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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!!