News from the Air

	From: kate schutz Subject: News from the Air We are a day behind our schedule as had to spend night @ jfk... dang Delta! may be able to catch original flight to! addis

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We're on our way!

We have officially left the house for the last time as people with no kids!  We have approximately 200 lbs of luggage and all of the paperwork we need... I hope!  I'm going to have mom and dad and Luke go through it tonight just to be sure!

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What do you pack?!

We don't know what size, what she likes, what she eats or what kind of bottle she will use. Turns out, you pack a LOT. That is how you end up with 2 huge suitcases for one little girl. I think Merrie is all packed.... now I've got to work on Nathan and I! I don't think I've ever been so nervous and excited in my entire life... I've had butterflies in my stomach continuously for about a week. Think good thoughts about us getting Meron's visa as expected.... I've already told Nathan that if we do the paperwork wrong and can't get her visa we're going to have to start looking for jobs and a place to live in Ethiopia. We would do it if that was the only way we could live in the same country as our daughter, but I think I would prefer to be able to come home!

Merrie's Room

Mom and I worked on Merrie's room today. It was lots of fun and very very scary! I can't believe that we leave in less than a week!

Now all we need is 1 Merrie!

TICKETS!!!!

Look what we got in the mail today! The whole travel agent thing was pretty fun for us. I just told her when we wanted to leave and come back and she did everything! We just got this big package in the mail with tickets, luggage tags and a travel organizer. Crazy... I've always booked all of my own flights and done everything over the Internet. It feels pretty luxurious to have someone else do it for me! Notice Tewabech Schutz's name on the ticket? Her full name is actually Tewabech Nathan Schutz at the moment.... never thought I'd have a daughter named Nathan, but oh well! I can't believe they're really going to let us take her home with us!

Great Song...

How well read are you?

The story is that apparently the National Endowment for the Arts estimates that the average adult has only read six of these books. I find that shocking... and I'm betting my family will do considerably better. Let me know how you did. Here are the markup guidelines:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Star the ones you love
4) Reprint this list in your blog


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien *
3 Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling *
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee *
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman *
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women- Louisa M Alcott *
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles- Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. The Complete Works of Shakespeare - I've read about half *
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien *
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows- Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis *
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis *
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code -Dan Brown *
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving *
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery*
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding*
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi- Yann martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -*
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the dog in the night-time- Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist- Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett *
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White *
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom*
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart Of Darkness- Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare*
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory- Roald Dahl *
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Success!

We finished the floors! I think they look lovely.... and as an added bonus Mom and Dad stayed with us for 3 days. I had a wonderful time. Thanks for all of the help guys!

Before

After

Happy 10 month birthday!

It is Meron's 10 month birthday today. Hold on baby; 1 week and 6 days and we will be on our way to get you!

Tickets!

We booked tickets today, and I am really really excited. We will be leaving Minneapolis at 4:25pm on Saturday Aug 23. We have a 2.3 hour flight to JFK, then a 12.45 hr flight to Dubai. We spend the night in a hotel there, then have a 4 hour flight to Addis Ababa. We will hopefully be back in Minneapolis at 3:52 pm on Sept 1st. Really REALLY excited!

New pictures!

Presenting our daughter....

Meron Olivia Tewabech Schutz.

We are officially parents!!!!! They said we may have a visa appointment as soon as August 21, which means we would travel on August 17 or 18th, but we won't know until the 10th!

No news!?

No news today... I was told today we will hear tomorrow at the soonest! I think you should all keep poor Nathan in your prayers, as he is bearing the brunt of my insanity.