Safe and Sound!

All five of us made it safely to Ukraine. Hooray! It has been quite a day. (Warning! There are lots of pictures in this post.)

We departed our house around 11:30am Tuesday after lots of photos while we were waiting for Daddy to secure the house. 2 large checked bags, 3 medium checked bags and all our carry ons. We needed two vans to get the luggage and us to the airport. The boys were very comfy in their warm up suits.

Grammy was very sad to say goodbye to these three! 

So thankful for all Grammy & Poppy's help getting ready for this trip. 

Our last family of five photo before take-off at the airport. The boys were truly delightful on our flights. So excited and enamored by all the new experiences and very agreeable. They didn't sleep much, which means I didn't sleep much, but they did great. 

They were very content with the new things I packed in their backpacks. Some things I gathered this summer and some things were gifted to us over the last couple weeks. 

Booking tickets one week in advance, there is not a lot of hope of getting perfect seats all in a row. Praise God that on our first two flights, the person assigned to a seat in our row (which kept us from being together) just happened to NOT show up. As a result of that, we were able to reshuffle so we could be together. How cool is that?! Especially on our 9 hour flight from Charlotte to Munich. 

 All the flight attendants and people we worked with were so helpful. We even met a couple sitting one row ahead of us who were on their way to bring home a 14 year old boy they were adopting from Ukraine after hosting last Christmas. What fun connections!

21 hours after leaving our house in the United States, we arrived in Donetsk, Ukraine. We were brought to our hotel in Gorlovka. (The same place we stayed on our last trip.) We were given a bigger room to accommodate all of us. We enjoyed a yummy supper of veriniki, pancakes with meat and borscht in our hotel. (Which we all shared since our appetites were not that big.) 

The boys are all tucked in and sleeping (after quite a bit of wrestling to get them to settle down!) We certainly made our presence known with the paper thin walls. Lots of giggling! I'm ready to go to sleep. Let's hope and pray they sleep long!

Next up… Thursday in Gorlovka -- free time to wander and get adjusted. 

Friday we depart at 7am to go to Irina's orphanage to gather her for court!!

Thank you for praying. One step closer...