Waiting for Xiao Hai

I love my kids!

2011-03-24T23:32:00.000-05:00

Just a quick post to say that the kids are doing awesome! Kylee just turned one (how is that even possible)! The kids get along great, and Ray and I are still alive. Exhausted- but alive. Kai is a little charmer! Everywhere we go he makes new friends. He especially likes check out girls;). Kai and Kylee get along fabulously! Now that Kylee is walking- she is giving Kai a run for his money. She wants to be everywhere that Kai is, doing everything that he is. She just adores him!

Speech is progressing slowly with Kai. He has probably 20-30 words that mommy understands. He has over 50 signs to help fill in gaps and he is always able to get his point across. We still do speech weekly and he tries so hard. He just gets so excited and all the sounds run together. On his 3rd birthday his speech will be transferred over to the public school so pray this will be an easy transition for Kai. He has a hard time with big change.

I still can't believe that I am such a lucky mom! I have the best kids and an amazing supportive husband! At the end of the day when I lay down (exhausted) I know how blessed I am!

Happy one year Kai!

2010-11-23T22:49:00.000-06:00

One year ago today I held my little boy for the first time! It is so hard to believe that this year has gone so fast and that our lives have changed so much.

At our first meeting Kai didn't want Baba (daddy) and now they are great friends. He shared his cheerios with Mommy- good luck getting him share anything now ;) (part of being 2 with a sister that is crawling already). Kai carried a bottle everywhere we went and now he drinks from a big boy cup. He wore a bib 24/7 due to his drooling issues and once his palate was repaired we had no more problems. Last year Kai couldn't communicate more than pointing and gesturing. Now he has over 40 signs and 30 words (that we can understand- gibberish there are TONS more). Kai had to be stuck to Mommy everywhere I went, but he now loves going anywhere Daddy goes too.

Sometimes I really just can't believe that Kai is the same little boy that flew home with us a year ago- I guess in many ways he isn't. He is much more matured and nurtured. What a difference a year makes!

We love you Kai and we are so glad you are a part of our family!

Our stylish little guy

2010-11-01T12:46:00.000-05:00

Really do you need any explanation- he is too cute for words!

Happy Halloween!

2010-11-01T12:44:00.000-05:00

Kai was such a handsome Buzz Lightyear that I just had to take a second to share. He is really a little ham- big surprise.

Super Kai

2010-09-14T00:23:00.001-05:00

My sister made this cape for Kai and he LOVES it! He "flys" around the
house. Thank you Aunt Julie!

Kai & Nancy at Target

2010-08-29T12:34:00.001-05:00

Kai is sooooooo thrilled to be at Target

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Mother’s Day

2010-05-09T23:34:00.001-05:00

Last year on Mother’s Day I was grieving. We had been informed that we was unable to have biological children earlier that year and I was facing an unknown timeline in the process of adopting from China. Mother’s Day had been difficult ever since we had decided to “let nature take it’s course” and every month came back unfruitful in our pursuit. Every month was a reminder of the empty nest in our home. Every month I grieved. Mother’s Day was a big fat reminder of the reality that was being faced every month.

Don’t get me wrong. I was very grateful to my mother and all that she has done. I was all about honoring her and all that she is, but it was still difficult. I wanted to have the opportunity to kiss my babies goodnight. I wanted to be able to kiss the boo boo’s and rock the babies to sleep. I wanted the opportunity to be the kind of mother that my mother had trained me to be.

AND then it happened. Just a few days after Mother’s Day last year we received THE CALL. We rushed to our computer and waited impatiently as the file loaded and we were able to gaze on his beautiful face for the first time. Staring back at us was OUR SON!!!!! AND his birthday was Mother’s Day 2008. God made sure that Mother’s Day would be a celebration for the rest of my life. Not only because I was now a mother, but my son was the best Mother’s Day present imaginable. As I was grieving- God was preparing my future.

