Home Again, Home Again

We thoroughly enjoyed taking yesterday off from blogging and off from everything else too!

We arrived back in Columbus around 8:30pm on Saturday night... exhausted. Our trip from Moscow included a 12 hour flight to Atlanta where we had a 2 hour layover before our flight to Columbus. I spent half of the Moscow - Atlanta flight with my pants soaking wet after Peter accidentally dumped his Koka-Kola in my lap... oh well, I guess I'll have plenty of time to dry out now. In Atlanta, we needed every second of the layover. Once we made it through passport control (using the US citizens line), we had to claim our luggage and go through immigration and customs. The flight back from Moscow might as well be called the adoption shuttle because there are always so many newly adopted children on it. We spent time speaking with quite a few families while waiting to board. Mostly people are adopting young toddlers, but there were a few families with older children like ourselves. There were probably 25 adoptive families on that plane, maybe more. With so many children to process through immigration, it is not the fastest of processes. We BARELY made it through in time for our connecting flight. We had to take the tram in the Atlanta airport from terminal E to terminal B and then run for it. Of course you could guess that our gate was literally the last gate. Picture us trying to run through the airport with four kids... two of whom don't speak English. Lisa had Peter and I had Kim. I'm not entirely sure that Peter's feet actually hit the ground in terminal B. He mostly flew behind Lisa like a kite. The agent at the gate knew who we were as we sprinted up, out of breath, to ask if we made it. He asked how we had liked Russia and that they were holding the plane for us guessing that we were delayed in immigration. Once on the plane, the stewardesses brought out bottles of water for us as we were still breathing pretty hard at that point.

The kids were asleep almost before we were off the runway. It was less than 90 minutes and we were on the ground in Columbus. At the baggage claim, we were warmly greeted by our dear friends the Canary's who had made a banner (in Russian) welcoming Kim and Peter. They brought our van to the airport for us as well and, God bless them, they had stocked our kitchen so we wouldn't have to go out right away. We were also greeted by another family from our church who have adopted three children from Ethiopia and have a really great blog about their experience. It was really great to see everyone and have such a nice welcoming, but you can see in the photo that Kim and Peter were pretty tired, scared, and overwhelmed. They warmed up pretty quickly however and were smiling and laughing in no time.

When we got home, the kids were in awe. They have seen many photos of the house and they knew that they each had their own bedrooms. The immediately had to run to their room and examine everything about them. After that, they had to tour the rest of the house. It was a lifetime of Christmas mornings all happening at one time. It was a little bit tough to get them to go to bed after a quick dinner of Soup (Thanks Sheri). They were back up at 3:00am turning on lights and trying to get the other kids up to play. It will take a few days to get their internal clocks adjusted.

Sunday was quiet. Grandma and Grandpa came down from Akron and brought our dog, Bandit, back home. It was cute that Peter spent most of the day calling him "Banchick". Kim also rode her bike. She was so excited about having a bike that was her own. She rides better than I would have guessed. Today, Beth and Luke went back to school and Peter and Kim started homeschooling with Lisa to learn English. We also took them to the grocery store... a little overwhelming, but kind of fun for them too. I installed a Russian/English keyboard on our computer and set up the Russian language support in Windows so Kim can type into the online translator. It is a big help... but we are limited by her ability to spell in Russian... this is a real limitation for a 9 year old. Once the neighborhood kids came home from school, Kim had to go ride her bike with them. Welcome to our new normal.