Our First Trip

Hi All,
Sorry for the delay in writing a post about our first trip.  We left on our first trip on August 31st.   We flew from Denver to Toronto to Munich to were our girl is in Eastern Europe.  Once we arrived and filled out paper work for our one missing suitcase....we drove four hours to her orphanage.  It was a long day of travel, but it all went well.

We got to the hotel in time to go to sleep in order to get up early to meet our girl!  When we got to the orphanage we were led into an office that they use as a doctors office.  As we were sitting there Paul asked me if I was as calm as I appeared....I said that I am about to throw up I'm so nervous ;-)
A few minutes later she walked in with one of her caregivers. Yes, you read that right....she walked in!  We were so excited to find out that she can walk.  The video we have of her from two years ago, she could only walk a few steps before falling.  So we were really happy to see how well she is walking.  She was appropriately shy for the first few minutes that she was in the room.  We had brought some glow in the dark bracelets and necklaces....she thought that they were pretty cool.  After a few minutes we brought out our newly purchased Ipad.  Well she loved that!  Even a kiddo who has lived her whole life in an orphanage figured out the Ipad faster then I did ;-)

She was able to move things around on the Ipad using her fingers.  She doesn't have much movement in her arms, but she can move her fingers and hands somewhat.  So she found it easiest to use the Ipad when it was flat on the coffee table and she was standing up.

Another surprise was how much she is talking.....like non stop.  She will fit in fine at our house LOL.  She was asking all sorts of questions in her native language.  She got used to asking me a question and then looking at the translator for a response.

We were able to see her every morning for 2 hours and every afternoon for two hours.  We were quite lucky that we were able to take pictures of her.  I am going to check if I can post them on our blog....there are a lot of rules about that sort of thing.  We were also lucky in that we were able to take her outside to their playground.  We saw were she sleeps and eats in the orphanage.  It was a clean although quite old building.  They really seem to care about her.  They seem very happy that we are adopting her.

It took them a few days to finally tell her that we were adopting her.  Her teacher (who was awesome) finally took out our photo album that we had brought for her.  He went through each picture with her.  At the end he asked her if she wanted to come live with us.  She said YES!  We were all sad at the last visit but he told her that we were coming back for her, so she was ok....I was a mess, but I held it together until we left.  Sadly, she doesn't understand that there are 4-6 months between our first trip and when we can go get her.  That just seems like forever!  We are going to send her another photo book and a communication book that they said they would work on with her.  Everyone was very nice and we are very grateful.

Since there was a holiday the last day and we weren't allowed to see her, we came back to the capital on Thursday night.  We had all day on Friday in the capital.  We were soooo happy to meet and hang out with Erin and Cliff.  They are adopting two angels from a different orphanage.  They were amazing and we were so happy to have had the opportunity to meet and hang out with them!

All in all our trip was amazing!  We are so grateful to our friends at home for helping with our kiddos.  We were able to skype with them, which really helped with the separation.  It is hard to believe that our first trip is behind us....it almost feels like a dream!  Once we got home we updated our homestudy.  Since we are adopting Baby A on Oct 9th (WOOT WOOT)  we needed to update it and send that to the state for approval.  So we are waiting to get that back and then all of our paperwork is sent to USCIS.  We are really hoping that the time in between our trips goes quickly.....we want our girl home with all of us!!