As we prepared our home for our son, we got the surprise of our life. We found out that we were pregnant! The impossible happened. I was going to have the opportunity to experience pregnancy for myself. I soon found out how difficult this process was to be. It was a long first trimester. Then it rolled into a long second trimester. I finally got a reprieve right before we left for China- at 6 months pregnant. I trekked through China and up the Great Wall of China 6 months pregnant. I carried our new son Kai in a carrier on my chest (sitting on his sister) all over China. It was worth every second! When we got home we had lots of growing pains. We are still having lots of growing pains. Taking care of a new toddler while very pregnant was difficult. He was a Velcro baby that only wanted his momma. After his palate surgery in January I held him in a hospital chair for 24 hours straight while I was 8 1/2 months pregnant. We had to make major adjustments in every aspect in our lives. I wouldn’t change one second of it. Everything that we go through makes us who we are today. Every tough day and hardship has made me the person that I am today.

On March 2, 2010 we added to our family again with our happy surprise. Kylee made me a mother for a second time in this one year period- joining our family just 4 short months after her brother. Again we have had to make adjustments and again it is worth every bit of it. I have a beautiful family! It is amazing what a difference a year makes!

I love my family!

2010-04-07T00:22:00.001-05:00

We are continuing to adjust and adapt every day as we get to know our
newest member of our family. One thing I can say though is that we
LOVE this little girl. She has started smiling and it will completely
melt your heart when you see it! That with her sweet little coos have
everyone wrapped around her tiny little fingers.

This past week my momma Virgie came to stay with us for a week to help
out. She was extremely helpful. I'm not sure what we would have done
all those nights has she not come and stepped in so we could get a
couple hours sleep. I will be so glad when Kylee figures out nights
and days! Thank you again Virgie for your help!

Easter was fun at our house. Kai got to participate in a couple of egg
hunts. His first was at school and he got the concept from the start.
I have a basket and there's stuff on the ground I can put in it. He
cleaned up! He also got to hunt eggs at our house with his Paw that
came to visit. I think they both just loved chasing each other around
the yard as much as they did picking up eggs. Either way it was fun to
watch. Kai sure loves his Paw.

Watching my family grow over this past year has been amazing! I never
would have believed anyone last year if they would have told me what
Easter this year would look like. It is wonderful! I love my little
family!

Kylee Mei Miao is here!

2010-03-21T23:27:00.001-05:00

It is with great pride and excitement that we can finally welcome
Kylee to the family! She was born March 2, 2010 at 6:45 PM. She
weighed in at 8 pounds 4 ounces and a lengthy 22 inches long.

It has taken us a while to get somewhat adjusted to having two little
ones (just when we thought we were adjusted to one). Having my mother
here for the first two weeks was a MAJOR help. We did have some
complications that made it harder for me to get around right after the
birth, so having her here really was invaluable. I love you tons mom!

Kai had a hard time at first with Mei Mei (little sister). In fact in
their first encounter- Kai hit her in the face :(. Lately he has
warmed up to her a lot. When she cries he tries to put her pacifier in
her mouth and brings her his favorite toys. When he goes to bed he
will go over to wherever she is to tell her goodnight (his version is
laying his head on you so you can give him kisses). I can't wait to
see how they will be together when they are older. I am sure there
will be plenty of "he's touching me" or " she's in my room" days but
I'm hoping there are more days full of playful laughter and sibling
bonds.

Ray is adjusting as a father of two very well. Of course we both have
our moments of being completely overwhelmed (I wish they were fewer
and farther between) but he is doing great! He changes diapers and
makes every attempt at calming her down when I need to do something
else- usually with Kai. I know it is harder for him since I breast
feed- he can't just give her a bottle to soothe her when she is
hungry. Overall I would say he has done well for the major changes
that our little family has had over the past few months. Thanks for
your help Ray!

I on the other hand feel completely overwhelmed most days. If not
overwhelmed then guilty for sure. We put Kai in "school" (I can't
bring myself to say day care) when I had to go back to work in between
the maternity leaves. At first I thought I could handle both kids and
could keep Kai home on my second leave with Kylee. Well that's not
working out so well. Granted I have still been in recovery mode
completely and I have had some complications since being home and I'm
still trying to get a hang of breast feeding and Ray has gone back to
work and my mom left after two weeks of being spoiled by her being
here and.......... Ok so mostly I feel overwhelmed. I am not super
mom right out of the gate. That is hard to admit but it is very true.
I'm sure that I will get the hang of it at some point and then
something will change again. Even thinking back to when we brought Kai
home- I had NO semblance of any routine for the first two months at
least and that was just one kiddo. Granted he was mobile and had
bigger needs than a new born.

