Leaving Medellin

Today we said goodbye to our apartment in Medellin. More importantly and sadly we had to say Hasta luego to Vicky. She has been a great help, a great resource, but she will always be a great friend. We hope the next time she comes to the US, we will be in her plans. And that we can return to Medellin in the not too distant future to see her again.
As per most of our plans for a day things were more complicated than was originally conceptualized. Sibling squabbles, misunderstood directions, cleaning people showing up before we left, and not having enough luggage for all the stuff made this morning a bit more stressful, but nothing bad. We left only about 30minutes later than expected.
In the grand scheme of our adoption process, we are now transitioning to Bogota and will be heading home starting next Friday. We are staying at the Club Campestre (Country Club) in Llanogrande, just over the mountains from Medellin. We stayed here a couple of weeks ago. This place has many advantages right now. For the adults- no making and cleaning up meals, for the kids- a chance to swim a lot and make new friends, it's 5 minutes from the airport so it's a quick drive on Monday, for the family psyche- it's a place we are all familiar with, but it's not the apartment in Medellin or La Casita, we are moving forward but gradually. It's a great place to transition. Once we start going to Bogota and the US the pace of change will be much quicker. Some of the girls deal with change better than others so this is a good median.
We arrived between 12:30 and 1pm. Besides people on the golf course we seemed to be the only ones here. Most of the afternoon was spent in the pool all by ourselves, except for a woman who did some lap swimming just before dinner. By dinner time there were at least 6 other families in the dining area. Because this is a 3 day weekend the club should be pretty full tomorrow and Sunday.
We need to make a skype call to Mercedes cousin Laisa tomorrow, to start introducing the girls to Laisa and Eric before we see them in Miami on the 21st. Inserting a break from the pool may be a bit complicated, unless the weather is bad.
We may try to skype with others this weekend too.
Coming back here to LLanogrande I could not help but notice how much the girls have changed since we first came. They seem stronger both physically and emotionally, they seem to handle conflict much better and have learned to make decisions faster when it comes to the menu (it helps they know this menu very well). We know how they are going to interact around here, so we feel more comfortable too. The staff here knows them and tomorrow they are looking forward to spending time with one of the weekend recreational staff, Alexa, who they loved spending time with the last time we were here. On our way to the club, we saw a lot of military presence on the road, then we saw a helicopter. We assumed that Alvaro Uribe had landed. He has a farm around here, so most likely it was him.

Sorry, no pictures today. We were so busy cleaning our apartment and trying to move everyone out of there that we neglected to take pictures. We will take pictures tomorrow.