Dad's Perspective

Since Kristen has been doing all the posting, and I've just been the technical engineer, thought it was about time for me to post. So here goes:

Adoption is one of the most rewarding and fulfilling life changing miracles I have ever experienced. I dreamed last night that the Father was telling me clear as if it was spoken "Alyssa is My child whom I love dearly. Bring her home and introduce her to Me."

Imagine if your son or daughter was on the other side of the world, what would you do to get to your son or daughter as fast as you possibly could to take care of them and bring them back home. That is the way I feel about Alyssa (and all my children). I believe that's the way our Father feels about everyone of us.

I am thankful for everyone that cared for Alyssa here, and that made it possible for us to bring her home.

Now to some more technical stuff that Kristen said might be useful for others venturing this way:

Things that worked well:

1. Apple's Airport Express is awesome! Just plug it into power and ethernet cable (most places here do not have wireless) and instant wireless network for your laptops, ipads, ipods, touchpads, iphones. $99 at apple store and best buy
2. Also awesome is Seagate GoFlex Satellite. It's a wireless 500g drive that you can stream movies and music to all your wireless devices mentioned in #1. So you can have 500g of music and movies at your disposal on your 8g ipod without having to have the space to load it on every device. We used it on the flight from US. Battery lasted about 8 hrs of the 14 hr flight with everyone streaming movies and music. You are allowed to use it on flights when they say you can, even through it is using WiFi. It's $200 at best buy.
3. JVC Everio camcorder with 32G flash memory. take videos all day then pop the sd card into the laptop and move the movies onto the Seagate Goflex hard drive. only issue here is battery life is about 2 hrs even through the card will hold 4 hrs of hd video.
4. I was surprised that most devices will plug straight into the wall without adapters or converters. We plug all the apple devices into the usb ports on the laptop to charge.
5. VPN - Make sure you have a good vpn before you leave. Stuff is blocked pretty randomly, but mostly anything you would want to get to is blocked. VPN express is a good free one.
6. Translator - Google Translator for iphones. I said what i wanted to say to my iphone and it repeated it in Chinese for the hotel folks (we need more towels, toilet paper, etc. were good uses) The hotel folks were impressed with the app, made life easier on both ends.
7. Skype - Free way to see/ and talk to folks at home.
8. Talkatone - iphone app that lets you call 10 digit #s at home for free and talk as long as you want. uses voice over ip on your wireless connection, just make sure you have airplane mode on or it could try to use your minutes instead of the wireless.
9. iphones can text other iphones for free over wireless. IOS5 allows iphones to text each other over the wireless internet without using international text messaging, otherwise it would cost .50 per outgoing msg. You can tell if a person has IOS5 by the color of your outgoing text to them. If it is blue they have I0S5. I was told by AT&T that incoming texts are free (since you can't really stop them), but we'll see when we get home. Of course we can't check our bill online like we could any other time, since we added international calling to one of our lines just in case of emergency at $6.99 per month, now when we try to look at our usage, it says it can't show it to us for a month because we changed something about our plan. So you might want to add international calling more than a month before you go if you want to be able to monitor your usage. AT&T also said it may take months for international charges to show up on your bill, so AT&T has fixed it so there's almost no way possible for you to manage your cell phone expenses while away. Thanks AT&T. Kristen's phone is staying in airplane mode with wireless enabled, so we know she's not using voice or data on AT&T's network. My phone has airplane mode off, but I have turned off data roaming, 3g, and push for emails, so I should not incur any charges. Also make sure you turn off voice mail while you are gone. If someone calls and you don't answer, if they leave you VM it will charge you $3 per minute while they are leaving VM, so make sure you turn that off. If someone does call me, unless its an emergency, I'll wait until i get on wireless and use talkatone to call them back, so no cost for the call.

Things that didn't work well:
1. Short list really. We did purchase some power converters and adapters that have basically not been used. I guess you should take one just in case your region does not have compatible plugs, but we have not needed them.

Well that's it for me.