Home at last - One journey over, a new life journey begins

After leaving for the Moscow airport at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, we finally arrived in Rapid City at 8:30 a.m. Thursday. We arrived on our Jet Blue flight into Denver at 11 p.m. Mountain Time and rented a car and drove through the night to Rapid City, which took us about 7-8 hours (we slept for a couple on the side of the road in Nebraska). The kids settled well into their first experience with a car seat and were asleep in no time.

When we arrived at our apartment, Fran and I took turns first going in to meet with Shreve, who we had left for the longest time since we have owned him. Once he welcomed us home, we introduced him to his new roomates. He seemed a bit bewlidered by the people who were his size; Ruslan went right up to him to pet him, but Yana was afraid of him. But they all got acquainted in no time, and were sharing each other's toys.

It was a tough morning for the kids though. Their body clocks were totally out of whack, they had no rrgular meals, naps or anything the last couple days, and they had experienced everything from their first bus ride, air train ride, car seat, plane seat, television, elevator, escalator ... you name it. They were a bit agitated when we arrived, and they quickly began getting into trouble and soon they were finding themselves being treated to another new American phenomenon: the timeout.