Going to Tajikistan

We finally booked our ticket to Tajikistan!  I'm so excited for Kimran to meet his family (grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and a lot of extended family) for the first time.  We're going for a month in September (can't go that far and not stay for a while) when Kimran will be a little over 3 years old.  We've been preparing him and getting him excited about going.

One night before going to bed, we told him that we're going to Tajikistan and asked him if he wanted to go.  At first he said "no" but when we showed him how excited we were to go, he said "I want to go" in the tone of voice he uses when he wants something now.  The next morning when he woke up, he said "I want to go to Tajikistan."  Of course he said that - how does he know what September is and why are we talking about this so early in the year?  As we walked out the main door of the house to go to daycare, he stopped at the entrance, held my hand and looked up at the sky and asked "where is the plane?"  And I just said, "if it were only that easy that we talk about going one day and go the next day and how wonderful, that the plane comes and picks us up at the door."

And then a few weeks later while putting him in his car seat after picking him up from daycare where he heard me telling his teacher that we're going to Tajikistan, I told him we need to take 3 planes to get to Tajikistan.  He looked at me, then at the sky and in a very contemplative manner said "mommy, I don't know how to go in the clouds."  "Oh, Kimran" I said, "the plane will take us in the clouds."  And now everytime we see a plane in the sky (which is very often since we live about 10 minutes from an international airport) I point out that the plane is going take us in the clouds.

We've had a look at our travel route on the map...from Canada (Vancouver) to the United Kingdom (London) to Turkey (Istanbul) to Tajikistan (Dushanbe). 

I've already started thinking about the things we can do when we're there...like baking a cake with his grandmother (whose cakes are amazing) and looking at rocks with his grandfather (a geologist). These are some of the things Kimran loves to do and won't it be great for him to be able to do this with his family in Tajikistan?