Early morning phone call.

Much to our surprise we received an early morning call this morning. Jaiden decided that he needed to talk to his mom and just called. We talked for a long time about the daily happenings at home and how he's doing at school. I can happily report that all is well on the home front. He just needed to have some one on one time with mom. Boy I love that kid!! Before we called it a night we had a quick math lesson on the time zone differences. He was surprised to learn that 3:30 PM in Utah means 4:30 AM in Karaganda. Does the time difference really matter? Not as far as we're concerned. We're having a heck of a time adjusting - living on short naps at this point!

First Days at the Orphanage!

Our first visit to the orphanage was on Wednesday morning at 10am. There are lots of beautiful children to pick from. We spent the morning playing with children and getting medical information for those we were interested in. The morning was pretty emotional. They say very rarely do parents pick the same children. Wouldn't you know that would happen to us! After lots of prayers we felt that Anya wasn't meant for us and went to our new friend Aspa from Philly.

During our morning visit Larisa, she's our facilitor, mentioned that hey had twins available and offered to show them to us (Xenia and Sophia). Given the lateness of the morning, we only got to spend a few minutes with them but asked if we could see them again that afternoon along with another child named Olga. By the time, we got back to the orphanage that afternoon we had decided that we would just play with the twins. The twins are beautiful Russian girls with blonde hair and blue eyes. When we got back to the appartment that night I felt like something was missing but decided we should spend another day with the twins.

We spent today with the twins and I still feel like something isn't quite right. We're going to ask if it would be possible to see a couple more children tomorrow. There's one child that really stuck out today in the baby room and we feel like we better ask before we settle 100% on the twins (this baby has dark hair). We'll see what tomorrow brings.

We have internet and cell access now!

Sorry it's taken so long to send out an update. We arrived in Karaganda late on the 22nd. Our appartment is amazing - better than we ever expected! They installed our internet connection last night so we've been reading and trying to respond to emails as fast as we can. I can happily report that my cell phone is finally working - a huge thank you to Jared for making a few calls. I think Zac was pretty surprised to hear his phone ring during class (oops forgot about the time zone thing).

We're on our way!

We left our Sunday morning to make a 1:21 PM flight to Denver. After lots of tears (mostly from mom) we checked in for our flight and made it to Denver around 2:30. From Denver we flew to Frankfurt, Germany, then to Astana and finally arriving in Almaty on January 22nd around 2 AM. The temp. is 22 below and it makes the weather in Utah seem warm! We'll be leaving Almaty in a few hours for Karaganda and thankful that this last flight is a short one. We're getting excited to go to the orphanage but a little scared at the same time. Life will never be the same. We'll post another update as soon as we can. Hopefully our next post will contain pictures of our new addition! Thanks again to everyone back home taking care of our boys!

Travel Plans

We received approval late last week to go ahead and book our airline tickets. We'll be traveling to Kazakhstan on January 20th.