Last photos from Changsha

Here they are again: Babies, babies, babies! They were in the hall of the Dolton Hotel having a grand time.
Cookies and formula for everyone!

They tried a group photo, but one sick little girl didn't feel like joining the party.

But aren't the rest of them cute?


Lance and Ting Ting are chatting with little Maggie and her mother, Kate, the pediatrician who kindly looked at Ting Ting's ears and told us to start the antibiotics. We are very grateful to her for taking time from her own new family member to help our little girl.

On Thursday, we toured a historical museum in Changsha that included some incredible displays of items found intact from a more than 2,000-year-old tomb. When archeologists excavated the site, they found the incredibly (and somewhat mysteriously) well-preserved body of a woman. She still had all her internal organs and some of her hair and skin. Scientists are a bit mystified by how the body survived for so long in such condition. Here's a model of what she looked like when she was alive. We decided to spare you the actual corpse (although we saw it).

Just hangin' here at my crib.




Too cute.




















Why can't she leave Daddy's nose alone?





Those bottom teeth crack us up.








And you think YOU have bed head? Puh-leeze.

















She finally learned to nap -- in her crib.
Isn't she the sweetest thing?







Rachel and Lance with our favorite doorman on the day we checked out.

Our visit to Yueyang

On Wednesday, two days after we received Rachel, we got back on a bus for a day-long trip to Yueyang County, home of her social welfare institute. Lance and I had debated whether Ting
Ting should make the trip because of her ear infection, but we really wanted to see the exact area she was from and tour the facility that had overseen her care the last 10 months. So we bundled her up, packed the Tylenol and climbed aboard for the 2-to-3-hour drive.

After awhile we left the highway and took a teeth-rattling, bone-jarring jaunt down a dirt road that was riddled with bumps and holes and way too narrow for two large vehicles in some places. At one spot when we had to ease around a construction site, the road ahead was on such an incline that everyone moved to the left side of the bus because we were afraid it would tip over!

The area was very poor. Again, we looked out the windows mostly in silence as we realized how blessed we are to have all the things we just take for granted at home. Finally, we hit a large city -- with dirt roads for main streets. A few turns later, and we were at the Yueyang County Social Welfare Institute.
The building was small and somewhat shabby. Someone had painted cartoon characters on the walls in an attempt to make it look a little more cheerful. It served as a true orphanage for awhile, but now all the kids are with foster families, with the SWI overseeing their care.

Bill explained that the SWI included this little patch of land that was being used as a vegetable garden. All around were high-rise residential buildings.

We went into the unheated building and climbed up to the top floor, where we were taken into a play room. My eyes immediately went to the back wall, where I saw a line of walkers. I saw the very walker in which Ba Shu Ting was standing when they took her referral photo. I also saw some rubber mats stacked in a corner -- she was sitting on one of the mats in another photo. Along two other walls were ornate wooden benches. Those benches were in the background of her photos.

The welfare institute director explained that each foster family was required to bring its baby to the SWI once a month for medical exams and other checks. The babies had spent time in that very room in which we were standing. What a gift it is for us to now be able to tell Ting Ting what that room was like -- and that we took her there to say goodbye.

One thing this SWI does that I really like is that they provide formula for the foster families to feed the babies, which ensures they are receiving nutritious food -- and enough of it. They also perform the monthly medical checks. And, best of all, the director said that an SWI employee visits each family once a week to check on the child's progress. Can you imagine DCFS sending a social worker to each foster home in its system once a week? Neither can I!

It's very clear to us that Ting Ting's foster family truly loved her and took good care of her. Again, we feel very blessed.

I was standing up in front of the group videotaping the director when something amazing happened: A group of women and a couple of men walked into the room and began visiting the babies. I looked back to see a woman holding Rachel's hands and saying, "Ba Shu Ting!" and chattering to her in Chinese. Later we asked Bill to come over and translate for us; he says the woman visited Ting Ting's foster family regularly. We weren't able to get much information from her about our daughter, but I did videotape the entire exchange, which will be a priceless memory. And maybe someday we can get a translation of her baby talk with Ting Ting.

