Many adoptive parents are adopting for the first time - but a good portion are leaving young children at home during their adoption journey. We chose to tell my in-laws about what time we'd call every evening - in an attempt to have them home and also the line free for us to talk with our son. It is probably important to establish some type of "timing" to make a call with the time zone difference and it is often difficult to receive a call in to the hotel (unless you know when the front desk would have an English speaking receptionist).

We also chose to develop a web page that we could update daily -- so family, friends and co-workers could log on and know that we were safe and how our journey was going.

Another important feature is to set up a Yahoo email account and add names and emails to your address book - just in case your "regular" email account can not be accessed while you are overseas. It is helpful to also include your pediatrician number and name in the address book - we did place a call from Almaty during our first adoption while our young son ran a fever.

Nursat cards are also available at most grocery stores -- these will allow you to call from home from a pay phone and some are available to pay for your Internet access. We chose to just locate an Internet cafe for most of our emailing - but occasionally my husband would log on from our hotel (for work).

And as a back up - print that Yahoo address book prior to travel - one never knows if something would happen to your account - you'd have a back plan in place.