There's No Place Like Home

If only it was as easy as clicking your magic heels a few times to return home!

After several flights on United U-suck airlines, we made it home safe and sound Friday night around 11:30 pm.

Clara Rose was happy to explore her new home in the wee hours after we arrived at our house. She honed in on the toy piano and played a symphony of sorts.

We are all pretty tired and discombobulated today. Josie isn't doing so good with the jet lag and not getting to sleep when she wants to.  Clara Rose is faring better than we expected with me taking on more responsibility with her care. She is more accepting of it if Wim is not around than if he is home. She also isn't too fond of the cat. Wait until she gets a load of Phoebe!

Here is Clara Rose today enjoying some soup for lunch just before nap time.

Wim brought Gabrielle and Xavier over to meet Clara Rose today and to see Josie. They are going to spend the rest of the weekend with us and will be with us most of this week and next weekend as well.

It was a long travel day back home. We started on Thursday-- we had to go to the US Consulate Office again to pick up Immigration papers, passport, and Visa for Clara Rose. Then we flew to Beijing and stayed at a hotel overnight there. The hotel wasn't a lot to write home about, but it was very clean and had softer beds so we had a good night's rest.  Josie Dong Dong didn't want to get up the next day!

We all managed to pull it together and had a good start to the long series of flights that eventually brought us home.

We definitely had some interesting encounters at the airports on this trip. When we flew to China, we met and chatted with Jane Liedke, the founder of Our Adopted Daughters from China. When we were at the Beijing Airport waiting to check in, we ran into our guide from Josie's adoption trip, Veronica! We were all quite surprised at this chance encounter and had a nice talk while waiting in line. Veronica was definitely the best asset to Great Wall of China Adoptions and we were happy to see her and for her to be able to see how much Josie has grown.

From Beijing we flew to Tokyo Japan and had a couple hours to kill there. What an innovative idea to have small play areas at the airport. Just what the girls needed to burn off some steam before boarding the very long flight to the states  at 11 hours it was 2 1/2 hours shorter than the long flight from Chicago to Beijing!

The flights weren't the greatest. In all their infinite wisdom and custoomer consideration, United did not have us seated together on most of our flights-- not even remotely close together leaving us to try and work it out with other passengers on the plane. This did not work out so well and we feel like we mostly wasted the money we spent on the extra seat for Clara Rose as we didn't really get to use it. Hence, United-- U-suck airlines. My new name for them.  On the bright side, nobody got sick on the flights and all our luggage made it home with us.

At home we were very suprised and HAPPY to find some snack waiting for us. THANKS MICHELLE! The girls played a bit, we had some yummy food, the girls watched a little Dora and everyone was off to bed around 1:00 am.