On October 28, we received the call we were waiting for, telling us to pack our bags for Kazakhstan.  Our departure is scheduled for November 26, the day before Thanksgiving.  At first, we were a little disappointed at the month of "waiting time" before our travel.  As that departure date has approached, however, a month no longer seems nearly enough time to get everything taken care of!  What would we possibly done if we'd only had a couple of weeks to prepare?

And we thought we had done pretty well up to this point.  For instance, in anticipation of being out of the country on November 27, we had an early Thanksgiving.  On a Saturday in late October we celebrated Turkey day in fine style with some of our best friends in town, the Beams and the Pleuddemans.  We had a great feast,  played football, watched football, and laid on the floor.  I think we all convinced ourselves that it really was Thanksgiving.  Jen, Heidi and Grace even wanted to shop on Sunday.

On a more serious note, we also had paid attention to vaccinations.   Travel guidelines suggested Hepatitis vaccines and flu shots, and we took care of these.  The hep vaccines in particular require three separate shots spread out over several months, and we had time to get two of them in before we travel.  Steve was also surprised that the shots hardly hurt at all.  Less pleasant was the financial side effect.  They weren't cheap.  Ouch!

As our pretravel days have rapidly dwindled away, so has our complacency.  The stress has really gotten ratcheted up over the last two weeks.  Our teaching jobs have been one of the major sources of anxiety for us.  We'll be on family leave for the last two weeks of the fall semester, and we've both been fortunate to have generous faculty willing to teach our classes during that period.  However, preparing for those two weeks in advance has been taxing, to say the least.  There have been review sheets and exams to write, consultations with faculty, lesson plans to lay out, and grading to be completed.  All this while we still keep the classes running as usual.   In effect, we're trying to cram 5 weeks of teaching into 2 weeks.  Steve keeps telling Jen that we should take the cue from our students.  They try to cram a whole semester's worth of material into one night of studying!    Jen didn't even laugh the first time Steve made that joke. 

We've been going over our checklist of formal preparation:  We've received our visas, and we've made copies of our important documents.  We've purchased our plane tickets.   Jen has worked hard on packing and buying necessities for the trip.  She's taken care of purchasing gifts for our facilitators, interpreters and drivers.  She's bought icebreaking treats for the kids at the baby house.  She's mostly cleaned out an entire Walgreen's Pharmacy (and probably the entire city's supply of over-the-counter antihistamine).  Steve has put together the book of family pictures for the court proceedings.  He's also trying to figure out exactly how to make sure that we can get an Internet connection in Kazakhstan.

In terms of preparations, then, the "Roller Coaster" analogy has pretty much been tossed out the window.  It's been replaced by the "Tennis Court" analogy:  at the beginning of the process, we stood at one end of the court with a tennis ball machine on the other end.  The balls would sent over to us and we'd smash them back.  Then the balls started coming faster.  and faster.  and faster.  For awhile, by racing around, we could still return all of them.  Now we're just trying to get our rackets on the balls.  A few just hit us in the head.  Fortunately, we can still manage the really big ones.  And in spite of all the challenges that we're facing in getting ready for our trip, we know what it's all about.  We can't wait to meet our son!