Last night before Beijing

Well, today was a day of goodbye's as two of our group families headed back home.  Needless to say, the remaining two families.... we were uber jealous.  We miss our girls and are ready to be back in our home.  The hotels are great and all but..... it is not home, nor is the food quite the same as eating out.  Our carpet picnics are fun with noodles, PB&J's, chips, oranges, and bananas, but its not like home cooking.... specifically I miss Mexican food :).   This trip was much easier than our last one with Olivia, less adoption drama and in all honesty a really easy trip with all the wonderful families we got to share time with.  Joel was a champ who rarely complained about the food, granted he didn't always eat much (like tonight when we hit Tai food), but he was a trooper and is a great traveler.  He always has lots of questions, some of which we know, others we don't, but we love the inquisitiveness he brings to our trips. We are already planning our heritage trip in 6-10 years with the whole family to visit both Josiah's and Olivia's home cities.  
 
We did the traditional red couch photo's with our group today at the White Swan (the 5 star hotel close by).  See the pictures above.
 
April is busy packing while I blog, of which I definitely got the better end of deal, as tomorrow we head out of our hotel back to Beijing at 5:45 am.  Hopefully the flight will go well and so will us getting a taxi to our hotel.  We plan on visiting the Olympic Stadium (Bird's Nest) and the area around it tomorrow, kids permitting. Then Saturday we are off around 11:00 am for our long legs home (4 hours to Tokyo and 9 hours more to Seattle, then 45 min to Portland, then a 3.5 hour drive to Bend weather permitting). The flight is long, but the price was too good to pass up... although now we are both thinking... what is another 900 if we could have cut out a stop in Toyko or a direct flight from here.... oh well.  We can do a lot with 900 :).   Joel made the observation that the Magic Tree House books say time travel isn't possible, but we leave Beijing on Saturday at 11:00 and arrive in Portland at 11:00ish on Saturday... so he thinks it is possible :).  Another fun explanation :).
 
We will continue to make updates to our blog, but much less frequently once we return home.  Mostly it will be about our adventures (4 kids, how can there not be something exciting going on... like the time Olivia found a small hole on our scale and got her finger stuck... and it took us almost 30 minutes to figure out how to get it out...).  We covet your thoughts and prayers as we adjust to homelife, specifically that Josiah will attach to his immediate family.  That is the downside of having an easy trip so far, we both think the attached process will be much more difficult time then we had with Olivia, she was a tough trip/transition for the first month but easy since then.  As such, we are limiting our overnight trips for the next couple of months, limiting having family staying over, and limiting guests to our home to a short quick visits, and limiting our out and aboutness.  It sounds odd, but it is not a reclusive process, rather a process highly recommended by attachment experts.  Also April and I are the ones responsible for feeding, discipline, basic needs, etc, sorry girls but you can't carry Josiah around, just Mommy and Daddy.  This is a "fun" process for both April and I as we raised our other kids more Love/Logic and Babywise methodology, so it can be a challenge for us when we desire our children to be independent rather than dependant, then when adopting we need to raise them differently while at the same time keeping the homelife "fair" for all the kids.

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