Touchdown!

We are back in the U.S.!  We arrived at out hotel in Charlotte late last night after about 30 hours of travel.  Our plane rides went as smoothly as could be hoped for, and nobody was sick.  Thanks for your prayers!  We got some decent sleep last night, and we're getting ready for the last leg of our trip, the drive home.  Daniel (He is asking people to call him that, although he doesn't necessarily turn around when you call!) is already finding Meiguo (America) to be a new experience.  Most of the food at breakfast this morning was unfamiliar to him, and he asked me why the TV was all in English!  He is in love with the weather.  I hope he won't be disappointed the first time it rains!  Daniel has already had his first lesson in American technology: how to reset the time on a hotel alarm clock after you lose the setting by unplugging it to see what will happen.

Last day in China!

Today is our last day in China!  I am more than ready to have more space to live in, to have a convenient way to get clothes clean, and to not have to walk out to a restaurant to eat!  Also ready to get rid of whatever bug is making my tummy not feel good.  We have been taking a few chances with our food, and apparently I'm now paying for one or more of them.  :-(  At least I'm just a little uncomfortable and not actually sick.  Tim and Daniel (he is asking people to call him that, although he doesn't always answer to it yet!) are feeling a little off too, and Esther has a cough and has complained once or twice about her ears hurting.  So yeah, I think we're all ready to be done with traveling!  It has been good to be back in China, though, and to get to see our friends in Jinan.

We had our consulate appointment yesterday, and in less than an hour we are supposed to get back Daniel's passport with his immigrant visa in it.  He will officially become a U.S. citizen when we go through Customs in Chicago, although it will take a while for him to get his Certificate of Citizenship in the mail.

On our way back from our Consulate appointment we added a bit more information to the mystery of Daniel's academic history.  Apparently he has been going to school for seven years, the first two at a school for the blind and deaf (maybe that explains why he sometimes uses signs when he wants to eat or use the bathroom, even though I understand both phrases perfectly well in Chinese?) and the most recent five at another school for children with disabilities, where he has been repeating first grade over and over.  This story just keeps getting stranger!  His math and reading skills do seem fairly basic, although the reading at least is more than I would have expected from a first-grader.  But he is obviously very bright and interested in learning.  I don't know if he has just been underestimated, or denied opportunities to learn, or if there could be a learning disability involved as well as low vision...we will have to think carefully about what kinds of assessments we try to get for him this summer.

Well, I'd better get back to packing.  We will be getting up about 5 AM tomorrow, so I don't want to be up late tonight!!

more about siblings

So, yesterday morning, Esther and I came back from breakfast after Tim and Huang-huang did.  We came in the door to find Huang-huang lying on his tummy drawing.  She said, "Mommy, he's using your pen!  He didn't ask!"  I reminded her that it was my pen, and if I had a problem with him using it I would take care of it myself.  Then she lay down next to him and started kicking him.  She was removed, and instructed to take off her shoes.  Instead, she lay down next to him in another spot and recommenced kicking.  She was removed again, and told again to take off her shoes.  Instead, she grabbed Huang-huang's electronic translator (which she is not supposed to touch without permission).  After a time-out and some intervention from Daddy, she finally had her shoes off and settled down to draw in her notebook.  She looked over at Huang-huang drawing, went and lay down next to him, and colored peacefully in parallel.  Okaaaaaay.

So, yeah, we go back and forth.  There are times when the two of them laugh and play together and have a wonderful time, and there are times when Esther is pretty aggressive.  Yesterday evening I got tired of removing her and just told her that if he whacked her back that would be her problem, not mine.  Other than some half-hearted complaints, he pretty much ignored her pounding on him.  He lived with a group of smaller boys at the orphanage, so I gather he is used to being beat on and doesn't take it  too seriously.  At least, I hope that's the reason and that he doesn't think she's the alpha female of the family!  He has commented at times that she is naughty, cries a lot, and gets her own way a lot.  He doesn't sound particularly unhappy about it.  In fact, he's pretty indulgent with her most of the time.  He let her take his turn using the hotel door key a couple of times, gives her piggy-back rides on demand, etc.

During our first 48 hours as a family of four, Esther got a couple of time-outs for hitting her brother and attempting to spit on him, but now the problem behaviors we're seeing are more along the lines of accidentally-on-purpose hurting (stepping on him instead of over him, or playing really rough) and hitting/kicking/pushing him away when I am carrying her and he also wants to hold my hand or put his arm around me.

The most problematic behavior that we had from Huang-huang early on--which was probably an attempt to be helpful to his new family--was that he was intervening (as in, running to grab Esther or to grab something out of her hand) whenever Esther did something that he thought she shouldn't.  That did nothing to help the sibling relationship, and also made it harder for us to discipline her.  (It was also pretty irritating when he tried to discipline her for things he does himself, like  picking everything up to examine it!)  After a talk (with the help of our guide) about letting parents do their own job, and a few reminders that I am the Mommy and he is not the Mommy, things got much better with the physical intervention.  He still tells her off a lot, and there are times that we get really tired of hearing "Esater, NO!" and "Satop!"

