We got home last night, after a very long a stressful day, only to be overwhelmed by our families.  More on that later.  Before I go into the blog, a quick “sorry” to all my Facebook friends.  I told everyone they could follow us on Facebook, forgetting that Facebook is blocked in China!  So, none of my posts were linked over.  This will be the first post on Facebook since we returned!

A Lot to be Thankful For!

We got up Friday morning and went to the airport to find that our first flight of the day had been canceled.  This started a cascading effect that meant that we missed every flight for the rest of the day!  That is NOT what you want to have happen when you are trying to get home and see your family.  To make things worse, no one would really help us rebook our flights in Guangzhou, saying that we had to take care of it in Beijing. We called our travel agent, Todd Gallinek.

(Side note:  Todd is an adoption only travel agent out of Denver.  He is great and if you are planning an adoption, you need to go through him.  Not only is he in tune to the flying needs of adoptive families, but he is very accessible.  How many travel agents do YOU know who are willing to take your call from China at 9:00 – 10:00 PM??)

Anyway,. Todd told us there was a flight to Washington DC that left at 6:25 PM from Beijing, so to try and get on that flight.  I tried talking to China Air in Guangzhou about rebooking us, but there were about a million people who had been canceled on flights that morning and they were just too overwhelmed.  They said that we needed to fix it in Beijing.  We were supposed to leave for Beijing at 10:00AM and ended up leaving at 12:55PM.  We landed in Beijing at 4:15PM, just five minutes AFTER our flight to Chicago left!

Because of Kelly’s ankle, they met us at the gate in Beijing with a wheel chair.  The girl that pushed Kelly around was very sweet, but didn’t speak much English and didn’t really understand what we needed to accomplish after getting our bags.  When we were waiting in the baggage claim area, I saw a Chinese business man who was talking to a Western business man.  I went and told him our situation and asked him if he could communicate with our assistant from China Air what we needed to do.  At first he asked how much money I was willing to pay him, but when he saw the dejected look on my face, he quickly told me he was kidding.

By the time we got through baggage, got up to the China Air desk, received a certificate saying that our flight was indeed canceled, and then got to the United Desk, it was 5:30.  We had the China Air rep, two United reps, and two United supervisors working on our situation, but the one supervisor told us that flight was already closed.  It closed one hour in advance.  I asked to please try, and she agreed, but she told us that we had 20 minutes to check our bags, get through security, get through immigration, get on the tram, and get out to the farthest terminal.  She told us there was no way we could pull that off, but we were welcome to try.  The other supervisor took us to check our bags and told the guys there to rush them out to the plane.  Then a very nice young chinese man started pushing us towards the gate.  He kept asking about times and every time I would tell him what time we had to be there and what time it was, he would get this concerned look and push faster.  He took us right to the front of the line at immigration and through two different security sections and we rolled onto the plan with about 15 minutes to spare.  I’m really not sure what happened with the time because we were standing talking to all the United people at 5:50 PM and were sitting on the plane by 6:10.  Nice …

We were told in Beijing that there were no flights out of Washington that had space, so they booked us on a flight early Saturday morning.  They told us that if we stayed in Beijing and left Saturday afternoon, they would put us up in a hotel and take care of our meals.  But, if we went to Washington, we were on our own.  We decided it was better to spend a night on our own tab in Washington than on China Air in Beijing!

As soon as we landed in Washington, we got a very nice middle-aged middle-eastern gentleman that pushed Kelly and got us from place to place.  He, too, pushed us right to the front of the line for customs and immigration and we were through in no time.  We went up to the United desk and, believe it or not, there WAS a 10:15 flight to Dayton!  We went to the counter and the agent told us that the flight was fully booked, but that she would put us first on standby.  There were twelve people who had not checked in and as long as five didn’t check in, we were on.  However, it was a pretty small plane and there was still almost an hour before the flight would close, so she wasn’t overly positive.

The other issue was that if we checked our bags for this flight, we wouldn’t get them back and we would have to spend the night without them.  They would be put on our morning flight.  So, we were standing there at the ticket counter digging through all our baggage looking for items that we could keep if we went and got a hotel!  Taylor suggested we all freshen up our deodorant right there in the terminal lobby!  It was probably a good idea, but we were to embarrassed to take such measure.

Our wheel chair guy took us through the employee security check point, which was almost empty, and we headed to the gate.  We sat there and slowly watched the number of people who had not checked in yet start decreasing.  We were the first five on the stand by list, but there were probably twelve or more people on it all together.  In the end, eight people didn’t check in, and we were on!

