Keith reporting:
It’s our last night here, Karen and Kasen are upstairs packing, and I’m here in the business center writing to tell you all that we’re coming home! We leave out of here at 6:15am in the morning, that’s 5:15pm(CDT) Wednesday night back home, arrive in Nashville at 7:30pm(CDT) Thursday night, and should be home by around 9:30pm. For those of you who are figuring it up, that’s a little over 28 hours of travel with our new 13 month old daughter before we reach our home. Please pray for us!
We went to the US consulate today for the swearing in ceremony. After practicing and studying all night, Kasen didn’t have to do any swearing! They looked at our documents one more time, had us raise our hand and swear that our mountain of paper was “nothing but the truth”. The five minute walk to the consulate was long compared to the ceremony. But it’s now all official: She’s ours, and the US is ready for her to come home! What a blessing!
The rest of the day was spent doing some last minute shopping, starting to organize our stuff for tonight’s packing endeavor, and the taking of famous “Red Couch” photo. This is a White Swan Hotel tradition where all the babies from your group are placed on a big red couch in the White Swan, and the parents quickly try to take photos before the babies start crying. If you look at many of these photos on the web from the hundreds of groups who have done this before us, you quickly see that there is rarely a photo where at least one, if not all of the babies are crying. The photo on our website was taken one split second before Miss Kasen started crying (organized anything makes her think that an IV IN THE HEAD is soon to follow).
We look so forward to seeing you all. Thanks so much for your thoughts, prayers and words of encouragement in our guestbook throughout our trip. You kept us going, especially when times were tough. We’ll see you all in Tennessee! With love, Kasen, Karen and Keith