One of the vignettes that I will remember about them from early on is the morning we went to do our adoption paperwork, less than 24 hours after our first meeting.  Esther really wanted to sit near Huang-huang, so they both go in the back seat of the van together...and then proceeded to spend the rest of the ride encroaching into each other's space and tattling about it.  Oh, yes, we are working on the tattling.  At first I welcomed it as an improvement over physical confrontation.  And I think in some ways it is helpful for both kids as they get a feel for what our behavioral standards are and whether they are the same or different for the two of them.  But I tell you, the "Mommee, ni kan ta!" ("Mommy, look at her!") and "Fu Huang shouldn't be doing that!  He didn't ask!" get real old real quick.  I think it is slowly dying down a little bit, as they start to realize that (on Esther's part) we really prefer to take care of our own interpersonal  issues without her "help" and (on Huang-huang's part) that we really are aware of what his little sister is doing and are in control of the situation.

Esther still says she doesn't like having a brother.  I think what she really doesn't like is having to share us with him.  When it's just the two of them, she certainly gives every appearance of liking him.  It is hard that both of them particularly want my attention.  Esther tends to become a Mommy's girl when she needs reassurance or is feeling out of sorts, and Huang-huang can talk to me and not to Tim, so he tends to gravitate towards me.  So Tim and I have been working hard to make sure that both children get periods of my undivided attention.  Sometimes that has meant splitting up and having Tim do an activity with one child while I do an activity with the other.  Thankfully, Huang-huang is not at all pushing Tim away (as some newly adopted children do with one of their parents) and is quite happy to go with him, especially if he's doing a more interesting activity than I am.

This afternoon we're all going to go swimming.  Huang-huang has been counting the days until he got his TB test read and was allowed to get his arm wet again, and today is it!  His TB test, by the way, was virtually non-reactive.  So, no chest x-ray and no regimen of pills.  Hurray!

Proof that they do get along some of the time!

The last few pictures are from Huang-huang's birthday.  He told us that it is a tradition for somebody to smear icing on somebody's face.  (I wasn't clear on whether people smear icing on the birthday child's face or whether the birthday child smears icing on others' faces.)  Esther asked me what we were talking about, and when I translated she begged to have icing put on her face.  So they both had fun icing up each other's faces.  :-)

Proof that they do get along some of the time!

The last few pictures are from Huang-huang's birthday.  He told us that it is a tradition for somebody to smear icing on somebody's face.  (I wasn't clear on whether people smear icing on the birthday child's face or whether the birthday child smears icing on others' faces.)  Esther asked me what we were talking about, and when I translated she begged to have icing put on her face.  So they both had fun icing up each other's faces.  :-)

More about Huang-huang

I really want to post some more pictures, but the internet is slow again and I don't know where the camera card is.  So I thought I'd share a few of my observations on Huang-huang instead.

Likes: anything electronic, music, amusement-park-type rides, asking questions, swimming, airplanes, Uno, and shopping (at least if we're buying something for him).  Oh yeah, he also likes a lot of people, including teachers, ayis, friends, and now his family!  :-)

Dislikes: waiting!!  He's not a fan of long walks, either.  I've been a bit disappointed about that, since I like to explore and he's not much fun to explore with.

Personality:  curious, intelligent, friendly, confident, affectionate, smart-aleck, unselfconscious, willing to try new things, and did I mention curious?  (In the van on our way from the airport yesterday, after Huang-huang and Esther had both just asked a whole series of questions, our guide turned to me and said, "They really are brother and sister, aren't they?)

Likes to eat: fried rice, eggs (fried or boiled), dumplings, noodles, watermelon (or pretty much any other fruit--we have two fruit-lovers now!), tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers (especially smashed cucumbers with vinegar sauce), chicken wings, cilantro (yech!), eggy tarts and yogurt drinks

Doesn't like to eat: eggplant (he says it makes his lips turn black),spicy food, fancy food, or large amounts of meat.  He has told several poeople now that he can't use chopsticks!  Actually he uses them as well as I do, but prefers a spoon.  Apparently that's what he's used to from the orphanage?  One morning at breakfast I was eating my hashbrown with chopsticks when I looked over to see that he was tackling his breakfast with a fork!

Would like to own: a USB docking device (or any other electronic "toy," probably), a remote control helicopter, rollerblades, and a three-wheeled motorized vehicle (I'm not sure how best to describe it, since we don't have them in the U.S.)

Lest anyone worry...

We are all doing fine.  I didn't try to post on Sunday because the internet was so slow, and since then we've been too busy celebrating Huang-huang's birthday, packing, and traveling to Guangzhou.  We are here in our new hotel now.  I will try to write more tonight, but I may or may not get to it.

Linette

Saturday morning in China

Ack, I have so much I would like to remember and not enough time to write all of it down!  I will try to at least get the highlights down in the blog.