I guess I just need to give myself a little slack and make it through
tonight before I worry about tomorrow. Thank you to everyone who
prayed for us and supported us through this journey! I felt the
prayers and support throughout and couldn't have made it without
them! Sorry it has taken this long to "introduce" our daughter but I
guess you can see where the priority lies ;)

Two and a half weeks post op

2010-01-30T22:05:00.001-06:00

We had our two week check up this week and he passed with flying
colors!!!!! His surgical site looks great and we were cleared to take
off the splints and add back in crunchy foods! Yeah for Cheerios!
Kai is a much happier boy and is sleeping much better without the
splints.

Since the surgery Kai has decided that he also wants to walk without
his toys. He is walking all over the house! Baby locks have taken on
a whole new meaning and everything below waist level is either Kai
safe or has disapeared. He is so proud of himself too. He smiles and
laughs while he walks in big stretches.

We are starting to get into a better groove. The routine helps to make
things a little easier. It's still a learning experience every day and
I'm still not sure if I'm getting this mother thing- but I have hope.

This week Kai made a big break through with Ray. He started giving
daddy kisses on the lips- and wouldn't give them to mommy! Ray had to
go out of town for business for a couple days and we were afraid that
it would wreck the bonding progress that the boys had made. Well it
was quite the opposite! Now Kai asks daddy to pick him up and love
on him. I actually started crying when I saw Kai give daddy kisses.
They are doing so great and I love watching it!

Side note- thank you to Virgie for coming to stay with me while Ray
was gone! I loved the help and the company! And best of all I didn't
go into labor ;). Kai did miss Maw after you left though.

4 Days Post Op

2010-01-17T15:35:00.001-06:00

Well we are finished with surgery and we are all doing better at this
point. Kai is happy that je is able to eat some food again (stage one
baby food) and we are happy that he is starting to act more like
himself. The 3 days of liquids only was incredibly hard for all of us.
Kai thought we were starving him. He kept doing all of his signs for
food and pointed to the cabinet where his food is stored. I just wish
that he could understand what we were telling him.

The surgery itself went well. It lasted just about an hour once it
finally got started. He had some post op pain problems and some minor
bleeding the first night. I stayed with him and slept (if you can call
it that) in the reclining chair holding Kai all night. He was given
pain meds around the clock and IV antibiotics along with the routine
vital sign checks, so needless to say- we had some form of company all
night long. I'd take that at any point over hearing him crying out in
pain again though.

When the surgeons came to see him that first morning they thought it
looked awesome. I thought it looked something like raw hamburger but
it was still so fresh of a surgical site. We were able to go home that
next morning with oral pain meds, syringe feeders, and splints for his
arms to keep "foreign objects" out of his mouth. I was just happy to
be getting back to my own house. I MAYBE got 2 hours of sleep all
night and I was ready for my tag team partner to take over.

I have to add that Ray's parents drove up from Houston to help out
before and after the surgery. They were invaluable! Ray's mother did
laundry every day, helped keep the house clean, and helped with meals.
I was also able to get a shower in everyday while they kept an eye on
Kai! (Lately this is a big deal- there just aren't enough hours in the
day to get everything done and I am still figuring out how to be a
mom). I just can't thank them enough for all of their help! They may
not think they did much, but those 30 minutes while you guys had him
in the stroller so I could get stuff done were the best ever, or just
sitting with us while Kai was in surgery so that we weren't alone made
all the difference! Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

So after we got home from the hospital Ray and his parents took over
so I could get a much needed nap and they got Kai down for a nap as
well. There was a lot of cuddling that first day home. I'm still not
sure who needed it more- Kai or me. Kai's fluid intake still was
pretty minimal but we were getting wet diapers so I wasn't too
worried. That first night home Kai slept part of the night in the
stroller and the rest in bed with us. For the first 3 days it's
important to keep the head elevated 30 degrees to help with swelling
and drainage, so the stroller was ideal for us. We were able to
control the head angle better, and he was on pain meds so he really
didn't care.