We landed in Dayton at midnight, about two hours past the time that we were originally supposed to be there, even with missing all the flights.  In fact, when we got to Dayton someone said that while our flight was the last scheduled flight of the night, there were a ton of delays and we were the FIRST flight to get in that evening.  I’m assuming that means that if we would have hit our original flights, we would have actually arrived home later!  God is good and he really took care of us.  There were a lot of times during the day to get frustrated and discouraged and we did!  But, in all, He took very good care of us.  And, Kelly’s injury probably saved us in a big way!

Kelly’s parents picked us up at the airport and we headed home.  Now for part two of the day!

Extreme Makeover

So, after the harrowing 30-hour day we had experienced, we walked into a huge blessing at our house.  Not only had our families spent a TON of their time taking care of our kids the two weeks we were gone, they had also (under my sister-in-law Koreen’s direction) spent two weeks working on our house!  I don’t know if I can begin to tell you all the things they did around our house and to our house.  And, to make matters worse, while we were gone there were several appliance failures that had to be incorporated into their plan!  The dishwasher started leaking, one of our water heaters started leaking, and the stove broke!  Are you kidding me???  We built this house almost ten years ago, so it is getting to that point in time that stuff will start breaking, but all this while we are gone for two weeks???

There is so much stuff that they did that I will miss something.  But, I honestly want to thank them for all the things that they did.  It was SUCH a blessing to us and to our neighbors, also.  I was stopped by our neighbor across the street who told me how much it blessed HIM to see everyone working so hard for two weeks getting all this stuff done just for our benefit.  It is really, really humbling and a few words spoken or placed on a blog do not do justice to how Kelly and I feel right now.

Here is what they did, or at least what I have found so far …

Outside

They weeded and mulched all the beds outside.  In addition, they sanded and restained the swing set and painted at least one outside door (I just saw that this morning when I was talking to the neighbor.) 

We had gotten on Jacob at one point over Skype for not going to a neighbors house to play and instead stayed around the house.  We thought he was staying home just to play PSP or something.  It wasn’t until we got home that we realized that he was staying home to work out in the yard and get stuff done.  What a great kid and we felt a little guilty.  He and Zachary both did a ton of work and Kelly and I appreciated their help.

Basement

I refinished the basement seven or eight years ago, but never quite got around to putting the trim up.  It is one of those things that I keep meaning to do, but never have gotten to it.  Not only did they repaint the entire basement, remove the cheap wall paper we put in the bathroom and painted that, they did all of our casings and moldings in the entire basement.  And, John, Chris, and Kelly’s dad didn’t just do it, they did it well.  I went back down this morning just to look at the great job they did.  It is beautiful!  The kids won’t be allowed to play down there anymore!  It is too nice!

In addition, they replaced the water heater that started leaking.  There was a brand new one sitting in the closet!

First Floor

They replaced basically every appliance we had.  There was a brand new stove, refrigerator, dishwasher, exhaust fan (and not some cheap exhaust fan, but a really nice one!  Probably one of the nicest ones I have seen), and a new washer and dryer. How humbling is that?

Second Floor

When we built the house, they didn’t do a good job with the carpet in the upstairs hall way.  We have tried and tried to fix it, but there wasn’t much that could be done.  It had started to buckle a little bit in two places.  The problem with changing the hall carpet was that you had to change the carpet in all the bedrooms, also.  I have known that this was something that was a high priority for Kelly for us to get done, especially since the carpet on the stairs was showing the wear of so many kids running up and down them for the past almost ten years.

Our family replaced all the carpet, including carpet for my office (they didn’t have that replaced because they were too worried to touch my office.  There is a lot of stuff in there and I am SURE that thought of pulling it all out and putting it back together was way too daunting!)  They replaced the carpet on the stairs, down the hall, and in all five bedrooms and closets!  It is so beautiful and it is SO soft!!  I’m thinking they also repainted a lot of the casings and moldings in the house, especially on the second floor.   It looks too white!

So, although Kelly had made it through most of the trip without crying, the long day combined with the blessing we received when we got home, was a little overwhelming to her and she cried a little last night, cried a little when we went to bed, and maybe cried a little this morning.  One of the things that she and I talked about was that we had a nice house before we left and really didn’t NEED all the things that were done.  Then we went to China where so much of this is beyond the scope of what they could ever imagine.  We are truly blessed to have family who loves us and desired to do something extra nice for us.

Update

Caleb did pretty good on his first night in the house.  I think he was a little overwhelmed and he cried a lot when he went to bed.  At one point he closed the door to our room, and I think that kind of helped him “compartmentalize” everything and shrink his universe and he settled down after that.  He is running around playing with Max and Nick right now laughing his head off.

We took Kelly to the urgent care to have her ankle xrayed.  It is huge.  They said that it doesn’t look to be broken, but the radiologist will look at it on Monday and give us a call.  They gave her an air cast and a boot to wear.

Thank you for following us for the past several weeks!  I will try and put some new pictures up as time goes on, but you know how bad I get about that!

Cameron