Today Saturday January 19th brought departure day to us. After we woke up and had breakfast this morning, the kids decided to play hide and seek one last time. I must say that he is an amazingly good hider if hider is a word ;) After they ran out of hiding places in the hotel room i decided to start throwing pillows at people and started a pillow fight. I think I ultimately lost because everyone turned on me.
As we were getting ready to leave the hotel, I took a load out to the car and had to put a few last minute things into his suitcase. As I was putting the items in I found myself being over come with emotion. I was putting dirty clothes in his suitcase. How does someone get emotional putting dirty clothes in a suitcase I thought to myself. I wasn't crying i just felt my eyes well up and my face did something funky. I walked back into the room and Linda informed me that I looked terrible.
We loaded up the van and headed to the airport. We made our way into the parking garage and found a spot. We knew that when we left the house his suitcase weighed 46 lbs. The suitcase could not weigh over 50 lbs or there would be an astronomical fee. We learned from a family that sent their host child home last week that had several bags inside the suitcase that they could pull out and put in the carry on. Since we added the items to the suitcase, we decided to pull out a bag that had some pretty good weight to it. We got inside and met the AAI rep that was going to be escorting him to New York City. She was a very nice lady that helped us through the process. We got the bag on the scale and it weighed in at 49.5 lbs. Whew we made it (barely).
We got to security and the Rep went to check to make sure she was not going to have any problems getting him through security. There was not much said by anyone as we waited for her to come back. She came back with the all clear and the time that we did not want to come was here. All of the kids got hugs from him, followed by Linda and then myself. I picked him up and gave him a big hug with him giving me a big hug back, and not wanting to let me go as he buried his face in my neck.
It was time for him to go and they headed through the security line. As they walked away the emotions were overwhelming. There are really no words that I can use to describe the feeling. I think the thing that I would compare it to would be the death of a family member. I do not say that lightly. The pain that I felt watching him work his way through that line was real and RAW. It HURT. I moved myself around while holding Caden so that we could see him every little bit that we could. We were able to asked the TSA Agent how far we could go and he said as long as we didn't cross the blue line we were fine. That allowed us to get one last exchange with him and blow him a kiss. He made it through the metal detector and they walked around the corner out of sight.
We stayed at the airport until his plane departed just to make sure that there were no issues. We ended up going back upstairs. Where we were able to see when his plane left the gate and then watch as it took off. He was gone.
The friends of ours that had hosted in the past that you have heard us talk about suggested that after he left that we should plan some one on one time with our kids. So we thought that was a great idea and I had purchased tickets to the monster truck show in Champaign, and Linda was going to take the girls out for a girls night. this was all planed out well before we picked him up at the airport for hosting. Little did we know that he would be staying another week and be departing the same day that we had planned these things. We had mixed emotions as the day wore on. Caden was excited and knew that he was going to love it, but shortly after I told him what we had planed, he reminded me that his L@tvian friend would have loved it as well.
As the day wore on there were more and more reminders of him. One of us would say something, or someone would do something. When we got home we saw things around the house. Even little things. It is going to be a process for us to work through our feelings and we would greatly appreciate your prayers as we work through them and find the best way to handle them. This will probably be my last post for a little while however it will not be my last post. We (I) will continue to blog on occasion sharing my thought with you and trying to help others as well.
Thank you all very much for following this journey that we went on. PLEASE, I encourage you, If you were moved by reading our blog and feel like it is something God is calling you to do. DO IT! Even though today was very hard for us, and will be for a while, as Caden told me this evening, it was life changing. Yes, my 7 year old told me that what we just went through was life changing. He was absolutely correct. If you have any questions feel free to email or leave a comment. If you want to fill out the pre-application for New Horizons, you can do so by clicking the link on the left.
Thanks again!
I don't know what to say. :(
ReplyDelete