That woman and several other workers held out their arms to Rachel, but she wouldn't go to them. Lance did ask the woman to hold the baby for a photo, but it's clear Ting Ting wants to go back to her daddy:

Here are the workers visiting some other babies in our group:

We were thrilled to have this experience to share with Rachel some day.

Lance and I also visited Rachel's finding spot.
Standing there made me wonder even more what dire circumstances had led someone to leave her here, and if that person had any idea that she would later fly to the other side of the world to be raised by foreigners. And I marveled at the strength of this tiny girl who was left in the cold only a day after her birth, surviving to be taken to the SWI, placed in a foster home and then adopted by us. Her life is full of opportunities and blessings that her biological family might not have been able to even fathom. It made me feel very humble that God has granted us this incredible opportunity -- and a wonderful daughter.

We were glad we had traveled to see the SWI to give Rachel a little bit of a link to her beginnings. Much of it will remain a mystery, but we can tell her about this place and the kind people there.

Afterwards we had a nice lunch at a local restaurant. The waitresses were interested in our girls; one of them is holding Ting Ting in the photo at the top of this post.

Then we took a trip to the Yueyang Tower, which is believed to be more than 1,700 years old. It is one of four famous Chinese pavilions and was constructed entirely of wood. No nails or beams were used in its construction; four wooden pillars support its three stories.


The tower is on the shore of Dongting Lake in Yueyang City, a bigger and somewhat more affleunt area. We saw beautiful views of the lake and nearby ports.

When Lance and Ting Ting and I climbed the staircases to the top, we attracted a little attention. An older woman started talking to Ting Ting and was treating her very kindly. I handed one of our intro cards to her, and she handed it to a younger man in the group who read it and explained it to the others. He kept saying a word I didn't recognize and pointing to Rachel. It's possible he was speaking Cantonese. However, I said, "nuer," which is Mandarin word for daughter, and they all nodded and smiled and excitedly repeated the word. Then they motioned that they wanted to take our photo, so we posed.

When we got back outside, a woman approached us and asked, politely and in impeccable English, if we had come to China to adopt Ting Ting. She said she had been living in Great Britain for a few years, but I gave a young woman with her a postcard of Chicago and one of our intro cards. They also asked for a photo, and when they learned we were still calling Rachel by her Chinese nickname, they all stood behind the camera waving to her to get her to smile and calling out, "Ting Ting! Ting Ting!" It was so funny -- I can't believe we didn't get a photo of either of those groups.

However, Lance did catch a photo of Lynette and daughter Dani with the souvenir sales girls:


Isn't that funny? I also caught a photo of Lance and Ting Ting:


It was a cold day, so we didn't linger. And, this time, when we got on the bus we took the (paved) highway all the way home.

Just for grins

Big blocks of text with no photos are a no-no. So here are some cute grins for you:









With Daddy at the grocery store in Guangzhou.








With Daddy in a restaurant.










With Uncle Bill in Guangzhou.



















Doing a little shopping.

















Visiting with Uncle Bob.





Several other babies and parents from our group, playing together in the hotel hallway in Changsha.

How it went down

Today Lance and I were looking at some of the video we shot on the day we got Rachel. I've posted most of the still photos, but I didn't go into a lot of detail of what that day was like. I thought I'd share some of that now.

First of all, I was full of nervous energy last Sunday night. I prepared our gifts for the day and packed supplies -- I wanted Lance to get video of me putting diapers and wipes in the backpack, but he was busy taking night shots of Changsha from our window and completely missed my very first attempt at a diaper bag (that's still a work in progress -- I learn something new every day). It was hard for both of us to sleep, but Lance had a much harder time than I did -- he heard my digital watch beeping at 12:30 a.m. and thought it was the alarm, so he followed his usual routine of taking his morning medication. The drug is a stimulant, so he usually takes it and goes back to sleep until it takes effect in 30-40 minutes. Well, by 1:30 a.m. he was wide awake for the day. That means he had maybe two hours sleep the night before he met our daughter.