So, I think I got us through our paperwork on Tuesday morning.  Tuesday afternoon was shopping.  I had only brought one outfit for Huang-huang from the U.S., since I wasn't sure of his size.  So I wanted to get four or five more shirts and a few pairs of shorts.  On a friend's advice, we went to a certain supermarket RT Mart) which is not too expensive.  With the exchange rate having changed since we were in China, it is no longer any cheaper to buy clothes here than it is to get them discounted at the places I shop in the U.S., so I was just going to get what we needed to get us through the rest of the trip.  Huang-huang told us that he prefers T-shirts over polo-style shirts, and he likes the colors yellow and blue.  We found several shirts that fit him (though some were a little big), but only one pair of shorts in the entire store!  The shorts in the children's section were all too small, and the ones in the adult section were all too big.  Afterwards we went to the KFC attached to that store, so Esther could play in the (very small) play place.  At one point she had to go to the bathroom.  It was a rather upscale bathroom, with squat toilets (of course) that flush automatically.  So every time poor Esther tried to squat down over the toilet, it started making a loud noise and sending water rushing and gurgling under her.  She decided she didn't need to pee after all. Overall she has been doing well with squat toilets, although at first she wasn't sure what to make of them.  (About the third time we entered a public bathroom to find that our only toilet options were the squat variety, she exclaimed, "Not again!!")

Wednesday morning was the zoo.  I tell you, one could spend a lot of money in that place!!  The entrance fee was not high, but like a lot of public parks in China, it has all kinds of amusement park rides, which you have to walk past in order to get to the animals.  Both kids were raring to get on some rides, but we told them we were going to see animals first.  Then we came to a little...I don't know whether to call it a trolley or what, but they're pretty common in zoos, a bunch of open cars strung together.  The lady in charge of it was Absolutely! Determined! that we needed to buy tickets on this thing to go around the zoo.  We didn't understand, she said!  It runs until six o' clock in the afternoon!  You can't see all the animals by walking; it's too far!  I finally convinced her that we were not going to buy tickets.  We did see almost all of the animals by walking, and I was less tired than I am by the end of a trip to the National Zoo in DC.  It's a nice shady zoo, with lots of walking paths and some pretty interesting animals.  We paid extra to go into the marine house.  I thought it was rather overpriced for the number of animals inside, but we did get to get right up to the seals' swimming pool and see them from a few feet away.  Their keeper had them do tricks for fish.  After we had seen all the animals we were going to see, as well as the inside of several bathrooms, we rode a few rides on the way out.  I picked out bumper cars, since I have been wanting to take Esther on a bumper car ride for a long time.  She had as much fun as I thought she would.  :-)  She and Tim rode in one car and Huang-huang and I rode in another.  I let him drive ours, and I think he had fun too!  Although he did a couple of fast back-ups into the wall that were...neck-rattling.

Wednesday afternoon Tim was picked up by his colleague from Shandong University to go give a scientific lecture.  I planned to take the kids to the bookstore to look for an electronic translator.  A while into naptime, Tim called to say that he had been asked out to dinner with some colleagues, and was I okay with having both kids by myself through dinnertime.  I said sure.  Then as we were out looking for the bookstore, I got another call saying that it was just Tim and his colleague for dinner, and could we come.  So we spent a very long time trying to find a taxi during rush hour on a street where taxis couldn't easily pull over.  When we finally got to the campus, it turned out that there were going to be multiple colleagues there after all.  It was a rather formal dinner, which meant some expensive and unusual dishes (I think I spotted a sea cucumber in my neighbor's appetizer soup, although mine happily contained some less exotic seafood).  There were some more "normal" dishes as well, but Huang-huang didn't really like any of them, so he dined mostly on watermelon slices.  By the end of the dinner both kids were getting up and wandering around the room, and Esther was so tired she was about at the end of her rope.  However, the meal was slightly redeemed for Huang-huang because the wife of one of the physics professors turned out to be a music professor who had once given lessons to one of his orphanage directors!  So they talked about music and their mutual acquaintance for a while, and that was good.  There was also a rather lively discussion (in Chinese, so I'm not sure what was said) of different customs in China and the U.S.  It was nice for Tim to see his ping-pong buddies again.

Thursday morning was the orphanage visit.  That requires its own post, I think.  Thursday afternoon I let Esther take a three-hour nap in hopes that it would improve her disposition.  Afterwards she and I went to our friends' apartment with some dirty laundry while Tim took Huang-huang to Walmart to look for clothes.  They got one T-shirt but struck out again on shorts.  So I got a little one-on-one playtime with Esther.  Our friends gave us some little crackers and a fishing net, and we went out to the little stream that runs through their apartment complex, fed the goldfish, and tried to catch some.  Then Esther went wading a little bit and got her feet covered in muck.

And I had better get off the computer and start getting ready for the morning.  On tap for today: the science and technology museum!  I'm gathering that Huang-huang is looking forward to going, since he reminded me at least ten times yesterday that we were going to be doing that today!

What you've been waiting for!

I finally have a moment to post pictures!  I didn't post any before coming to China because our agency asks us to keep our child's personal information private until after the adoption is completed, and I haven't had a good moment to sit down and access pictures on the computer since Tuesday.  For those of you who don't know us personally, I can now share that Huang-huang's special need is albinism, as I'm sure you can see from the photos!

