One Week Home ... A New Normal

One week home ... we are working on finding our new normal. We came home to the most amazing friends! There were friends at the airport to welcome us home ... friends at our home when we arrived to hug us and let us know how much we had been missed. Our home had been cleaned {it took me a day or two to figure out there was no way our cats did not shed the whole month we were gone}, our kitchen had been stocked, there were welcome home signs and sweet notes everywhere in our house. We have never felt so loved!

Another sweet friend set up meals for us ... we have been enjoying visiting with friends when they come with dinner! Last night our wonderful friends brought over a huge pizza from a local eaterie. How nice to just sit and enjoy fellowship over delicious food. {Oh how we have missed American pizza.}

And so, now we begin to settle into our "new normal" ... Hope is jumping right back into relationships with friends she met during winter hosting. There have been games of hide-and-go-seek, tag, lots of playing around with my camera {Hope loves photography - one of the pics she snapped below}, and decorating her room with lots of pictures of friends and her favorite clippings from magazines. In so many ways, Hope is just like any other teenage girl - she loves Justin Bieber, One Direction, the Disney Channel, cheeseburgers, pizza, and Coca Cola. We are so blessed to have some very close friends who welcome her with open arms and love her like Jesus loved us. They treat her as if she was always a part of our family and this is what she needs - we see her after these interactions and she is just beaming.

We have one more week of just extra-curricular activities before we start back to school ... so glad we get a few more days to adjust back to the time zone here. All three girls are super excited about dance beginning next week ... Hope is so happy to be back in ballet class.

I wish it was the end of our adoption journey ... it is not. Hope and I must travel back to Latvia two more times. Once around November for a formal FINAL adoption hearing and then again a month later to finalize all of the US Embassy requirements. We have a little more fundraising to do but, for now, we are taking a short break from all that craziness as we enjoy life together as a family - Kramer Party of Five Six!