The next day our super trooper must have forgotten that he had surgery
because he was ready to go. He wanted to play full speed and eat.
That's when it got hard. He started refusing his fluids to try and
convince us to give him something better. We even called the doctors
office to see if they had suggestions short of force feeding. They
just told us to keep offering the fluids and hang in there until
tomorrow. Little comfort when your little man is screaming from
hunger- not mouth pain. He finally got interested in Carnation instant
breakfast in whole milk from a "big boy" cup. It was a mess but at
least he was taking it! It seemed to fill his belly better than the
apple juice had and he started calming down. At that point I didn't
care how many bibs or outfits we went through. I was just happy he was
taking SOMETHING. That night Ray took night duty so I could sleep and
ended up sleeping in the recliner with Kai for a good portion of the
night. I really do have a great hubby!

Things got a little better yesterday when we could add in stage one
baby food. We are also allowed mashed bananas (Kai's favorite), rice
cereal, and anything that we can get to that consistancy. Now Kai is
eating like it's his last meal! He will scarf down a ton of food and
ask for more. We just hope we didn't take a step backward on the trust
front there. If only he could understand why we are doing all of this!
But with the return of food we are also starting to see a more normal
Kai. He is a touch more clingy but is full of energy and spunk. He is
also loving his balloons from "Aunt" Stacy. Thanks Stacy!

I am hoping that once the first week is behind us and we get closer to
getting his arm splints off we will get back to a completely normal
little man. I might miss some of the cuddle time, but it will be nice
to have this behind us.

Thanks to everyone for your prayers and support during this time of
need! It is getting a little bit better every day!

Surgery Day

2010-01-13T14:14:00.001-06:00

Today is the day Kai gets his palate repaired.

The surgery was delayed due to others taking longer than expected. So now we wait

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T23:24:00.001-06:00

We want all of our friends and family to know how much we love you and
appreciate all of the support that you have given this year. This next
year looks like it will also be fun and eventful with our ever
expanding family (and my belly right now). We hope you all had a safe
and happy holiday!

So...... From Kai (and the rest of us)- Happy New Year!

Christmas Day

2009-12-25T14:24:00.001-06:00

Today we got to celebrate Christmas together as a new family! I already received the best Christmas present ever- I was able to have Kai home by Christmas. It was so fun to see him tearing the wrapping off of the packages and playing with his new toys, and we loved being able to share that with part of the family through the web cam. It was exciting to see him try monkey bread for the first time (cinnamon pull apart bread that is a tradition in the Harkness family). Of course he loved it and kept asking for more. It was a blast getting Christmas Eve pictures by the tree (will post later). He loved looking up at the lights from below the tree! He also liked crawling back and forth to daddy in between shots. He would just sit in Ray’s lap and giggle, then crawl back to the tree for another picture. Everything about this Christmas has been new and exciting!

Every day is an adventure with this little guy! In the 3 weeks that we have been home, we have already been to 2 pediatrician appointments, the oral surgeon that will do his palate surgery, gotten the palate surgery scheduled for January 13th, and been evaluated by Sooner Start for services (the Oklahoma services for kiddos with delays to get them caught up for school). Never a boring or empty day here!

We are starting to get some resemblance of a routine started which has been a big help. At least I know when the relief of nap time is coming ;) Don’t get me wrong- he still has a great temperament, but I am EXHAUSTED. My ever expanding belly reminds me that baby #2 will be making a debut before too long and she keeps me tired all of the time anyway. Add to the equation a toddler that has endless energy and you get one tired mommy!

Kai has started to feel comfortable in his new surroundings. We can tell by the fact that he is testing boundaries and entering into power struggles (not wanting to go to bed at bedtime). Even with this new found spunk ;) I still wouldn’t give up one second with him. Going back to work is going to be incredibly difficult when that time rolls around. There is nothing like being able to just stare at him when he is cuddling in my arms at nap time or belly laughing at his daddy when he plays with him.

I truly do have the best Christmas presents ever! I have the most wonderful family! Merry Christmas to everyone! I hope that your Christmas is full of wonder and awe too!

Kai’s Progress with Walking

2009-12-13T21:05:00.001-06:00

Well, after a couple days, Kai made big progress walking. I didn’t get to capture it on my High Definition video camera but was able to on my Canon PowerShot S70 point & shoot so the resolution is fairly poor. But, it’s enough to see how much he’s progressed.

First, I captured him walking from his push toy to Nancy then I went and sat next to his push toy and captured him walking back to me.

Kai's First Trip to Target

2009-12-12T18:51:00.000-06:00

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Kai’s First Steps

2009-12-10T12:14:00.001-06:00

I captured this video of Kai taking his first steps as he was playing with Nancy’s and her dad.