The first photo is of Huang-huang signing the paper saying that he wants to be adopted by us.  The other two are from our trip to the zoo yesterday.

So much happened this morning that my brain is full, and I'm not going to attempt to blog it right now.  We did have our orphanage visit, and it went well.  Esther has been struggling the past 24 hours or so--dissolving into tears at the least little thing, and ignoring us when we tell her what to do or not do.  So we would appreciate prayers for her adjustment, and for her rest!  I'm guessing that tiredness is playing a big role here, although there are plenty of  potential triggers to choose from!  I'm going to try to spend some quality one-on-one time with her this afternoon, since she did get rather shunted aside at the orphanage this morning.  On the bright side, our sleep patterns are slowly falling into line--this morning we all made it till 5AM!

Our second day together

Zao shang hao!  (Good early morning!)  It is 5 AM.  Tim and Esther are in the bathroom eating a banana and trying to be quiet, and I'm done sleeping.  At least we haven't woken up Huang-huang yet.  I was worried that he wouldn't be able to fall asleep at nine last night after taking a long nap, but he lay down while I was finishing up some business on the internet, and he was out cold by the time I finished.  I made it until 4 AM this morning.  I was still sleeping soundly when Esther suddenly woke up and announced that she couldn't sleep anymore because it's too dark and she's scared of the dark.  So she went and lay down with Tim.  He managed to keep her in bed until 5, so hopefully we are slowly resetting her internal clock.  I am sure looking forward to the day that we can wake up at five or six in the morning!

Yesterday was our first full day as a family of four.  Our hotel's buffet breakfast is included in the price of the room, so we went down there as soon as it opened.  Over breakfast, Huang-huang started showing off his English.  He doesn't know very many words, but he told us "banana," "apple," "yellow" and "blue," as well as the names of some letters and numbers that he saw written on signs.  He also knows "stop."  Between him and Esther, we have heard that quite a bit.  It was a really fun breakfast getting to interact with him.  I think he got a little bored, though, with how long it took me to finish up!  I am a slow eater at the best of times, and yesterday I first got Esther's plate and then went back to get some egg and tomato soup for Huang-huang (because he had said that tomatoes are one of his favorite foods) before I got my own plate.  It is nice to be able to see something that I know he will like and provide it for him. 

After breakfast, I prepared the appropriate number of gifts to give to the officials who would be processing our adoption paperwork, and then we met our guide  in the lobby and got started on our tour of governmental offices.  When we adopted  Esther all of the paperwork was accomplished in one place, but yesterday we had to go to the Civil Affairs office, back to the hotel (because we discovered that we should have a nicer gift for the police station), then to the police station, and then to the notary's office.  We almost made a stop at the bank as well, because our guide hadn't told Tim how much money he would need for the notary fee and we didn't have enough in Chinese currency, but then the guide decided to pay the fee himself and have Tim pay him back in a mix of RMB and US dollars.  I must confess to wondering if he knows a way of parlaying US currency into more money than he could get by exchanging at the bank, but if he does, that's not my concern!  Both kids fell asleep during all the shuttling back and forth, although neither one got a very long nap.

At the Civil Affairs office, a very momentous event passed by without much fanfare: Huang-huang signed a paper stating that he wants to be adopted by us!  Nobody actually thought to tell us what he was doing, but I knew how the process worked, so when I saw him signing and fingerprinting an official-looking document  I grabbed the camera and we got some photos.  He didn't act particularly impressed with what he was doing, just wrote what he was told where he was told.  He had to ask our guide for help "spelling" one of the Chinese characters.  We came out of the office with our official adoption decree in hand.  Huang-huang is now legally our son!  In the eyes of the laws of China and the U.S., he is no longer Fu Huang, but Daniel Huang [our last name].

We are still calling him Huang-huang.  He never got the letter that I sent him introducing his English name, so he doesn't yet know all the deep and meaningful reasons why we chose it for him.  But on our first afternoon together when we were talking about some of his friends who had already been adopted, I happened to tell him the English names of a couple of them that I'm familiar with.  He was very intrigued and asked, "What's my English name?"  So I showed him where it was written in the letter and pronounced it for him.  He seemed to be fine with it.

And one more thought before I take over Esther duty from Tim: our boy seems to be funny!  While we were waiting around in the Civil Affairs office, he was cracking up the Chinese adults with what appeared to be smart-aleck comebacks.  (I didn't understand what was said, unfortunately.)  Our guide told us later that he is very smart.  But we knew that already!  :-)

On tap for this morning: the zoo!

afternoon update

It's 2:30 PM, and I am the only one awake right now!  I could certainly use the sleep, but as soundly as Tim and I both sleep when jetlagged, we decided it would be good to have one adult awake to know when our kids get up.  I don't know if Huang-huang normally naps after lunch (a common Chinese custom, which even many of my university students followed), but he fell asleep in the van this morning on our way from one governmental office to another, so I asked him when it was Esther's naptime if he wanted to rest, and he decided that he did.  Esther also fell asleep at one point during our long paperwork morning.

