Bulgaria here we come!!

I am working on the premise here of "better late than never"!! I wish now that I would have been documenting our lives in much more detail over the past six months or so. So many things happening...surprising, exciting, unexpected, difficult. Words that could be used to describe most adventures.

On February 19th we will be taking one more step on our latest journey. We fly to Washington DC, then Paris, and then on to Sofia, Bulgaria. Nearly 24 hours total travel time. We will be met by our Bulgarian attorney (Toni) on the 20th. She will also act as our translator. We will spend the 21st - 25th in Lukovit meeting B. We will be with him at his orphanage each day for several hours in the morning, and then again in the evening. We will return to Sofia on the 25th for the weekend. On Monday the 28th we head out to Plovdiv to meet L. We will be in Plovdiv until the 2nd when we will return to Sofia. We head home on the 3rd.

One unique aspect of adopting a waiting child (a child with special needs) from Bulgaria is that once we return home, Toni will be our representative in court and the legal process will all take place while we wait here in the US. Once that is completed they will legally be our children and we can go and bring them home! The wait time between trips is usually 3-5 months. We are praying to be able to return to pick them up by the end of July (of course, we hope that the time will be much sooner, but in our initial -- also known as unrealistic planning-- we also thought we would have them home by Christmas......) since the Bulgarian government goes on a summer break from late July to early September. We don't want our process to grind to a halt during that time. We pray and trust that God's timing is perfect, a truth He has shown us over and over!

We have no doubt that we will be changed by this trip. Experiencing the orphanages is something that we are both anxious about -- how we will respond to all that we see. We don't want to remain the same and are eager for God to change our hearts to be more like His. Neither of us have ever traveled internationally, so that will also be something new and different.

So, in only 19 more days we will see these sweet children about which we know so little, but amazingly already love so much.