Flights are booked

Only 12 hours after receiving notification that we have a court date, our flights are finally finalized! 
I depart our small regional airport at 6:55 am on Saturday the 16th and arrive in New York at 1:50 pm.  I have to transfer over to JFK from EWK to catch our international flight.  That should be interesting.  There are four mamas traveling together.  Our children are all in the same orphanage and we have the same court appointments.

My original itinerary had a three hour time frame for me to transfer and that kind of freaked Mike out.  He spoke to a couple of people who know that transfer situation and both agree that I needed more time.  I called the booking people and was on hold for an hour.  And then the cordless house phone died.  Called back on my cell phone.  It wouldn't let me through.  Called again and finally got to speak to a human.  Sounded like she was from India and very could have been in India but she was very helpful and changed my ticket so that I could land at Newark Liberty a full 5 hours before my flight from JFK departs.  Thankfully that change only cost $100.90!  

The total cost for my flights this time comes to right at $2800.  Crazy!  The short notice certainly can be largely to blame along with the busy summer travel season.  We will all share a hotel room and food is pretty cheap, so hopefully we won't blow the budget too badly on this trip!

I get to add another country to my list.  We will fly through Moscow!  We have a 10+ hour layover in Moscow, so lots of time to see the sights.  Well, the sights inside the airport.  We will land at our final destination at 5:10 am local time, Monday the 18th.  We will visit the orphanage and our coordinator will have some additional documents legalized at the ministry that legalizes thingies. 

That was another adventure today.  We had been instructed to have new Power of Attorney forms notarized and apostilled.  This gives one parent permission to represent the other in the courtroom making it possible for one spouse to stay home on this trip.  We all thought we had plenty of time to get this done.  Until we found out today that we are leaving.  On Saturday.

After Mike got off of work we rushed ourselves and new Powers of Attorney to our friendly (and free) notary public, Kim, and got 12 forms notarized.  I then rushed the forms to the UPS store only to find that the UPS store had moved.  It was now 4:40 pm.  The truck leaves the UPS place at 5 pm, taking with it all packages intended to be overnighted.  I found the new UPS store and made it inside in time to send off the package to our good friend Betsy.  Betsy lives a lot closer to Austin than I do, so she will take our forms tomorrow to be apostilled and then she will overnight them back to me so that I can take them to the judge.

On Tuesday we will have an interview with the judge.  I am not sure what this entails.  I guess we'll find out.  On Friday the 22nd is our actual court hearing.

Each day that we are there, we will get to see the kids.  Oh I can't wait to see him and hug him again!

On Saturday the 23rd we will depart and I will get back home at 9:20 am on Sunday the 24th.