So, back to yesterday.  After our guide left, Huang-huang pulled out a memory stick that he had brought with him and started playing some music.  It turned out that it was a recording of him singing!  He played us several  songs, and then we asked him to do something quiet while Esther took a nap.  So I lay down with my waaaaay over-tired younger child, and when I got up, Tim had pulled up some photos on the computer and Huang-huang was looking through them.  So we both sat with him and looked at pictures, and I pointed out who some of the people were and where some of the places were.  Then Huang-huang started playing around with the computer, and pulled up QQ (popular Chinese chat site) on the internet.  I already can't remember exactly how things happened, but he communicated that he wanted to chat with his friends, and I communicated that that was okay.  I hadn't quite realized that it would involve downloading multiple programs onto our computer.  But anyway, he got it set up to his satisfaction (changing the picture background on our computer while he was at it), and then showed us some more music files and some pictures of him and his friends and teachers that were available to him on the internet.

Eventually Esther woke up.  We let Huang-huang choose where to eat from a set of options, and he chose McDonalds.  He didn't eat as much as I had expected, but said that he was full.  When we came back to the hotel, he immediately got on the internet again.  We are definitely going to need a translator to help us lay down some ground rules about internet usage!  Actually, after watching him go through the routine several times (he opened up the computer first thing when he got up this morning, and checked it again as soon as we came back from all our paperwork), I think he is just checking QQ for messages the way Tim and I check our e-mail.  That I can handle, I just don't want him going off into his own little internet world for  long periods of time.

Whether for sound or misguided reasons, Huang-huang seems pleased to be going with us.  (He was looking at our passports while we filled out paperwork yesterday, and at one point he  said "Meiguo" (America) and kissed the passport!  Today he wanted to know where his passport is.  (We'll get it on Friday.  Or possibly Monday.)  He likes to be physically close to us, and he likes to talk to us.  So things are going as well as could possibly be expected.  It is frustrating not to be able to communicate everything we would like to, and it is rather awkward being together 24-7 with a near total stranger, but that is par for the course.  This afternoon we are going to go out clothes shopping.  I only bought one outfit for him in the U.S. (plus essentials like pajamas) since I wasn't sure about his size, so now we need to acquire several more shirts and shorts.

My cold is slowly getting better, and Esther's seems to be as well.  No-one else has gotten sick yet.

more details

It's 6:03 AM, and I've been awake for three hours already.  Tim said he was awake most of the night.  Esther made it till four, which is great since she whispers and rustles once she wakes up.  All of our tossing and turning had our son up by five, which is probably not a bad thing since he went to bed an hour early last night and will likely do the same tonight.  I am really glad we had the last couple of days to recover before meeting him, because yesterday was the first day since we've been in China that I felt really human for most of the day.  I was still pretty glazed over by bedtime.

So anyway: our first meeting!  We had, as I posted earlier, been told by our guide that our son would meet us at our hotel  at about 1:00.  Yesterday morning our guide called again and told us that we would be meeting our son at 2:30, and we could check in on our own anytime after 11 AM.  So we decided to stay and have lunch with the friends we were staying with, and then hopefully check into the hotel and give Esther a nap before 2:30.  Well, between this and that, we didn't get to the hotel until 2.  As we walked in, Tim spotted our son in the lobby!  And our guide wasn't there yet!  So Tim went to the desk to check in and I went over to our son and his escort to say hi as best I could.  I was worried that they had been waiting for us since 1:00, but the escort (who I later found to be the director in charge of foreign adoptions) said that they had left the orphanage at 1:00 and arrived at 2:00.  So we sat around and tried to communicate while we waited for our guide to show up.  I could tell that he was familiar with the contents of the first letter we sent telling about ourselves, because when the director asked me a few questions about our family, our son was answering along with me!  :-)  Later in the afternoon, when looking through some family pictures on our computer, he pointed out the ones he had seen before, so we know he got the pictures we sent him as well.  (Meanwhile, the front desk couldn't find our reservation, so Tim was trying to deal with that, and Esther had reached the frenetic-activity stage of sleep deprivation and was getting into everything.)  I asked our son what he likes to be called (well, actually, I asked him if he wanted to be called one version of his name or a different one).  First he said it didn't matter, and then he suggested Huang-Huang.  (Redoubling the last syllable of a child's name is a common way of forming a nickname in China.)  He was very eager to be helpful, like taking my backpack from me and putting it on our pile of luggage, and running over to the front desk to get a pen that the director needed.  Finally our guide showed up and we signed some paperwork.  I had some questions I had wanted to ask, but the director was in a hurry to another appointment (which was why they had come to the hotel earlier than previously arranged) and just said, "He [our son] is intelligent; you can ask him and he'll tell you the answers."  I did manage to discuss one bit of business that I needed her help with, and then she took off.  Tim had noticed that our room didn't have the extra cot we had requested, so our guide put in a request for that, and found that we needed to switch to a larger room.  So we went up, fetched our luggage (noticing that a crib had been put in our room!) and moved to the new room.  We had our guide ask Huang-huang some questions (e.g. about his daily schedule) and convey his answers to us.  We got one big surprise: Huang-huang told us he has been going studying in the first grade of primary school rather than the first grade of secondary school like we had been told in an update.  So if that is correct, he is not in seventh grade but in first!  That is certainly not unheard of for kids from Chinese orphanages, but it will change some of the ideas I had had about his school for next year.  He seems more literate than I would have expected for a first-grader--at least, he was searching the internet competently, which I would think would require some ability to read!  On the other hand, when I showed him two letter that we had sent to him but that he had not received, he looked at them enough to say that he hadn't seen them before, but didn't show any interest in reading them--which would make sense if he can't read well.  We also learned that he likes tomatoes, rice and potatoes, and he can't eat eggplant because it makes his lips turn black (?).  Our guide conveyed that Huang-huang goes to bed at 9 PM, but he told me last night at 9 that he normally goes to bed at 10!  But we were in no condition to stay up another hour, so everybody went to bed at 9.  Anyway, while we were talking with our guide, the staff knocked on our door with: another crib!  More discussion and a phone call later, we finally had a cot, and forked over some more money to cover the extra bed and extra breakfast every day.

