Heading to China

Got our bags packed! Although I ended up changing what
luggage we actually took.. Paranoid about carry on restrictions.

It has been almost a full week since we first left Texas and headed into the unknown. We really didn't know what we were getting into with adopting an older kid. Then again, adoption is full of the unknown! These kids have a history we may never fully know, a background that will never be uncovered. Adoption, for us, isn't just to have a family, although that is the biggest bonus of all. No, it's all about them; to give them hope for a future, love, and the security of a family. 

It seemed like we had already been flying forever!!

So there we were.. 2 months of turning our lives inside out and spending a crazy large amount of money that was miraculously just handed to us by friends, family, strangers and churches. All for a kid, a teenager, that we knew nothing about except for snippets of information from people who had met him, from the orphanage (which is known to usually be less than accurate) and a tiny handful of pictures. We boarded a plane with our sometimes unpredictable child, stayed in the air for over 24 hours, and landed on foreign soil. All for a kid we didn't know!

Little Mr. Plane-rider

The first city we landed in was Beijing. We were so tired we left one of my bags at the airport with all of my makeup, all of my power cords, my favorite blankie, and computer mouse :( I was sad but grateful that it wasn't anything too important. Our next stop was in Lanzhou, the city of our new son. I'm unsure what time we arrived, except that it was dark. We found our guide immediately. He loaded us up in a bus with all of our belongings. He explained that it is unsafe to leave our luggage underneath the bus because people just grab bags and take off. 

After what seemed like 10 minutes, our guide was waking us since we had arrived at the hotel. We were standing at the check in counter when he told us to just go up to the room. The next day I thanked our guide, named Tom, for taking care of us and getting us checked in because we were barely aware of what was going on at that point. Tom said that we were barely conscious when we arrived and that now he understood we had been traveling for so long. When we left Lanzhou, the airport was nearly an hour away. I asked him if it was the same airport, and indeed it was. We literally passed out on the bus!

The next day we met Liam. Stay tuned for more on that!