The Time Has Come

On Tuesday night we went out for our last dinner as a family of 5. It was fun to hear the kids talk about how excited they were that it was finally time for us to go get their brother. They also talked about all the things they were going to do with papa and grammy while we were gone. It is a long time to be away but it is nice to know that they are in good, loving hands.

The final additions were added to the bags on Wednesday morning. I am not sure I really slept on Tuesday night between packing, preparing, thinking and the excitement about finally getting to China to bring our little boy home.

We went from Sioux Falls to Minneapolis and then on to Seattle. We boarded the flight in Seattle for Beijing, China.

This was home for our 12 hour flight. The goal of the flight was to stay awake as much as possible since we would be landing at 9:00 pm China time. We wanted to crash and hopefully avoid too much jet lag.

Eric followed through and slept very little. I on the other hand slept all but probably 2 hours. I think my body finally crashed after the week of preparing. Every time I tried to read a book, watch a movie, read a magazine ... anything for that matter I would fall right back to sleep. Needless to say the trip went fairly quickly for me!

We watched the map on the plane and my stomach did a couple flips when our plane finally landed on Beijing on the map.

We then moved through the airport to costumes. We had hardly set foot in China and I already got in trouble. I got yelled at as I took this picture by the official. I neglected to see really large "no photo" sign - oops! We then proceeded to get our visa and passport stamped. The official looked at Eric and and at his passport pictures numerous times. Eric is about 3o pounds lighter now than in his passport picture so needless to say it doesn't even look like him. Finally he asked Eric it the picture was really him. After Eric said "yes" he finally let us through. I am bummed that we didn't have enough hands to have our cameras out. As we came out of customs there was Tina with a sign that said Eric and Julie McDonald. It was fun to be one of those people at the airport that someone was holding a sign for.

We got to our hotel room about 10:30 pm China time which was 8:30 am Sioux Falls time. We were ready to crash even though I had slept most of the last 12 hours. As I crawled in to bed Eric tried to plug in the converter and his power strip to charge his computer. Within seconds sparks flew and all our lights in our room went out. We ended up having 3 hotel staff in our room trying to located the fuse box and get our lights back on. About 30 minutes later they had our lights back on and we were ready for bed. Eric crashed and I took a sleeping pill to help me crash as well.

So all in all the trip was uneventful until we hit China. I guess it is all about making memories. We had a couple good laughs our first night in China. We can't wait to see what other memories are to be made in the days to come.

I know I am way behind on the blog and am hoping to catch up in the next day or so. It seems like either the Internet wasn't working, I couldn't get on my site to post or there just wasn't time. The last couples days have been wonderful but the most important days and pictures are yet to come. We are almost there.