Well, I don't think I can narrate the rest of the day until later, but I know some people are wondering how Esther is doing.  She told me a couple of days ago when she woke up from her nap, "Mommy, I just can't make the bad feelings go away!"  However, she has not followed through on her threat to be mean to her brother.  In fact, after about 10 minutes together in the lobby, she was complaining to me, "But Mommy, I want to sit next to Huang-huang!"  For the most part, they have been fine together.  She gets really upset when he touches her camera, and she just finished throwing a hissy fit because we wouldn't let her have his magnifying glass, but they have also laughed together and helped each other do things.  I asked her this morning before he was awake how her feelings are doing, and she told me that she is "stressed." (I didn't know she even knew that word!)  She added that if he is mean to her she will say, "Huang-huang no!  Go to your bedroom!"  I asked if she thought he has been mean to her and she said yes.  I'm not entirely sure what she is referring to, possibly the fact that he has corrected her several times (generally for something she really shouldn't have been doing, like opening the door to our room).  So there is much adjusting yet to be done on everyone's part, but no disasters so far.

We go to the Civil Affairs office at 9 this morning to finalize the adoption.  Oh, and we have been given permission to make a visit to the orphanage!  Not sure yet what day/time that will happen.  This afternoon we hope to go shopping and buy Huang-huang a summer wardrobe (I brought very little from the U.S. since I wasn't sure of his size) and an electronic translator.  I didn't want to buy a translator without being sure he would be able to use it, but I think with him along we should be able to pick out one that he can use, and there were times last night when it really would have been helpful to have one.

Nine minutes till the breakfast buffet opens!!

we have him!

I think I will get to write more later, but just in case I can't, I wanted to let everyone know that we have our son!  He is, as I could tell from pictures we got earlier, as skinny as a rail, and not very tall.  However, his voice has changed!  He seems to be just as curious as Esther, examining everything that crosses his path to try to figure out how it works.  I'm not real keen on him randomly picking up the cellphones and internet diagnostic tools of visitors to our room without asking permission, but that method of discovery does seem to have worked for him, as he knows a lot about a lot of things, especially computers.  Speaking of computers, he is waiting right now to use "QQ" (a Chinese social networking site) to communicate with his friends.  And I'd like to take some time writing up our meeting without a bored teenager taking apart our hotel phone, so I'm going to keep this short and let him have a turn!  Oh, I will say that communication has been going better than I expected, considering the limits of my Chinese.  We have been able to exchange information on most topics that we have attempted (like who is who in family photos or what our trip back to the U.S. will be like).  So, so far so good!

Sunday in Jinan

Well, I just wrote a long entry and lost it all. I don't have time to
re-type, but the pertinent points are:

We're in Jinan and doing well. (I do, however, have a cold.)

We've woken up at 3 AM the last couple of days, and really hope to
start getting more on schedule soon, especially by Tuesday morning! I
would prefer not to wake up our new son on our first full day together
by middle-of-the-night activity.

Tim just called the guide who will be walking us through tomorrow's
paperwork and meeting with Fu Huang. We are a little unclear still as
to the details, but we will check into our hotel after lunch, and it
sounds like we will meet Fu Huang at the hotel at 1 PM. That's 1 AM
Eastern standard time. Prayers appreciated!

made it to Shanghai!

Someone must have been praying!  Or more likely, several someones.  Esther showed no signs of illness the entire trip.  (She is getting a little sniffly again now, as am I, but that's much better than feeling sick on a fourteen-hour flight!!)  Our flights were smooth, our connections all went according to plan, and we got some sleep on the airplane, though of course not the quality we like.  Esther slept for the second of our two domestic flights and the middle six hours or so of our international flight.  She was cheerful and behaved reasonably appropriately all the time she was awake.  For anyone taking a long trip with a small child, I highly recommend Sticky Wicks!  (I think the current incarnation is called Bendaroos, but they were sticky wicks when my brother and I loved them.)  They're not messy, and there are lots of different ways you can play with them.  I just brought a small pack, but Esther spent more time with those than anything else I had brought for her.  Now we are in our airport hotel (and very thankful for the staff person at the Shanghai airport who helped us navigate calling the shuttle!) and looking forward to a good night's sleep before our last hop to Jinan tomorrow.  Thanks for your prayers!  We are feeling them!  Oh yeah, and our camera works again.  I charged it up a little at an airport kiosk, and apparently that's all it needed.

