We’re Going To India!!!

We can finally share… we’re headed to India!!! We are so incredibly excited and anxious to meet our sweet little girl! We wanted to post a blog update with some details of our trip and ways you can be praying. We hope to post some updates over the next few days and weeks as well here or on Facebook depending on how travel goes and how much free time we have while we’re in country.

A little background first… many of you know what a challenge it has been to get our daughter’s passport issued and have been praying for that to be resolved. We so appreciate your prayers! This past Thursday  we received an email and message from our daughter’s orphanage director asking us to travel to India to attend the passport appointment with them on July 27. Our adoption agency confirmed that it would be good for us to travel so that we can hopefully help get the passport finally issued by being there in person. We will also have our adoption agency’s in country guide with us to help at the passport office along with another family who is also adopting and in the same situation as us. So after a lot of phone calls and decision making we booked our flights!!

Before we leave for India we will have to test negative for Covid. We have a specific test we have to take within 72 hours of our flight that leaves the US so please be praying that our Covid tests will be negative and that the results will come in quickly! Our appointments for testing are on Wednesday at 1:00pm so you can be in prayer for that!

We will be flying out on Saturday, July 24 at 6am to Chicago where we will have a 6 hour layover before flying to New Delhi, India. That flight will be about 14.5 hours. From there we will have a layover for 3 hours and then a 3 hour flight to Bangalore, India. We will arrive in India at 7:30 pm on the 25th (10:00am on Sunday - Michigan time). So our total travel time from when we get to the airport until we land at our destination in India will be about 30 hours. Please be praying Saturday and Sunday for us especially as we will likely be dealing with exhaustion and the stress of international flights and travel and luggage! Please pray that all of our flights would go smoothly with no delays or cancellations and that our luggage and paperwork would all be in order as well. 

When we arrive in Bangalore on the 25th in the evening we will check into our hotel and have the 26th to recover and rest. At 10am on the 27th (12:30am Michigan time) we will be meeting our guide and the orphanage director at the passport office for our appointment. Please be praying that everything goes smoothly at this appointment!! This is the biggest step in the whole process and the one that could most affect our trip and how long we are gone. We are praying that the passport office will agree to issue the passport quickly and there will be minimal stress getting it issued! If all goes well, they will get it printed quickly and mail it to our daughter’s orphanage within a few days.

If all goes well at the passport appointment on the 27th, we will likely fly out the 28th to our daughter’s city where we will meet and bond with her while we wait for the passport to arrive in the mail at the orphanage! Please pray that the passport arrives quickly and there are no issues mailing it! 

Once we have our daughter’s passport in hand, we will travel with her back to New Delhi where we will spend 5-7 days doing the remaining appointments such as a medical appointment, embassy visa appointment and waiting for our exit permits. We will also need to test negative for Covid again to be allowed to enter the US. This is also a little stressful because if we would test positive we would have to quarantine in India and we are a bit unsure what that would look like. We would love for everyone to be praying for all negative Covid tests!!

As soon as we have all those things completed we will be booking flights home!! If all goes well our agency estimates the trip will take 15-17 days total. We are hopeful for that and would love your prayers for that also! 

Please most of all be praying for our sweet little girl and our two boys at home. This will be a huge transition for all of them in different ways. For our daughter, it will be very scary to leave all that she’s ever known and go with people who are essentially strangers to her. At 2.5 years old it’s going to be very hard to understand and so confusing and frightening. Please be praying for her heart… for peace for her and for quick bonding with us. Pray that she knows quickly how loved she is! For our two boys, this will be the longest we have ever been away from them. They are so excited to get to spend time with grandparents but we know there will probably be days where it’s hard on them and hard to understand how long we are gone. Once we come home they will be wanting a lot of attention from us and our daughter will be needing a lot of attention also. Pray for us as we navigate that and navigate having 3 little ones who are all trying to adjust to their new normal.

Once we are home we will likely be sticking around home as much as possible for while and slowing life down quite a bit to allow us all to bond and recover from time apart. Please pray even now that the time we spend together would be refreshing and that we would adjust smoothly into life as a family of 5!

Thank you so much for all your prayers!! We are praising God that we are finally to this point in the process and at the same time realizing that this is just the very beginning of the adoption journey. We can’t wait to introduce our daughter to all of you who have given financially, prayed for and encouraged us over the last 2.5 years. God has been so faithful and we trust and believe that He will be faithful and go before us in these next few weeks and months!!