Journey to Kai – Day 12 (Consulate Appointment)

2009-12-01T00:55:00.000-06:00

OK. It was another night hitting the rack after 1AM. The usual routine was had in the morning so I’m going to skip ahead to where things are different from normal.

Today is our Consulate Appointment. At first, when I was given the schedule for the week I thought we were going to have to be driven down to the US Consulate and be interviewed by someone. That was because we were told that the purpose of the appointment was for Kai’s visa application interview.

Last night we were told that all that we have to do is stay in our room until 10AM and wait for one of two calls: a call saying there was a problem or a call saying everything was fine.

While we waited for the call we played with Kai and goofed off on the computer. Skype has been a godsend on this trip. It’s amazing how well you can keep in touch with people back home with such tools available.

We received the call from Grace at around 9:50AM telling us that there were absolutely no issues with the paperwork and we were free to leave our room.

In fact, today was the day we are scheduled to go to the Pearl Market. We are told it’s a great place to find pearls and other jewelry.

With Nancy still not feeling well, it took a bit for us to get ready after receiving our phone call releasing us from our sequestered state in the room. So much so, that Grace had to call to see if we were still going on the excursion.

We finally made it down to the rendezvous location (the 2nd floor of the hotel next to the jade boat) and everyone was already on the bus so we ran out to the parking lot.

It turns out that there were more people wanting to go to the Pearl Market than there was room on the hotel shuttle so there were still a couple families waiting for a van to load the overflow into. So, we weren’t holding anything up.

The van was pulling up about the same time as we arrived so we all piled in along with Maggie (Grace’s assistant) and we were on our way to the Pearl Market.

T he ride to the Pearl Market was pretty quick and we got there way before the larger bus full of the rest of the group. Apparently, there was more than just our CCAI group going.

Once we got to where we were to be dropped off and everyone from both busses had arrived, we were given a brief lowdown on the lay of the land.

Where we were was a huge shopping center but it wasn’t the Pearl Market. We had to do some walking to get there and cut through some other shopping center buildings.

Once we got into the Pearl Market, it was a 5 story shopping center where every floor had something to do with jewelry. We were told that the top floor typically had the best deals and that is where we went.

By the time we got to the top, my sciatica was really acting up but we immediately went to a pearl store. Nancy liked walking the aisles of the small store looking at all the pretty stuff. The difficult part was that nothing was priced. Negotiating wasn’t allowed because price is fixed but you had to ask someone for the price and some wouldn’t really tell you what it was unless you told them you wanted to buy it.

After prying a few prices out of the sales people it was easy to see that nothing in this place was in a price range we felt comfortable with. Everything we looked at appeared to be above the US$100 range. Since Nancy isn’t a pearl necklace/earring type of lady, that wasn’t an option either.

Apparently, Americans like to buy pearls for their daughters when they are born and since most people adopt girls from China, that is why pearl shopping is so important for them.

After leaving this store, we decided to check Kai’s diaper since he was being fussy. Sure enough, it was wet so we changed it on a bench outside the store. Then we wandered through a few more stores until we realized there really wasn’t anything in this entire place that looked like it was something we couldn’t get in the United States so we left.

We were pretty much told we were on our own anyway so we didn’t feel bad going our own way.

Once we managed to navigate ourselves back to where we were originally dropped off Nancy let me know she was hungry and we decided that we were going to try and get something there. One of the many shopping center buildings was touting a Papa John’s Pizza so we thought we’d go check it out. Worst case scenario would be that we’d be taking a pizza back to the hotel with us in the taxi.

The Papa John’s was on the 3rd floor of this place and we had to go through a giant electronics store to get from floor 2 to floor 3

When we finally got to Papa John’s we were pleasantly surprised to find out that it was a sit down establishment. I think in the United States Papa John’s is all delivery.

We were the only people in the place and it still took forever to get anyone to take our order. We are starting to detect this as a trend here in China. We thought it was because the menus were open, but even after closing them and trying to get someone’s attention, we still couldn’t get speedy service.

Nancy just wanted breadsticks and I ordered a 9” pizza with mushrooms. For drinks we ordered a Coke and a Sprite.

