Saturday, March 24, 2007

Finally, pictures of Kolkata!

I will TRY to post more pics. Some of Delhi next time and our new daughter at home.

A really narrow road that made me nervous.
Cool three wheeled truck. We would have great fun with one of these out here at the farm.
Victoria Memorial.
Bike powered rickshaw.
This would be enough to give you a headache.
Speaks for itself!
Flowers strands strung in a doorway.
Man powered rickshaw. Traffic.

A neighborhood in Kolkata.
A building across from our hotel.
The girls, sacked out!

Monday, March 19, 2007

We reached home!

Sorry I hadn't posted sooner, we have been so tired and our internet was out for a day and we got home a day later than planned as we had another flight added, by the airlines,to our route home. We were just so tired after all the plane changes and the rushing inbetween them and such that we stayed a night near our final landing spot. It felt so good to just rest and know that we wouldn't have to get up the next day and fly somewhere, but to be able to just drive ourselves home. About 5 hours later we were finally reunited with our sons again and it felt really nice.

Guess I still have Delhi belly. I thought it was Mcdonalds that made me sick but now I am rethinking that it may have been the bottle of pop that I drank. I was so careful about this and only drank pop that had been bottled by Pepsi. This pop had the same name, but after I drank some of it and realized it had a different taste to it, I looked and didn't see that Pepsi logo on it. Opps! So, now I am blaming the pop. I am starting to feel better though.

Sananda is still doing well, she loves to eat. I weighed her today, she is 18.5 pounds. We all are still just trying to adjust to a new time zone. I will try to post some more pictures tomorrow.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Olivia and our driver on embassy day with thier ice cream.
Sananada with her chopsticks and Daddy with his. This one's for you Bill!


Sananda likes Lemons!


Olivia in her cute Indian outfit!



My baby is all smiles! It sure is worth all the time it took for us to get here, hard but worth it!




Sananda and her crib neighbor, Daya. What cuties!





Sananda in her cute Indian outfit!






Hi all,

It has been a few days since I could post, sorry bout that, this trip really takes a lot out of a person and my time on the internet has been pretty limited.
We were able to meet with another family adopting through our agency, they just picked up their little girl too. We found out that they were in cribs that were next to each other. I will post a picture of them together.
We met a second family who has adopted from our agency. They are here to pick up their boy this time from another area, but wanted to visit their daughter's agency. It sure was good to talk to them.
We were sad to leave Kolkata and are finally getting used to Delhi, but we now leave tomorrow night. This may be my last post from India. We have had a few mix-ups here in Delhi, but overall we are having a good time here too. This country is so beautiful, but it is hard to not be able to help all we meet that have such need. The driving here is crazy and fun, can you imagine that they talk on cell phones here while they are driving too.
We were able to see the President's Garden which is only open a couple of times a year. we couldn't take pictures though, due to security reasons. It was beautiful and very large.
We ate at a Chinese restaurant at our hotel. The food was very good, but we are not used to such service. Just for you Bill, I will post a picture of Sananda with her chopsticks. :)
HAPPY BIRTHDAY JAVIN, we have some great video that you and Isaac will love to see! I hope you had a great day! Can't wait to celebrate with you when we get back home!
Jessi is REALLY enjoying her stay too, as all the men are madam this and madam that to her. What's up with that??? The rest of us are not getting much of that treatment. They even brought a coat rake to our dinner table to hang her purse on. %)
We are ready to come home and see our boys, wish it didn't take so long to get there.
I am feeling a little sick today as I decided to get brave and eat at McDonalds here just to see what it tastes like. They even have a doorman there and delivery. The delivery car is a red moped with a large yellow M on the side of it.
So much has happened here that it is just too much to mention here.
Our driver for Embassy day took a liking to Olivia and bought us all ice cream bars from a street car vendor. Yes, we did eat them, hope we don't all get sick. We will post a picture of her and driver with their ice cream. Thanks Deb, for your recommendation of hiring this guy!!

Friday, March 9, 2007

Pictures!!


Our sweet Sananda!

