And We're Off on Wednesday!

Our flights are made and we're pretty much ready to go. This Wednesday afternoonat 4:35 , we leave for Sofia, through Frankfurt where we have a 6 hour delay (arg), and arrive into Sofia on Thursday night at 11 p.m. -- a 19 hour voyage! We are going to try and get a good night's sleep (yeah right) and after breakfast we head directly to Yambol to the orphange to pick up the girls. Once we arrive at the orphanage, we are going to get them dressed in their new clothes and say our good byes. Quick and hopefully not too emotional.

We'll take the girls back to our hotel and spend the afternoon together -- maybe go to the park which is right by our hotel. That evening, Gunther and I are hosting a dinner at one of the finest restaurants in Yambol for our lawyer Nikolay, Rosi, Dr. Atanasova (director) and Galia and her husband (and the four of us) to celebrate our new family. Then our final goodbye to Galia -- which is going to be so hard but we just need to keep it positive as we don't want to upset the girls. I can't imagine how sad this will be for Galia who feels such love for our girls and has done such a great job at taking care of them while we were gone. I'm sure it's a very tough aspect of working as a caregiver of children -- having to say goodbye.

We go to sleep that night for the first time as a family. Putting them to bed for the first time and looking down on them while they're sleeping is going to be amazing. Wow...

The next morning we head back to Sofia where we'll spend time visiting the city and taking the girls around to check things out. We'll take them to Happy Restaurant -- a noisy but fun place (think Earls or Fridays) to go with them. We spend the next full day in Sofia just hanging out. We'll have to get to bed kinda early as we have to wake up at 4 a.m. to head to the airport to come home! Our flight leaves at 6 a.m. and we have a 4 hour layover in Frankfurt and then leave there at 1 p.m. We get into Vancouver at 2 p.m. on Canadian Thanksgiving. I'll be so happy when the plane touches down! We will have lots of treats, toys, videos and things to keep them occupied for the flight. They'll probably just sleep for a large portion of the flight -- or at least we hope they do! We'll have some children's Gravol just in case!

So that's it...our whirlwind trip to bring them home! We'll keep the blog updated each day we're gone. As always, thanks for all of your prayers and well wishes! We can't wait to get home...