at the airport

After the motrin last night, Esther stopped flipping back and forth next to my back and fell asleep pretty quickly.  This morning she seems fine, although I'm sure she is tired!  Tim and I sure are.  I don't know what it is about adoption trips--we were exhausted and sick when we met Esther for the first time, and given that she has undoubtedly shared her germs with us, we are on track to be in the same condition when we meet our son.  Sigh.  Right now Esther is very, very excited and cheerful about traveling.  Actually, she has been great the last couple of days, not fussing about our busy-ness or the long drive down here.  Even last night she seemed more pleased with the novelty of getting up in the middle of the night to take medicine than she was upset with being sleepless and uncomfortable. 

I dropped my camera while trying to take a picture of Esther with our luggage and now it won't turn on.  :-(  Otherwise, we are well.

3 AM update

We're all awake.  Tim has a sore muscle in his back and Esther has a fever of 100.  They just took motrin and advil, respectively (glad we came prepared!).  Prayers appreciated.  Sigh.

leg 1 accomplished

We made it to Charlotte!  We left home a couple of hours later than we had planned--not too bad, for us.  We left the house reasonably clean, our mail is stopped, a kind neighbor has plans to empty our dehumidifiers and water my indoor basil plants, and things are generally feeling organized.  Our packing is brilliant, if I do say so myself.  The last leg of our trip, from Shanghai to Jinan, was bought separately from the international portion of our flights, so it's subject to China's domestic baggage restrictions, which require fewer and lighter suitcases than the U.S.  So we are traveling tomorrow with two checked bags (one of which has a smaller suitcase packed inside it) and four carry-ons; we will travel on Saturday with three checked bags (one of which will have a former carry-on packed inside it) and three carry-ons, and once we have our son, we will travel without anything packed inside anything else, and we should be able to make it back to the U.S. without buying another suitcase in China.  Not only that, but we should not have to unpack our checked bags (except to switch which smaller suitcase is packed inside our largest one) until we get to Jinan, because we have two nights' and days' worth of clothes and all of our airplane supplies packed in our carry-ons.  I'm proud of myself!  I have already discovered two things I forgot: my hair scrungy (easy enough to replace in China) and Esther's eczema cream (rather more problematic, but we'll figure out something).  Well, we're getting up at 5:30 AM, so I'd better get to sleep!  The next post might be from an airport layover...or it might be from China!

testing, testing...

So, I have this blog set up so that I can post to it by e-mail, since the blog itself will probably be inaccessible to me while I'm in China.  The question now is, can I post pictures?  This entry is an attempt to post three pictures via e-mail.  The first two are from our Very Fun museum trip of a few weeks ago, and the last is of our son's bedroom waiting for him (Esther is modeling). 

Here we go!

Here is our itinerary for our big trip to China!

Wednesday, June 8--drive to Charlotte and spend the night

Thursday, June 9--leave Charlotte airport in the morning, make our way through Dallas and LA and on to Shanghai.  Our longest flight is about 14 hours.

Friday, June 10--arrive in Shanghai in the evening, local time; spend the night in a hotel

Saturday, June 11--fly from Shanghai to Jinan; meet friends; stay in the guest bedroom of friends of friends

Sunday, June 12--more meeting of friends, hopefully some shopping in preparation for meeting our son, hopefully attending the weekly get-together of Christian foreign teachers in the evening

Monday, June 13--move to a hotel, meet our son for the first time and spend the rest of the day and night with him

Tuesday, June 14--sign the official adoption paperwork

Wednesday, June 15--Tim gives a science lecture at Shandong University

June 15-17--somewhere in here we hope to get permission to visit our son's orphanage and school, meet the people who are important to him and find out more about him from them

Friday, June 17--receive our copy of the official adoption decree, along with our son's Chinese passport

June 18-19--see friends and do fun stuff as a family

Monday, June 20--celebrate our son's 14th birthday!

Tuesday, June 21--fly to Guangzhou, where a U.S. consulate is located

Wednesday, June 22--first pre-immigration medical appointment for our son; besides a basic physical exam, he will get a TB test and probably several vaccinations

Thursday, June 23--free day; maybe we'll go shopping

Friday, June 24--second pre-immigration medical appointment; our son will have his TB test read and if it looks suspicious he will have a chest x-ray.  We expect the chest x-ray to be clear, but we have a couple of extra days to sort things out if they need to do more tests

June 25-26--free days for us; we will meet other families from our agency who are just coming into Guangzhou and probably do some sightseeing as a group

June 27--consulate appointment

June 28--we can pick up our son's immigrant visa in the afternoon

June 29--fly back to the U.S.  Just how I always wanted to spend my birthday, entertaining two children on an intercontinental flight!  (not)  Thanks to the international date line, we'll arrive in the U.S. (in Chicago this time) still on June 29, making it back to Charlotte shortly before midnight.  We'll spend the night in a hotel.