We have our sweet baby girl!!!! We all went to the orphanage to pick up Sananda. When they first handed her to me she just stared at me for the longest time. She is so cute! She cried some on the way back to the hotel but after that she didn't fuss much. She even gave me a glimpse of a smile that night. Since then we have gotten to see more of a smile and she plays patty cake with me, crawls, smiles (a little) and waves bye bye. She even says mama and dada. I think she likes her picture taken, we have so many of her already. I will try to post some on another computer as this one isn't letting me do it.
Besides the fact that it is not always easy to communicate to others and that things are a little slower here due to the fact that we just have never done anything like this before, we are loving it here in India. The weather is great, the people are friendly, the food is great, the shopping was fun, The car rides are really fun, and most of all, we are finally with our baby girl. The hardest part of this all is that we are just so tired. We did get a long time to sleep last night but of course I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep. Sananda slept through the night for us.
I just wanted to comment a little on last times post. The reason we didn't get our luggage to the right airpport is that the airline told us that they would send it straight to Kolkata and they didn't. So, we had to go file a claim for it and that is why we ended up missing our flight. So, for those of you are are still waiting to travel, if they tell you that the luggage is going straight to Kolkata and you have connecting flights, please be sure to check that it is really going to happen that way. It really did turn out ok. While we were waiting for James to find our luggage with some guy, there was a man who waited with us. He brought us chairs to sit on and entertained Olivia, he was so nice. And while we waited 5 hours for our flight we got to see alot of cute Indian kids and we dreamed of meeting Sananda. We also meet a couple of nice ladies from South Africa, who were touring India.
Our second flight was a lot more fun than the first now that we kinda knew that the plane wasn't in trouble everytime there was some turbulance.

Thanks to those who have commented. It is really nice to be able to communicate this way and we love reading them.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Here we are!

We finally got to Dehli!!!!! The ride was a little scary as this was the first big plane any of us had ever taken. We checked into our hotel room at 2:00 A.M. We barely slept,then we were off to the airport early in the morning.
We get to the airport and they tell us that our luggage is at the other airport and that we have to go back to get it and then we will miss our flight. Or we can leave our luggage in Dehli, that was not an option. So we now wait for the night flight and will have to get our daugther a day later than planned.
We get to the first airport to get our baggage and end up waiting an hour while they took my husband who knows where to get the suitcases. They finally come back and we wait 5 hours at the airport to fly to Kolkata.

We are finally here and once again without much sleep. But, we will get Sananda in about an hour. YEs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I will post more another time.

A GLITCH ?

We were checking papers and realized that we forgot to notorize one of them that we needed. This happened on a Sunday and we thought we may not be able to leave til the next day. Everything seems to be popping up at the last second to throw us off, but we are on a mission and we will perservere. We called our agency and they told us that just within the last two weeks, this notory signature was no longer required. Praise the Lord!, another answer to our prayers.

Monday, March 5, 2007

"SMILE"

Last night we left home and hugged our boys good-bye. We miss them so much already!! We picked up some more things we knew we would need and drove about half-way to the airport to stay for the night. We don't want to be late!! We were exhausted already. After some much needed sleep we are ready to go to the airport today and get on the plane to make our way to Sananda. :)

There is a song that had been playing on our radio station for quite some time while we were still waiting for the judge to sign our guardianship papers. Thanks to our friend Joel for helping us to locate this song and the lyrics! If you have a chance to listen to it, do.

It is called "Smile" by Chris Rice.
The chorus goes like this:

I just wanna be with you.
I just want this waiting to be over,
I just wanna be with you,
and it helps to know the day is getting closer,
every minute takes an hour,
every inch feels like a mile,
till I won't have to imagine and
I finally get to see you smile!

With all of the pictures and video that we have received of Sananda, we still have yet to see her smile. So, this song has helped us some with getting through the waiting period.

Well, we better get back on the road. We will post as we can.

We miss you boys!!!!!

Friday, March 2, 2007

Finally getting ready to go.

Hi, we are James and Lynda, we have 4 kids at home now and are getting ready to bring our little Indian blessing home. We are packing and making sure everything is in order for us to travel to get Sananda. There is much excitement as we all antipicate this trip. It felt like this day would never come, but it has. We leave for India in just a few days!!! It is awesome to see how God has worked everything out each time a new problem would arise, and there have been many of them. Like I have heard many others say, this has been a rollercoaster ride. Well, the hill climbing is over and we are finally getting to the fun part. Soon our daughter will be in our arms. I will have to say that part of the climb was fun though, as we have been blessed to meet many wonderful people along this ride who we never would have known otherwise. There was also the joy of seeing our daughter's picture for the first time and all the little hints that God gave us that made us know that Sananda is ment to be our child, and how He smoothed out all the mountians so she could become ours. I feel like our cup is just overflowing with blessings this week, there are just too many to name them all, but just this week alone we received 3 new pictures of our daughter and a video. We are so grateful for these and know that Sananda will treasure them too, in years to come. Each one is so precious to us as we examine every little detail of them. Many thanks to the families who traveled ahead of us and took them!!

Here is one of the pictures we recieved this week.
I can hardly wait to hold our little Indian cutie in my arms!

It snowed and drifted alot here yesterday and today, James made it all the way home from work, but got stuck in our driveway. Some wonderful neighbors came by and pulled the truck out of the drift and then plowed out our drive. It doesn't really look all that bad here but some of the drifts were around 3 feet deep.

At this point it looks like the weather will cooperate for us to get to the airport on time. Yes!!