2 weeks until take-off. OMG!!! I am feeling like I am living in the twilight zone right now. It is all still so surreal! Two weeks from now, I will be having breakfast at my in-laws, getting ready to board a plane for a true life changing experience. Here is a little more about our trip:
We fly out of Mpls at 1:15 and arrive in DC at 4:45. It looks like several of the families we will share the week with are on the Ethiopian Air flight so that should be fun! Anyway, John and Melanie are going to meet us at our gate and then we are going to grab our last American Meal, then board the plane to Addis. We have a fuel stop in Rome, then continue on to Addis, arriving at about 7pm Addis time (8 hrs ahead of CT). We will be met at the airport by a rep from the agancy. Once we purchase our Visa's and get our luggage, it is off to the care center. We are staying in the smaller more traditional of the two guest houses. I guess there are 3 families total in this house and we walk to the other house for meals etc. Thursday night we attempt to sleep and get ready to meet Miss Sunshine.
Friday moring we have breakfast at the care center and then have a brief orientation at the main office, then head to the care center to meet Sunshine. They do not allow camera's in the care center, but they will video tape the first meeting for us. We get to spend about an hour with her and then return to the house for lunch. Then we get to go back and hang out with her for a bit longer in the afternoon.
Saturday, we spend the morning learning more about our sunshine. We will get time to hang out with her in the care center and love her up! After lunch, we have a chance to shop and exchange our $$. We have the option of going to a hotel buffet at the Crown Hotel. At this point we are thinking of skipping that event as the next moring is really early..we'll see how it goes.
Sunday we get up at 5am and travel south of Addis to Hosanna to meet sunshines birth family. We are hopeful we will meet her father. We spend 3-4 hours in Hosanna, seeing the orphanage she came into intitally, meeting family and experiencing a different part of the country. Then we board our bus and return to Addis. We will not see sunshine this day.
Monday we get to go back to our girl and I think bring her back to the guest house for a while. The afternoon on Monday we see some of the humanitarian projects in the area as well as a museum.
Tuesday Sunshine is all ours! There is a going away ceremony in the morning and then we have our Embassy appointment in the afternoon. After that, she is in our care forever. YEAH!!!
Wed and Thursday are spent in the guest house, getting to know our girl and settling into the routines of parenting a baby again. Thursday we leave for the airport arounsupper time for our 10pm flight home. We arrive in DC on Friday am at about 9am and go through immigration and customs. Then we hang out in the airport....until our flight home at 5:15. It will be a very long day of traveling, but we will finally have Miss SUnshine...so it won't matter!
We return to the Mlps airport about 7pm. We welcome friends to meet us at the airport, but know that we won't be passing sunshine around and the main focus will be uniting our whole family. We will most likely be rather strung out and loopy as well.
So now that I have typed all that, I am so excited I can hardly sit still. It is going to be here in the blink of an eye! Yipee!!
Friday
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