TRAVEL DATES!!!!

There must be something about the long wait that has affected my ability to communicate. I have delayed in blogging my very, very exciting news. On thursday July 18th I was given travel dates!!!! We will be in Bulgaria from August 15th-24th!!!! We will have Simon in our ARMS on Monday August 19th.

Jon's sister RAchel has agreed to travel with us. She is a pediatric nurse and we felt it would be nice to have her there "just in case" :) SHe has also traveled the world quite a bit and is one of Jon's favorite people to shoot the breeze with. We are very excited that she is coming along and that it gives us the ability to never walk around alone looking for babyfood!

This is my understanding of how it will all go down. We will leave for the airport at about 1pm, we are leaving from the LINCOLN airport. (after taking this trip twice, there is no reason to mess around with an hour drive to Omaha at the beginning and the end of this LONG trip) Then we will fly to Chicago, then we will fly to Munich (this will be my first time at this airport!) and then into Sofia. We will get there on Friday around 4pm. I have found the key to this whole flip to Bulgaria time is to stay AWAKE just past dinner. This means we will probably go to bed around 8pm Bulgaria time....(then wake up around 3am maybe, take a melatonin and back to bed!)

We will have Saturday and Sunday to bum around Sofia. Jon and I have never really explored Sofia, so I thought this might be nice. Our agency, who I love, will also be connecting us with some missionaries that we might be able to hang out with. I would LOVE to pick their brains about culture and religion in Bulgaria! There is a zoo, and some kind of archeological museum and a walking tour of Sofia. So we will see what we do. I also just want to be able to scout out the good places for Simon food and our food. Our plan is to only eat fancy a few nights for dinner (the hotel we are staying at is very fancy, and close to US prices, although the quality is much higher than what we are paying!!!) We can eat cheaper away from the hotel!

MONDAY, will FINALLY come!!! We will be picked up by our driver and translator (2 people actually :)) They will drive us through the mountains and into Pleven. It is a very pretty drive. I am glad that we will be all slept up for it! We will go straight to the orphanage...and we will get Simon. I plan to hug his baba tons, and give her, her locket (with Simon's picture inside). She has been his Baba for 3 years and I know this day will be hard for her. Then we will get in the car and GO, GO, GO.

We will be in the country with Simon for 5 days. In those 5 days we will need to do a few things, I have no idea the order but here is my loose understanding of what we will have to do. We will go to a police station for a photo, I think. We will go to the embassy, which I hear is super hard to get into..., we will also go to see a doctor. At some point we will be given a new birth certificate for Simon, his visa and his Passport!!!!! The final night we will get to have dinner with our lawyer Toni and any of her other clients that might be traveling, so far it is just us :(. BUT we are excited to get to spend more time with Toni. We will probably try to pick her brain more about the history of Simon's orphanage and also what is really going on legally right now.

We don't know how Simon will do out of the orphanage. We do know that he eats slowly, so we will spend a lot of time feeding him. We will have to take him on the outings listed above, IF he handles those okay, then we will be able to go do some other stuff, like show him some of the cool places we found when we were out on Saturday and SUnday. If he can't seem to handle it, we will stay in the hotel room eating :) And at least we will have some pictures to show him of his native land!

We do plan on blogging. My husband just bought a new camera, because ours died, and he has become quite the budding photographer. He got it last week and already had two gigs yesterday (a friends engagement photos and VBS photos) He was very excited about the camera for its ability to take scenic pictures and also very FAST photos. We are hoping to get awesome pictures of Simon and his birth country!!! Sadly, those pictures will not arrive on our blog until after we are home....DON"T FEAR, we will take some pictures on the ipad and some video....we will POST those right away!! :)

There is the overdue update for my blog readers. Sorry my communication is down....my mind is still mending with the news of our travel dates...I am feeling the fog of uncertainty and sadness lifting ever so slowly, and I am hopeful that when it dissipates, I might have my whole brain back from the pit of international special needs adoption of a severely neglected child.

THank you all for your support and encouragement during this time of our lives!!!!