travel & getting settled

i want to remember everything about this journey to bring Lena home, so my goal is to blog a lot while we are here!  so for a while, this will just be a place where i have a little journal of our trip.  some days, i may just link matt's blog because we'll both be blogging.

on saturday we hugged hazel & anders tight one last time & then their grandparents pulled out of the driveway with them.  the kids were great, but we were so sad to be saying goodbye to them...in the big picture, we know around 40 days isn't that long & more than worth it to get our daughter home, but saying goodbye to the other 2 was so hard.  we love those rascals & have not been away from them very much before.

just look at these guys, how would it ever be easy to say bye to them?!:)

our dear friends paul & heather took us to the airport at noon.

please note matt's focus in the backgound, so much to get together before leaving!

we went xna --> chicago --> zurich --> kiev.  we had a long layover in chicago where we sat down & watched arkansas basketball & the SEC football championship before the 9 hour flight.  

chicago

we found zurich airport to be fascinating... awesome architecture, tons of windows with beautiful views of green hillsides & swiss snow covered mountains in the distance.  it was just beautiful.  

zurich

we got into kiev around 6pm and it was interesting to gate check Lena's wheelchair the whole trip here & dream about what it will be like to do all of that with her.  our driver (taxi's here are very expensive, so our facilitator set up a driver) took us to the grocery store & onto our apartment in kiev, where we got settled & i made us a delicious ukrainian dinner...kidding, but it wasn't that bad.  then this morning we met with our facilitator to discuss some details then she & her husband walked us around kiev for a bit.  

dinner: bread, cheese, summer sausage, bananas, chocolate snack cake type thing

breakfast: cheerios, milk, instant coffee that we brought from home

olga, alex & matt in the kyiv apartment

independence square

restored building close to the president's office, quite interesting with statues of rhinos, frogs, mermaids & rope

line of ukrainian flags outside of the president's office, meaning he is there today.

great first day, now to battle some jet lag & try to stay awake through dinner and tomorrow, our first appointment!