June 30--sleep in (if jetlag will let us), visit an Asian grocery store in Charlotte and stock up on foods our son likes, and head home

Prayer request for the day:  We have our international plane tickets, but we're still working on many other details of travel.  We'd appreciate prayers that we can book the flights and hotels that we need efficiently and economically.

tickets bought

One more (major!) check off the checklist.  Despite looking periodically all day, I didn't find any better deals than what we had saved last night, so I went ahead and bought those.  It is a pretty good itinerary on an airline we like, and considering how close we are to travel I can't complain about the price, although I'm still a little bummed about the fare that got away.  :-(  Oh well, as Tim reminded me, he got an unanticipated bonus from his university for publishing a paper this year (you can tell it's a small university when a publication is considered a matter worthy of financial reward!), and that can go towards our tickets.  At least we should have a comfortable flight.

Esther told me tonight as she was going to bed that she feels sad about getting a brother.  I had been wondering if any of her recent "processing" is related to her experience with Big girl, and I was even more curious after I wrote Big girl a note today and Esther instructed me to say, from her, "I love you and miss you."  (Actually, she wanted me to write "I love you and miss you and I don't like my brother," but I just wrote the first part.)  So tonight I asked Esther if she wanted to add a different person to the family or if she wanted it to be just her, and she said wistfully, "Just me...and Daddy!  And you."  Poor kid!  The three of us have a really good thing going on, and it is hard to leave a good thing behind and step out into the unknown, especially when it wasn't really your choice and you don't have a long-term perspective on it.  As of tonight, she only plans to spit on her brother if he's mean to her, but she intends to go away and hide where he can't see her.  And we agreed that I will carry her a lot while we're in China.

sibling rivalry

I meant to add to my post last night that Esther asked me at lunch yesterday how to say "You're not my buddy!" in Chinese.  Oy.  I'm not thrilled that she remains determined on her course to be mean to her new brother, but the girl is smart!  Apparently all my explanations about how her brother will speak Chinese and not English have sunk in.  I told her that she can feel however she likes, but we don't allow our children to be hurtful to each other. It's going to be interesting figuring out how to enforce that rule!

elation, frustration

We got our first-choice consulate appointment--June 27 it is!  (I can't remember if that was our first choice the last time I posted about it or not--we went back and forth a few times.)  We will be meeting our son on June 13, staying in Jinan long enough to see friends and celebrate his birthday on the 20th, and then flying to Guangzhou on the 21st to do the medical and visa portion of our trip.  I started looking at plane tickets while Esther was napping this afternoon, and lo and behold our ideal dates (June 9 - June 29) were also the least expensive.  I found two flights, on different airlines and leaving out of different cities, that were good--not "gotta grab 'em up like hotcakes" good, but quite acceptable--and since the prices were very similar and they each had unique advantages and disadvantages, it was hard to decide which one we wanted.  So I played around a little bit figuring out what aircraft we would be on and whether or not it would have cool features like personal video screens on the back of the seats in front of us...and JUST as I was about to buy the flight we had decided on, it went up.  By about $400.  Per person.  So I went to check on the other airline that had flights we liked, and--same thing.  Meanwhile our internet slowed down to a crawl, which made double-checking all possible travel sites an agonizing process.  Several hours later, after lots of stress, way too much time on the internet, time out for a few necessary domestic tasks (like eating cereal for dinner), and finally remembering to stop obsessing over travel sites long enough to pray, we have reservations with our original first-choice airline for a slightly less ideal schedule and a few hundred more dollars than we would have paid early this afternoon--but a good $600 less than we were looking at earlier this evening.  I plan to keep checking back with the airline in case anybody else decides not to purchase their reserved tickets!  But, at least we have a ceiling on what we can spend, and it's better than it could be.  Now I'm ready to calm down and go to bed.  :-)

A Word on Comments

I'm pretty sure that blogger is blocked in China.  So for our trip, I've set things up so that I can post via my e-mail account.  I wrote the last post that way and it worked fine, so I should be able to post from China without issues.  I also set the blog up so that comments will come directly to my e-mail.  Unfortunately, I then have to approve the comments before they will post on my blog, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to do that from China or not.  Nor do I see any way to test it out before going to China.  Sooooo...if you comment on my blog while we're in China and your comment doesn't come up, that doesn't mean I disapprove of it, it just means that the Great Firewall is not letting me access the blog.  I will still be able to read comments myself, and I'll publish them when we get back.  Thanks for your patience!  :-)

TA!!!!

We got word today that our Travel Approval has been issued.  We're praying that we get the date of our consulate appointment tomorrow so we can buy tickets without having to pay extra due to the timing.  The consulate dates we are asking for are:

first choice June 27
second choice June 23
third choice June 28

We will most likely be meeting our son on June 13.  We'll spend at least a week in Jinan with him, then on to Guangzhou for several days of medical exams and our consulate appointment, and then we get to fly home!  Well, home for us and a whole new adventure for our son.  Yesterday I was scared; today I'm excited; and tomorrow...who knows!  ;-)