Tonight's the night! Well, actually tomorrow's the morning...

Wow. It seems like we've been counting down and anticipating this forever, but we are finally here...sort of. Nastya's flight from Kiev to JFK was delayed for almost two hours and so she missed her connection in New York and had to be re-routed to a later flight. So now we are picking her up in the wee hours of the morning tomorrow. She is going to be exhausted!

We had previously made the decision to not bring our kiddos with us and, while I'm going to be sorry to not have that family shot at the airport, I think it will be best for all of the kids this way. Sam and Trevor still have two more days of school before break and Trevor has a special concert at his school tomorrow morning that we didn't want him to miss. For those of you who know my kids well, you also know that Trevor would be overtired and running around the aiport doing flips off the luggage carousel and Samantha would be talking Nastya's tired ears off for the entire drive home (so we have two more good reasons for our decision)!

We did want the kids to be involved in her arrival so they helped make her welcome sign:


The master of the gluestick...

I will make scrapbookers out of them yet!




Welcome Nastya! (top line is welcome in Ukrainian, bottom is Russian...
thanks Anna for the translation help!)


And they helped pack up a welcome bag for her:



Sweet Samantha made the bracelet for her and helped pick out a snuggly blanket


Some of our host families live hours away from their nearest airport so I am thankful that we have less than an hour's drive to get her home. I'm sure it will be a relief for her to finally lay her head down in bed! So many questions are about to be answered and I'm sure they will be followed by many more. I'm excited and nervous all at the same time...can't believe that she's almost here!