The Final Stretch

Well, here we go. The week is finally here and man is it a busy one.

Last night (Monday), we had Meet the Teacher night at school. The kids found out who their teachers are and seem to be really happy with who they got. Andrew got the teacher that Jakob had last year. He has had the same teacher as Jakob 3 out of the 4 years at this school. Weird. The teachers notice how different they are right away. Jakob is shy and reserved. Andrew is outgoing and quite a jokester. Always trying to get the ha-ha's.

Tonight was their first fall baseball game. Andrew plays up a grade on Jakob's team. They won the game, but really didn't play all that great. Pretty rusty. It was the first game with steals and kid pitch from a mound. Lots of easy steals and walks.

Tomorrow is the first day of school. I am taking the day off from work to get ready for the trip. Trish has done 99% of everything since day 1 of the adoption saga a few years ago and has done an awesome job. We are mostly packed, but have a lot of loose ends to tie up. Hopefully I can make myself useful the day before we leave and not get too much in the way. I can vaguely see a method to her madness, but it's hard to keep up because she changes it so often. She has some sort of a system and I have no desire to mess it up.

Thursday we leave KC. Layover in Salt Lake City. Land in San Francisco around 6pm. Our flight out doesn't leave until after midnight, so we are going to rent a car and sightsee to burn some time.

Friday we fly. And fly. And fly. And fly. 14 hours or so. Brutal. My legs are already getting antsy. Also, we lose like 15 hours. So strange. My brain hurts just thinking about where exactly that time goes. It like goes into some temporary storage in the sky until we fly back.

Saturday morning around 6am we land in Hong Kong. Hopefully we get some sleep on the plane so we can be awake most of the day to get used to the time change quicker. China is 13 hrs ahead of KC. Pretty much exactly the other side of the Earth. Should be some cool stuff to check out.

Sunday we fly from Hong Kong to Chongqing, like a 2 hr flight or so. This is where we stay for the week. It's one of the biggest cities in China, so we should be able to find some stuff to do.

Monday is THE day. Gotcha day! We meet Maria early in the afternoon and a new journey begins.

So there's our last week as a family of four. Gonna be a doozy. We'll keep you posted.

Kraig