Texas, HERE WE COME!!!

YIPPEE! The moment is finally here for us to head home with our Precious Boy. We are so thankful for God’s providence and pray He will bless us with a safe and quiet trip. Caleb has been sleeping well the past few days so we are optimistic that he will sleep on the plane. Hopefully he hasn’t been sleeping a lot so he could rest up and be awake the whole flight! ;)

Today we hung around the hotel in the morning and began to get organized and packed for our return trip. In the afternoon, we went with Zorya to the mountains. It only took about 40 minutes to get there from our hotel and it was really beautiful. We were able to see a large sporting center for speed skating from Soviet times, a beautiful river that runs down the mountains and into Almaty and a great view of Almaty. Caleb was good in the car and when we were in the mountains as well. We only visited briefly to take some pictures before heading back to the hotel.

Family photo in the mountains

The large stadium for sporting events

Beautiful river that flows down to Almaty

We have tried to rest this afternoon and evening in anticipation of the loooooong flight home. I think our travel time in the air is around 21 hours, plus a 3.5 hour layover in Frankfurt. By the time we get to Houston we may have been awake – or mostly awake – for close to 48 hours! Our flight information is listed below. All departure and arrival times are listed in the local time for the respective departure and arrival city:

Depart Almaty on Lufthansa Flight LH 647 at 3:20 AM/ Arrive Frankfurt at 6:20 AM

Depart Frankfurt on Lufthansa Flight LH 440 at 10:05 AM / Arrive Houston IAH at 1:35 PM !!!

Anyone who wishes to join our families to greet us at the airport in Houston is more than welcome! We can’t wait to introduce you to the cutest new US Citizen, our precious Caleb Daniel. We’re not sure what state the 3 of us will be in or how Caleb will handle the new environment, but we’d still love to see your smiling faces! We plan to hold on to Caleb at the airport and just let everyone take a good look at him since the larger group of people will likely be a lot for him to take in.

We can’t thank everyone enough who has ‘cheered us on’ via your e-mails, blog comments, and most importantly your prayers while we were away. We relied heavily on the support and love of our family and friends to complete this journey. Thank you for being a part of turning a family of 2 into a family of 3! We love you all and cannot wait to see everyone in TEXAS!!

To all our family - this is what you have to look forward to when we walk out of Customs!



PS: Audrey, the books you gave us have been a big hit!! Caleb loves to “read” them and has even learned how to reach out and touch the pages. When we first picked him up from the orphanage he did not realize he could reach out to touch things or to grab toys, so these have been a big help.