Turat, Ready or Not Here We Come!

We can't believe it, the time to pick up our son is finally here. We are leaving tomorrow for the adventure of our lives!!! We have a plate on a plate rack, that we write on with a dry erase marker, in our kitchen, and we have been counting down since we got our travel dates. Megan has faithfully changed it everyday and today it said one more day until we leave to go get Turat. We have been packing, preparing documents, and getting details together of leaving our children home, for over a month now. At this point if it isn't done it isn't getting done. So I guess you could say we are officially ready. We will be traveling for at least 24 hours, including 4 planes, 3 layovers, and 4 different countries including Germany, and Turkey. We should be arriving to Kyrgyzstan around 2am on Jan. 2nd. We will have someone at the airport picking us up and taking us to our hotel. We should have a little time for a nap and then the facilitator for our adoption agency is suppose to come and get us sometime that morning to take us to the orphanage. I get chills just thinking of the moment we see Turat for the first time. Most people don't know this but Turat was officially ours, on paper, on December 19th. We did receive new pictures of him on Dec. 23rd which was a great Christmas present. We haven't seen pictures of him since October. He seems to be getting stronger, and bigger. Also he is sporting a new hairdo these days. They gave him a buzz hair cut. They do this in the orphanage for lice sake. I guess he will have lots of time to let his hair grow when we get him. We will hopefully be posting a picture of him on our blog as soon as we get him back to our hotel. That means by the time everyone here in United States gets up on January 2nd we should already have him.

Turat ready or not here we come!!!

Baby Shower for Turat Andrew Stahnke!

We were so blessed to of had a baby shower for Turat Andrew on Friday, Nov. 30 . We are forever grateful to our mothers and our great friend Mary for putting this together for us. We knew when we laid eyes on some of the things that we had from our other two girls that it wasn't going to cut it for Turat. We had car seats from when Alisha was little, which makes them 16 years old. I don't think that will pass safety inspections!!! We had so many things we needed to get before we brought Turat home, and with this baby shower we got just about everything we needed. We were grateful for everyone who came. We felt so loved!!! We even had my dearest friend Ginger, who I have known since junior high, come up from Columbus with her husband and children. We spent the rest of the weekend with them and had a blast! However, for the first time, it all felt so very real that were going to be holding our little one in our arms in just about a month. We put out everything around our home including the high chair, so we could get use to the idea that a baby is coming. This is a little weird for us because it has been 10 years since there was a baby around the house. I don't think anything can prepare us for the shock we are in for, but we are excited for whatever adventure we are going to have. Thanks again for everyone who has been so supportive and uplifting throughout this process.

I loved the game that my mom came up with to have us feed baby food to our team member, and they had to guess what kind of baby food it was. Cain loves food, but he didn't like any of the baby food that he got to try. He got all of them wrong!! Thanks a lot Cain, we lost !

We loved the bib that we got that said "I was worth the wait".

My friend Ginger and her family!

My friend Mary and my sister in law Chrissy with their girls!