Blog Entry
Posted by Loren Alldrin on December 27, 2009 to Adoption blog
(click any image to enlarge) Happy Homecoming Anneliese and a weepy Mackenzie meet Olivia for the first time. Competition Little Mr. J didn't care much for Kristen holding Samuel. Here the three make friends. Good Friends, Good Food We spent Christmas dinner at a Chinese buffet, and laughed over flashbacks from "A Christmas Story". No duck was served. Three Princesses The new girls found the dress-up clothes right away, and looked every bit the part of Ethiopian princesses. Comfy at Home It's sure good to be home, where we can feel sick and tired in a familiar place. Note: I posted two blog entries tonight, so don't forget to read "Our Last Day in Ethiopia". I also posted some pictures to the travel gallery that are not attached to blogs. Getting checked in at the airport took forever, but soon we were on the jet to Dubai. Samuel put up a brief fight upon being buckled into his seat. The girls enjoyed the in-seat movies, then settled in to sleep. All in all, the kids turned out to be good little travelers. After a four-hour flight and one hour lost due to a time zone change, we landed in Dubai around 1am. We discovered that our children didn't have all their paperwork in order for the UAE (kids!), so we bounced from passport control to customer service to bank to passport control again. All that shuffling put us to our hotel about 3am, and we had to get up at 5am to get on our flight home. Not exactly a restful night! Two dear families drove with their kids, and ours, to see us arrive on Christmas day. That's over eight hours round-trip, in two big vans, with fourteen kids. Now those are devoted friends! Thanks to the Grant and Goff families, our arrival in SF was a very special event. It was SO GREAT to see Mackenzie, Anneliese, Emily and Jillian after 10 days apart. We had a weepy, huggy family reunion right there in the airport. Then we drove for a while and caught a fun Chinese buffet dinner in Vacaville. What a truly memorable Christmas day. Back home, the new kids explored the house and their new beds. They were very excited to see the place, and walked around wide-eyed for a while. We put the kids in bed, sang and prayed, and everyone slept through the night. Amazing! The next day was a fun one for playing with toys, bouncing on the trampoline, swinging and riding around our backyard's paved track. Grandma and Grandpa Bergstrom brought Laney by, and we soon learned that Samuel is terrified of dogs. He screamed, shook and tried to climb on top of my head when she came in the room. By day two he was letting her get within a few feet, but he clearly has some dog-o-phobia issues to overcome. Our second day at home was fun, starting with opening Christmas stockings and one final gift per kid. Then it was all about playing with new toys, eating candy, and looking wistfully out at the rain-soaked backyard. Strangely, Kristen and I felt worse today than when we first got home. Our stomachs are not happy, and we both needed long naps today. We fear we may have picked up the GI bug that all three new kids seem to have, and have started on antibiotics. We'll get the kids in to see their pediatrician this week to deal with GI issues, coughs and runny noses. We expected the kids to be sick when we got them, and they did not disappoint. So we've officially started into this exciting new chapter of our lives. We extend our sincerest thanks to everyone who has supported us in any way, and we hope our journey thus far has blessed and challenged you. We'll add to this blog as time allows. I also plan to put together a video of our trip that I'll make available online. But that takes spare time to accomplish, and that will likely be in short supply for quite a while. Back to: Adoption blog There's No Place Like Home...
At nearly 16 hours, the flight back to the states seemed to take forever. Luckily, the kids slept a lot and the toys and movies kept the girls occupied. Samuel didn't care for the movies, and quickly grew bored with the toys we had brought him. So we had a few of those nightmarish "toddler moments" where he taxed the patience of everyone around. But the fits lasted only minutes before we were able to get him calmed down. The stewardesses liked Samuel, and welcomed him to their galley area at the back of the plane. The kid wants to be held all the time, so my plans to walk him up and down the aisle for exercise completely fizzled. I changed two diapers in the plane bathroom, one a certified DoD (Diaper of Doom.) Though not my favorite activity, it wasn't as horrible as I expected it to be.
We arrived in SF to discover that our plastic tub was missing. Nor did we have the claim ticket for that particular piece of luggage. So we feared the worst, that our tub had not made it through Dubai, or had gone home with another family in our travel group. We were standing at the "lost luggage" counter when I looked waaaaaay down the baggage claim area and saw something that looked like our tub. I ran down to discover that it was our tub, stranded in the "oversized luggage" area (though it wasn't oversized). We thanked God and tossed it on the cart.