I was nervous as could be when we met the other families in the lobby at 8:30 a.m. Within a few minutes, we were walking out to the bus, gift bags and video cameras in hand. The tourist part of the trip was over, and we were about to become parents (several of us for the first time). I started tearing up right then -- two years of paperwork, preparation and agonizing waiting was ending in less than an hour, and I was overwhelmed. It was a rather subdued bus ride that morning. I suspect most everyone was equally emotional.

It didn't take long for us to get to the Civil Affairs Office. We went upstairs to a large waiting room with benches lining the walls and made nervous conversation. Bob McNeil, head of international adoptions for Sunny Ridge, had made this journey with 35 other groups, but he said placement is his favorite part. He and the agency's in-China staff member, Li Jian Zhoung ("Bill"), answered questions and tried to calm us down a little.

The 10 Sunny Ridge families in the room were all receiving babies under the care of the Yueyang County Social Welfare Institute. All the babies had been in individual foster homes, and Bob told us that he had learned that the babies had been removed from their foster homes only the day before. That was both good and bad news -- bad because our babies had undergone a great deal of trauma right before being placed in our arms, but good because they weren't put into the orphanage a few weeks in advance, which would have given them time to get comfortable with yet another group of caregivers only to be taken away from them.

The clock ticked past 9:30, which was supposed to have been our placement time.

All of a sudden two little Chinese girls walked into the room with their nannies. They were being placed with families waiting in the adjoining room. Some of us watched parts of the process at a distance through an open door. These girls were 2 or 3 years old, so they were really confused when their nannies left them, and both of them cried and cried. Well, if our stomachs weren't already in knots, that did it.

Then someone shouted "the babies are here!" You should have seen us all race to the windows and knock each other out of the way to see a few women walking into the building with big orange and yellow bundles. An agonizingly large number of minutes later, these women started filing through our room into the adjoining conference room. We were all huddled at one end of our large room peering through the door at the bundles, trying to recognize the daughters that we knew only from months-old photos. I spotted one who I thought was Ba Shu Ting, and I asked Lance if he thought I was right. He shot some video of her (and when we looked at the video today, we realized I was right). She was sitting calmly in the nanny's arms.

Then a woman introduced the director of the Yueyang County SWI. He came into the room, said a few words that Bill translated, then they began calling us up individually to receive our babies. Truthfully, the next few minutes were a blur. I was trying to take photos for all the other families and looking at the babies (at last) and shedding tears of joy for our friends. Then through the chaos, Bob said to me, quite calmly, "Susan, get ready." Oh my gosh, we were next! I tried to get Lance -- he came up with his video camera and I told him to ditch it. Another new dad took it from him and videotaped our first few minutes.

I went up and showed our passports to the official who checked them and then checked Ting Ting's ID badge. She nodded to the nanny, and she handed the bundle to me.

I looked into my daughter's eyes and she let out a wail that cut deep into my heart. Tears poured out of her eyes, and I remember noticing her two little bottom teeth as she let out a scream. I just pulled that little orange and yellow poufy bundle toward me and began patting her back and telling her, "it's OK, it's OK." I was crying, too, of course, because I was so sad for her losing the foster family who had loved her and cared for her for 10 months. I could just feel her grief and her intense sadness and confusion. She was so fully padded that I couldn't tell how big she was, but she felt like nothing. But she was sobbing so hard her entire body was shaking.

A lot of the babies were crying, and that was making it worse for everyone. When we watched the video today we were surprised at how loud all the wailing was; we didn't really remember that. I ended up walking out into the hallway with Ting Ting and just walking up and down it, patting her on the back and talking softly to her. Lance was trailing us with the video camera. He tried to distract her with a toy (and his still camera), and it worked for a few seconds, but just as she seemed to calm down she would turn around and look up at me and her face would crumple in grief and confusion and she would start wailing again. My heart was aching for her --I just wanted her to know that she was safe, that we would love her with all our hearts, but I knew she couldn't know that. So I just patted her and talked softly to her until her wails faded into little whimpers.

