We Have Lift Off!!!

Well, dates for lift off anyway!  Can you even believe this!?  I can't!  I'm sort of freaking out right now!  We are leaving IN ONE WEEK!!!!  You heard me right!  We have 7 days to prepare everything we need for our first trip to meet our girl!!!  Do you think I'm ready for Christmas yet?  Nope.  Do you think we have everything we need for our trip (or even know what we need, for that matter?)  Nope.  I'm over-the-moon excited, but also SO anxious!  We'll need to speed through the next few days to get everything done!  Who will our child be!?  CAN'T WAIT to find out!!!  I know there are a lot of exclamation points involved in this post, but that's because I'm so excited right now I can't even stand it! 

Because of our late notice and traveling around Christmas (our travel dates are December 15-December 23), our tickets and Visas were insanely expensive!  Oh well, how do you put a price on a child's life?  We are flying directly from L.A. to Meg's country's capital city, then catching a connecting flight to her region.  Well, the flights from Salt Lake to L.A. were $750 over these dates!!!  What!?  They are normally around $150, so this is insane!  We have decided it is not worth $1500 for us to fly to L.A., so we are making the 12 hour drive.  Crazy?  Yup.  Anything to save a buck these days ;) We are going to be dead tired, but we'll be home for Christmas!!

We booked our plane tickets a few days ago because prices were sky rocketing every few minutes.  We knew it wasn't a sure deal that we would be traveling on these dates, but it would only be $90 to cancel our international flights.  Worth it not to risk losing the chance to travel before the LONG January holiday!  Well...because we sort of guesstimated the dates, we are arriving in Meg's country a few days earlier than our appointment with the Department of Education.  I guess we'll get to do lots of sight seeing.  In temperatures that won't exceed -5 degrees F.  Haha!  It will be an adventure, that's for sure!  The only sad thing is that we only have Thursday the 20th and Friday the 21st to meet with our baby.  Big, big bummer to travel literally half way across the world (which will take us 3 days to get there) for only two days of visits.  It's okay, though.  In the long run, these dates will be worth it.  Going before Christmas will allow us to work on our court dossier while Meg's country is on shut-down for the New Year/Christmas vacation (they celebrate Christmas on January 8th).  The country pretty much shuts down the first three weeks of January. 

We are over the moon excited and hope you'll all stay tuned for our adventures in Eastern Europe!!  We have internet service, so hopefully I'll be updating the blog daily once in country!  Thank you all SO very much for the love and support we've received thus far.  We are truly blessed!

***UPDATE!!  We got tickets to LA, so we don't have to drive!!!  Many thanks to Quin's mom for searching those out for us!  They were around $500 I think, but Quin's parents donated their frequent flier miles for one of the tickets, and my parents donated miles for the other ticket.  We appreciate their kindness more than we can even say!  Thank you to all of them for being so amazing!!