Shower? More like a flood.

We had an astounding show of support from my work friends and others today.  With less than a week to organize it, my buddies at my once and future work place organized a shower.  While not many people could make it on a Friday afternoon, lots and lots of people made sure we got presents for the kids.  Most of our wish list was taken care of--yay!  we don't have to shop for booster seats!--and then there were some brilliant things we never would have thought of, like kid-sized camping chairs and kid toiletries, including strawberry flavored toothpaste and Kermit the Frog bandaids. 

Our flight leaves Wednesday at 6:20 am.  Jon's wonderful brother is picking us up at 4 am.  Extra Lithuanian socks for that guy.  (Oh, have I mentioned?  Everyone is getting Lithuanian socks for Christmas this year.)  Jon did a huge job getting the rooms ready this week--cleaned out our storage space so we could move my dad's stuff from the spare rooms into there, converted the spare rooms into actual bedrooms by putting together the beds and getting bookshelves and bureaus into both rooms, and even installed the required smoke alarm. It makes me feel MUCH better to know we have places for them to sleep. 

 I still have a s--t ton of grading, then entering final grades, and we suddenly realized today that we should probably bring the kids some clothes. And undies.  And socks.  And pjs.  The Lithuanian Adoption Yahoo Group, my number one resource for all this, is a little confusing on this topic--some say the kids walk away from the care home with only the clothes on their back, while others were handed bags of clothes.  However, it also sounds like all the parents showed up with at least several full outfits.  While I know for certain you can actually buy children's clothes in Lithuania, and in some way would prefer to be able to have the kids try stuff on and have some input into color and style, I also think we don't want to be in a position of HAVING to go clothes shopping with two kids hours after meeting them.  So we'll make some guesses and get at least some things here for them.

I would love to write more, but I am dropping with exhaustion.  We'll try to keep updates coming.