As soon as I sat down on the bus, she fell dead asleep in my arms. Lance asked to hold her, so I passed her back and got some video. It was about a 15-minute ride back, then he carried her up to our room. We could both feel that she was wet, but we didn't want to traumatize her by trying to change her diaper right then. He put her in her crib and tried to get that big poufy jacket off of her, and it woke her up. She just looked at us curiously. So Lance picked her up and we sat down on the bed with her. He asked me for the Cheerios, and he showed her how to eat them, smacking his lips loudly. It wasn't long before her little hand was reaching out to pick them up. She has great dexterity and had no trouble feeding herself. We both took turns holding them out to her, and she ate and ate. Then I got the great idea to fix her a bottle, and she wolfed it down. She seemed to be getting sleepy, so we decided we should try that diaper change. She screamed through that, and I was all thumbs, of course (hey -- why didn't somebody tell me they've replaced the tape with velcro-like fasteners?). Lance tried to nap with her but she fought sleep. In fact, she didn't nap at all that day.

I've described how the two of them hung out together that day. He could make her laugh, and she seemed to find him less threatening than me, so I let him take the lead. I was so in awe of how he was able to relate to her; it just melted my heart to see her climbing over him and eating Cheerios from his hand and playing with all the toys he handed her. He just instinctively knew what to do with her, while I fumbled around and tried to figure out how to relate.

At 2 p.m., Bob and Bill were back with the SWI director for a short private meeting. We were able to ask a few questions, but he didn't know a lot of details about her care, since she hadn't lived in the orphanage. I did give him a gift I had prepared for Ting Ting's foster family, though. Among other things, it contained an album of photos of Rachel's new family, with Chinese labels, and a locket with her photo in it. I also enclosed a letter of thanks to them and some stamped envelopes addressed to us in case they wanted to make contact.

At 4, we had planned an outing to the local Wal-Mart. Lance stayed at the hotel with Ting Ting and I went to the store to buy more diapers (a size smaller than the few I had brought from home), wipes, baby food and other supplies. Most of the other families were represented, many of them with their babies in tow.

A couple of hours after the Wal-Mart excursion, we had a paperwork meeting in a conference room at the hotel. One parent had to go fill out some adoption forms, so that was me. When I finally got back to our room, completely exhausted both emotionally and physically, Lance had put Ting Ting in her crib. She didn't stay long, though -- she finally fell asleep on Lance's chest, both of them snoring away.

The first day or two, Rachel would let me hold her to feed her a bottle, but the second she was through she would wail until Lance picked her up (then she would stop immediately). I know she needed time to grieve, so I didn't push her. It made me sad that I couldn't comfort her, but I felt so grateful that she had bonded so well with Lance. I kept feeding her so she spent time bonding with me, too, and each day she lets me do more with her or for her. The last two nights, I've been the one who comforted her until she fell asleep, then put her in her crib. I'm very proud of that. I've also learned to change a diaper and change her clothes without the blood-curdling screams I heard the first few days.


Now she even feeds Cheerios to me.

Tuesday morning, we were back to the Civil Affairs office to complete the adoption, then we spent the afternoon getting to know her (and, as it turned out, finding out she had an ear infection). She's over the worst of that now, though, and each day she comes out of her shell just a little bit more.

I'm going to post some more photos of that cute grin now.

Gimme five!

Ting Ting's daddy already is teaching her tricks.

Signs of Changsha

Let's rewind a bit

Now that you've had a few photos of the Tingster to tide you over, I'd really like to go back and try to put some things in perspective. Don' t worry, we'll post more photos of her cuteness shortly.

We left Beijing last Sunday for Changsha, which is the capital of Hunan province (Lance thoughtfully provided a photo of THIS plane as well). While Beijing is a huge city preparing to welcome the world for the 2008 Olympics, Changsha is more rural, and more typical of most of China. Even so, it's a city of 15 million people, which still blows me away.

When we were overhead, the area around Changsha reminded me a bit of Nashville -- green and hilly. We boarded a big bus and drove through a rural area into the city, and the land flattened out a bit and got a bit less green. We were all fascinated by the scenery, though -- rice growing beside the road, men working in the fields with oxen, people carrying things in buckets on either end of a pole across their shoulders.

