WE ARE GOING TO LATVIA!

We got our Court Date!!! February 10th! Now we can try to get everything ready. I am so happy that we finally know when we will see our girls! However, this means we will be gone for Reagan's birthday :( and Valentine's Day. I don't really care about V-day, but it is breaking my heart to know I won't be with Reagan on her 5th birthday. We will have her party on the 6th before we leave and I know grandma will make her day special, but the mommy guilt is eating me up inside. Please be in prayer for all of us as we are apart. I know everything will be okay, but it is going to be hard.

There are so many things to think about to get ready to be gone for 2 1/2 weeks! I will never have everything as organized as I want it to be! I am so blessed that I have a wonderful mom who will come take care of my kids!

We called the girls to tell them that in 25 days we will see them! Their reaction wasn't what we expected, so I am not sure if they didn't understand or they already knew. It seemed like it was old news to them, like "okay, that's great." They were trying to tell us something about January 21 being Agnese's birthday, which it's not, so we were really confused. They tried over and over to tell us it was her name birthday. After we hung up, Tim googled it and found out that they do some kind of Name Birthday celebration. We will have to look up more info and figure it all out. They were excited about it, though! It's funny to hear them say January, it sounds like "Yanuary"! I tried to say a few things in Latvian, but they didn't understand. The communication is getting more and more difficult and I am starting to get frustrated! I just want to see them so bad! When they left at the end of July, I promised I would come knocking on their door in Latvia, and now it's so close to being that time! We were not able to mention adoption to them (although it did come up a time or two) while they were here, so we have not been able really let our emotions show in front of them. I hope it doesn't take long for them to understand how much we love them and that God brought us together in His perfect way.

This process is so different from a China adoption. I wish we had a better support system like we did with Reagan's adoption, as far as from the adoption agency and in country facilitators. We traveled to China with such an awesome group of families and we had our guide/translator with us all the time. They also made all of our travel arrangements as well as cultural tours, dinners, etc. We only had to worry about taking care of Reagan! With Latvia, there isn't a set process where everyone experiences pretty close to the same thing. Everytime I have a question for our caseworker, it seems she doesn't really know. She is great to find out an answer, but it would be a much better feeling if we were more confident in their knowledge of how everything works. I am also nervous about making our own travel arrangements and having layovers in countries we know nothing about. We are not experienced travelers at all! It is a good feeling to know that God is with us wherever we are, and with all the girls, too!