highly qualified instructors.

We offer: Piano, guitar, voice, violin, cello, brass, improvisation, music composition, worship music, music theory, music technology, woodwind, group, private and moreOur tutoring center offers you a variety of subjects from Math to Chinese.

Check us out! We offer competitive rates, referral incentive, family discount, homeschooler special, and scholarship for gifted and needed students. 

Call us at 402-697-8388 or email us info@newbrightfuture.com to find out more.   Your New Bright Future Starts Here!   

Attachment and Adoption Issues Sites

Attachment and Bonding at adoption.com

Attachment and Bonding Center of Ohio - articles and resources

Attachment 101

Attachment Activities

Welcome to the Attachment Disorder Site

Developing emotional attachments in adopted children

Journey of Attachment A free on-line course to help: See attachment as a lifelong mutual process; Identify the factors that promote and impede attachment; See how a child's behavior can be a sign of attachment; Learn strategies to foster attachment;Develop a personal plan for building attachment with your child, and Identify when and where to seek help

The mission of ModelMinority.com is to provide this scrutiny in every possible way, so as to educate, inform, provoke, and inspire movements by individuals and groups toward Asian American empowerment. Through ModelMinority.com, we intend to provide the Web''s richest collection of research articles, commentaries, stories, poems, pictures, and other documents on the Asian American experience.

Older child adoption/attachment links

Understanding the Institutional Culture http://home.att.net/~PracticalAttachment/page8.html

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Travel related sites:

The Assistant Stork --couriers

Danny's Bagels - lots of info on Guangzhou and printable menu for delivery in the hotel (Vortherms)

Delight Travel

The White Swan hotel webpage

The Victory Hotel in Guangzhou

Sofitel Grand Park Hefei in Hefei -DO NOT STAY HERE - TOO FAR FROM SHOPPING AND THINGS TO DO

Electrical sockets - a site that shows you the sockets for plugging things in and explains the adaptors you need.

Homeland Children's Foundation -- Click on Orphanage Relief Packs to request a packet to carry to your child's orphanage -- no cost involved!

Medical Kit for Travel You will need your referral information to order this as they want to insure that it is being used for adoption travel. If you have a hard time getting your doctor to prescribe travel meds, this is a way to get them.

Orphandoctor.com This is a great site set up by a female doctor that has visited many orphanages all over the world. She gives lots of info on medical conditions, travel etc. You should check this site out it is very helpful with your medical questions and concerns. She also provides services for parents. We did not use these so I can not endorse them in any way.

Our Chinese Daughters Foundation and OCDF China Tours gives away to all new adoptive families a red bag with a Chinese baby charm along with a 22-panel (fits in your pocket) language guide in English, PinYin, Characters (with cute sayings to speak to your child, foods/menus items, medical terms, emergency information, measuring clothing, and much more). For those staying at the White Swan or nearby such as the Victory Hotel. You can pick up your free OCDF Red Bag from the shop below: China Doll Room 302, Building 1 No. 11 Li Fu Road Tel: 13822192205 For those who would like to have these sent to your arrival hotel or Provincial hotel in China, please email Ross@ocdf.org and we will arrange for delivery to your hotel in China. Many thanks! Please share this information with others who are pre-adopt! Jane

Panda Phone -- China Cell Phone Rental (Vortherms)

Let us know if there are any web sites that you enjoy and we'll include them on this page!