We have been back for a couple weeks now and I am ready to share about our experience. I will be breaking up our trip into a few blog posts so stay tuned :)
We got our travel invite on Oct 17. It was a Saturday. I wasn't planning to hear from Little Mans country. In fact I had just stopped obsessively checking my email a few days prior. My agency had said it would probably be November before we heard anything. It wasn't a super eventful day or anything, we woke up turned on some praise and worship music and started cleaning our house. My husband was at work so it was just me and the littles. Around 2pm I decided to check my email, and I am being completely honest it was because I get entirely way too many emails and my notifications on my phone was driving me a little bonkers ;) So when I opened the email and saw one from our agency with the subject line that said "travel time." my heart stopped. Could it be? In the middle of the month? No way. Shes probably just giving me another when to expect travel dates email LOL.So after freaking out for several minutes I called my husband, mom and mother in law and told them the great news ! We were leaving Oct 30, so they needed to prepare for our arrival in NJ. Since we had decided the littles would not be coming along with us, my mother in law said she wanted to keep them with her. We booked our flight which was actually a total miracle ! They were less than half of what we thought they would be ! Miracles !
On Oct 29 (a wednesday.) Ethan went to school and I finished the last minute packing for the trip. Tony got off work a little early and we started the 10 hour drive to NJ. We arrived there around 4am on Thursday. We passed the littles off to their overly excited grandma and went to bed. When we woke up our bear had arrived and we put him in our carry on.
About the bear. I wanted so badly to leave Owen a bear with our picture on it so that he would at least have that with him until we come back for him. A friend of mine made the shirt with our picture and asked her husband to mail it to us, but something was wrong with our address and it never left the post office. We didnt realize the error until Wednesday afternoon so there was no way to get it. I was absolutely devastated. I knew that meeting him was so big, and in the grand scheme of things this bear wasnt huge. But my heart was breaking. Well Brook worked some social media magic and a a ton of amazing angels helped make that bear possible. She had some friends with USPS who held the truck for a few extra minutes until she could get there and my friend Carol covered the fee for flying it to NJ in time for us to bring it. Miracles. I am so thankful for them ! And by the way, he loved that bear. He snuggled it so hard and asked if he could put it in his bed when we left <3
On Thursday night my MIL drove us to the airport and we waited 5 hours for our plane to leave at 1:45am on Friday. We flew for nearly 20 hours and arrived in little mans country at 12:30am. And then went to sleep :)
We met another adopting family for breakfast along with our translator. When we were finished with that we toured the city a little and visited the cascades. The time difference was kind of sorta kicking our butts but we were so excited to finally be in little mans country. The place of his birth, his culture and heritage, the place he has spent the last 4.5 years in waiting for his family to come. It was an absolutely beautiful City and I can not wait to go back!
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