Homecoming

God surely heard the prayers of many on our behalf this week and granted us such a wonderful homecoming!


Celebrating U.S. Citizenship for Jinna when we landed in Detroit

Our journey from the last hotel in China to our doorstep in NC was about 31 hours, and it was pretty tiring,  but not nearly as bad as I anticipated it to be.  Our first two flights went quite smoothly, and while all the security checks and baggage checks got to be wearying at all 3 airports, we weren't stopped by anything major.  We enjoyed being able to travel with the Childs family (who we had been with all week), and also another family who just adopted and was headed to Maine.

 Our last flight, from Detroit to Charlotte, ended up getting delayed for almost 2 hours which was a pain.... and we felt even worse about it when we finally arrived in CLT to find...

A whole bunch of Wrays waiting for us!  We had told everyone to stay home and not come to the airport because we knew we would be getting in late, but they totally disobeyed me and came anyway!  On a school night and everything!  Our plane didn't get in until almost midnight, so those kids were up LATE (the latest EVER, according to Kai.  :)  ).

We stepped off the elevator and were completely surprised and overwhelmed (almost literally) by the Wray clan!  Suddenly there was a whole swarm of cousins surrounding Jinna Rai, waving posters in her face.  But our little girl is quite a trooper....even after all the changes she's endured over the last 2 weeks, and all the travel in the last 2 days, she was still able to take it all in calmly and with some smiles.

We're not sure how much she comprehends, but I know she felt like that impromptu party was pretty special because on the way home in the car she kept tracing over the letters on the signs and pointing at herself and talking away (in Mandarin).  Then she gestured that she wanted me to put them all in her special backpack -- where she keeps all her personal treasures.  She also was pretty excited to play with a little stuffed animal one of the cousins gave her.

We finally got to bed last night at about 2:30 am, and even though that was the middle of the afternoon her time, she went to sleep -- and slept all the way through until 9:30 this morning!  Thankful that jet lag has either passed us by or is just postponed for a couple days.