Then a few minutes later you'd drive past the BMW dealership.

We saw very little English on the billboards -- unlike Beijing -- and we were an unusual sight, even without our babies. When we'd pull up next to another bus, the people inside would stare at us. We were all a bit quiet on the ride in as we soaked it all in.

Beijing was full of cars -- our standing joke every time we got on the bus was that it must be rush hour. But in Changsha, we saw lots and lots of bicycles. We saw motorcycles. We saw . . . well, I'm not sure what some of them were. People used all means of transportation there.




And they hauled all kinds of things.







Sometimes we'd wave at people looking at us, and sometimes they would wave back, as this little boy did.







As we got closer to the central part of Changsha, things got livelier, and traffic increased. Bicycles, pedestrians, buses, taxis, private cars and people hauling lots of things all fought for the right of way.





Finally we arrived at the Dolton Hotel, our beautiful residence for the next several days. We were greeted by a doorman that other adoptive parents had told me about. He always had a smile on his face and a cheery "hulloh" for us.




He helped me off the bus.


Lance and I had a spacious room, all equipped for a baby. When I walked in and saw the crib, it really hit me that this was going to happen -- and soon! The hotel also provided a little baby bathtub and a "Hello Kitty" bowl and spoon. And the mini-bar also had juice and a jar of baby food.



We were on the 31st floor, so we had a beautiful view of the city.

And it was even better at night.

Hallelujah!

Hello, everyone! We have much to celebrate tonight.

First of all, we arrived safely in Guangzhou today. Little Ting Ting did just fine on her first airplane flight. We were worried because of her ears, but she chowed down on Cheerios the whole time, begged our neighbor for food and posed for photographs like a champ.

We checked in to the Victory Hotel, and it is amazing. Michelle I., you wouldn't believe the difference in the last few months. We're in the newly renovated section of the hotel and everyone in our group is raving about how beautiful the rooms are. Ours is smaller than the one in Changsha, but it is gorgeous. The bathroom has a big tub and a separate shower. And they have a new water filtration system so the water is SAFE TO DRINK! We can brush our teeth with it instead of buying bottled water!

And when we got to our room we also discovered that each room is equipped with a computer, hooked up to the internet. The computer even has a card reader. And they have wi-fi, which means Lance can use his laptop while I'm on this desktop. He's over there cleaning up some photos right now, and he's going to put them on a card and plop them into this one so I can post. Hallelujah indeed! I was getting embarrassed when our friends and relatives started commenting on our travel mates' blogs because they were not finding any info on ours! That is changing right now, believe me (of course, you still should read about Chuck and Lynette and Dani and about Jacquie and Mickey and their daughter Tabitha for other perspectives on our trip -- for example, Dani's first flight was not as smooth as Rachel's, unfortunately for her daddy).

Best of all tonight, we're so grateful that little Ting Ting is feeling great. She's asleep in her crib right now (and believe me, that is a HUGE improvement -- just ask Lance, who served as her bed for the first few nights). We're seeing more of her personality these days, and it's delightful. She's a little stinker, trust me. Today she greeted each passenger that came on the plane after us by holding up her hand to give them high fives or offer them a Cheerio or giving them her happy high-pitched greeting of "dah!" We're going to see if we can get her a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart over the Christmas season. She is not quite as clingy with her daddy these days, so I can hold her and play with her and even comfort her sometimes, which gives him a big break and thrills me no end. And this morning while we were packing our suitcases, we put her in her crib with her toys and she stayed in there for a couple of hours, pulling herself up into a standing position and shouting "dah!" at us and singing. That little grin of hers is absolutely delightful -- she has several teeth on top, but for some reason when she grins she juts her jaw out so that all you see are the two on the bottom, which are cute as the dickens.
Do I sound like a happy mama? Well, I am! Later I'll go back and fill you in on some of the things I have missed, but I think we're back in action, at last. Enjoy our cutie.