Titled: Heading Home
YAYYY!!! We leave tonight and we are VERY ready to be home! The week has gone amazingly well, we have a great sleeper and she has started cooing to us too! She even seemed to like the baths, we took one this morning to get all clean smelling for the long journey home. We are praying she will sleep alot on the flights home, but even if she is awake, she is pretty content unless she is hungry - also kind of like me! :-)
Can't wait to get some pictures out and some video. Thanks for all your prayers, they have made our week a pretty painless one! Looking forward to letting you know we are home!
Karen
We took some pics:
This is Tigest who was the day person at the front desk. She was very helpful and really a delightful person. You can see the computer in the background that she or Johnny would let us use to send and check emails.
This is Haile (Hi lee) who was the 19 year old cook. What a sweet, wonderful young man! I tell ya, women and men alike truly adore babies and children, they are revered. He was so cute, during this time when we were in the lobby and he held Little J and we were talking, he whispered to me, "how old is she?". I answered "4 months". He says with a pause and whispers back ....."ohhh, she is too big", all in kindness and sweetness, but yes, we knew she was too big, a 4 month old doesn't usually weigh 25 pounds but it was not her fault nor the nannies who let her drink too much. This was obviously her comforting mechanism and we just weren't worried and knew eventually she would grow into the extra weight which is occurring very nicely!
Michelle and "G". Is he not the CUTEST thing??! We are going on vacation with them this spring and can't wait to see them again and meet his Big Bro "C" and Michelle's husband. Their two boys are about the same age as our two girls, hmmmmm...... :-)
Mike and Paula, the fantastic dancers if you watched yesterday's videos, and sweet, adorable "B"!
Matt with model material "T". We told Matt on probably a daily basis this kid needs to model! His eyelashes were seriously the longest and most beautiful I've ever seen and his smile would melt your heart in an instant!
This is Haile with Matt's little guy!
Then our final picture. Our travel group, except Annette, Michelle's mom. What a great group of people that we were so blessed to travel with and with whom we shared a precious week of our life! We are so grateful that we were able to travel to Little J's birth country and even if for just a short visit, experience some of her culture. We hope that we can return with her in the future when she is old enough and ready and hope that we can travel to the region where she was born as we've heard it is so different than the bustling city of Addis Ababa.
Our flight didn't leave until 10:15 p.m. that Friday night. We had heard that if we wanted to try and get a bassinet that attached to the bulkhead, you should get to the airport about 4 hours ahead. It would take two trips to get us all there so Mike and Paula and Tim and I went in the first group. We already had seats assigned when our travel agency booked our flights but this would hopefully let us change them. When we got to the airport, we hauled our luggage in and got in line to send them through security first. I had Little J in a sling with a metal ring, hmmm, wrong option! She was asleep but they made me take the sling off. Understood, but oh what a hassle. At 25 pounds, she was no little peanut that you just stood and held for long periods of time. After our luggage went through, they pulled one of the two bags aside as well as one of Mike and Paula's. We had to go over while they hand checked it. They seemed most interested/focused on a little bag of batteries and a portable batter charger. After we got through that, I was already sweating! We got in line to check in and wouldn't you know, that old memory issue of mine, I forgot to ask about the bulkhead seating until he was pretty much done - arghhhhh! The whole reason we went FOUR HOURS early and I FORGET! He was rather polite and said they were all taken - totally not true but again, at least he didn't say what he was thinking which I'm sure was, no way am I going to redo everything you crazy white lady! The seats we did have our travel agent book were the three seats in the middle aisle. We had booked the two outer seats (didn't have to buy a ticket for Little J) in hopes that no one would choose the middle seat. I asked him if anyone had booked that seat or if it was still open and he said it was open. He did SO kindly put a block on that seat so no one could sit there. I was so grateful for that. Maybe there is some benefit to having a terrible memory, Little J may not have been all that comfortable in the bassinet assuming she would even fit, and it couldn't have been any better to have all three seats to ourselves. This is how she traveled much of that 17 hour flight to DC:
After we got checked in, we had more paperwork to fill out so we stepped over to another area to do that and then went through yet another line. This is where they checked Little J's paperwork and all of our visa's. By this time we knew that Michelle and her mom and Matt had arrived and were getting checked in. We all eventually met up in the upper level of the airport. They had shops and places to eat and an internet cafe. We bought some bottled water to take on the plane because we were already checked in and through security, right? Well, as they started the initial phase, we got in another line to go into our boarding area. Believe it or not, we had to go through ANOTHER check-in with our carry on luggage. So again, off with the sling and this is where they took my jar of peanut butter! And, they took every one's water bottles, that we had purchased in their airport, and threw them all out. They let us keep one for making bottles since we had a baby but poor Matt, they took all his water for "T" for his sippy cup.
Once we got in this area, boarding didn't happen right away and as I sat with Little J, I was starting to have a hard time keeping myself together. I tried to keep busy either talking with others or walking. We finally were able to board and at least I was keeping it to just tears running down my face instead of all out sobbing which is what I was feeling. It still brings me to tears to remember this and certainly write it. Thank goodness Tim was holding her and giving her a bottle as we took off. My heart was breaking for her and frankly, I hope I will never forget how I felt as I am sure there will be the day when her heart will break for all she had to leave behind. Yes, she is so loved and will have opportunities that she would never have in Ethiopia, but she still had to LEAVE to be in our family. I know God wanted me to feel that pain, the thoughts that she is leaving HER country, HER culture, HER heritage, HER fellow countrymen, perhaps never to return, to be able to know in some small way the feelings she will likely have some day. We hope that we will be able to return with her some day and experience more and share with her what information we have, which is little. I pray it will be enough......
1 comment:
Karen, I felt the exact same way at the airport. The whole ride there, while we were checking in, waiting to board, and then walking onto the airplane my stomach was in KNOTS. I was fighting tears and just trying not to sob the whole time. Actually the whole time we were in Ethiopia I was just an emotional wreck. I am sure my knewly discovered pregnancy had a lot to do with it but I was just so in awe of the country and culture and all that our kids had gone through that I was constantly trying hold in the tears. Sometimes I could keep it in and sometimes I just couldn't. I knew that what we were doing was God's plan for them because he had provided for every single step along the way but but I also felt bad that they had to leave behind all that they knew. Great post. I totally agree with you too, Alazar is sooo handsome isn't he??
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