The pizza was just as good as home but I don’t think we’ve ever done breadsticks from Papa Johns since Nancy doesn’t care for their pizza. So, we aren’t really sure if the breadsticks are the same as home or not.

Nancy tried giving Kai some of her breadsticks but I don’t think he liked the hard crust on them and at one point, I think he got a piece of it stuck in his cleft palate because he started freaking out like one does when they get a piece of popcorn caught in their teeth.

After enjoying the pizza, we attempted to make our way back to the first floor. I wasn’t listening to Nancy so I kept taking us to the wrong place to locate the down escalator. Plus, we kept getting attention from the various purveyors wanting us to look at their cell phones, electronics and clothing goods.

We finally got out of the building and made our way to where we originally were dropped off. We had no problem locating a cab.

Communicating with the cab drivers is often difficult due to the language barrier and without an address written in mandarin you may not be able to get where you are needing to go. Fortunately, many of the nicer hotels have printed their room keys such that you just need to show it to the driver and they know where to take you.

It took about the same amount of time to get back to the hotel as it did to arrive. I was a bit concerned that we’d get the ole “give the tourists the scenic drive to wrack of the fare”, but that didn’t happen. The final fare was 8RMB which was inclusive of the 1RMB fuel surcharge (~US$1.19). I’m sorry but good luck finding a taxi ride that cheap in the united states. Heck it costs something like US$25 to just get from one resort hotel to another at Walt Disney World.

When we got back to the room, we gave Kai a fresh bottle and tried to get him to lay down for a nap. But, because he caught some z’s while being carried around in the ERGObaby carrier, it was not in the cards. He was chock full of energy and was all over the bed.

We put him on the floor and tried to play with him, but the room here is tiny and quickly became difficult for me to do it comfortably.

Nancy was trying to write a blog post of her own that has already been posted and can be found here. Kai’s fussiness and unwillingness to allow me to play with him was making it hard for Nancy to do what she wanted to do. So, I was presented with a crossroads. Do I just let Kai win again and Nancy doesn’t get to do what she wants (write her post and relax) or do I bite the bullet and see what happens if I take him to the play room.

So, I snuck up behind him and scooped him up in my arms. I grabbed the backpack/diaper bag and told Nancy that I’m going to the playroom. I didn’t take the camera or put shoes on his feet. I just left.

Nancy asked me if I was sure, and I told her, “Why not?”. I told her if it went bad, I’d just come back but felt the playroom may be just enough distraction to make it tolerable.

Kai started crying as soon as he realized that he was going one way and mommy was staying put. He cried all the way to the elevator, but once we got in the elevator it stopped. He does this sound that we really like that sounds like he’s making a question. An upswing in his “voice” and he looks at you like he’s saying, “OK, I like what you are doing”.

He also seems to get great enjoyment out of seeing his reflection in the mirror. I have been able to console him a few times by just taking him to a mirror where he can touch his reflection with his hand.

The elevators have mirrors in them so I let him look at his reflection and down we went to the first floor.

When we got off the elevator I saw one of the other dads and pointed out to him that I had Kai and Nancy was nowhere to be seen. He knew about our problems with Kai rejecting me and gave me the thumbs up.

We quickly made our way to the playroom and when we got inside there was another dad and their daughter already in there. I put Kai on the floor and let him crawl around a bit as I took my shoes off and stashed the diaper bag (they want you to take your shoes off).

After I was ready to play, I took Kai to the rocking horse and put him on it. He got really bored with the horse real quick and then moved onto some other toys. He eventually found a few that kept his attention for awhile.

While I interacted with Kai, I also talked to the other dad. He was Chinese but lived in Michigan and was also adopting from China using CCAI as his agency. He was really nice and Kai seemed to find him interesting as he talked to my son in Mandarin. He helped me with my pronunciations of Kai’s middle name and the province and city in which he was born (Luohe, Henan)

Eventually more families showed up and there were a few more kids in the room. Kai seems really tolerant of other kids but at times doesn’t really like when they want what he wants.

I did locate the toy that lets him walk behind it and set it up for him. This one toy was the major point of Kai’s interest. This time, instead of letting him walk in one direction until he ran into a wall or some other obstacle that would stop him, then turn him around to do the same thing, I walked beside him and gently guided the toy so that he could continuously walk.

I was able to keep him going for a really long time without a break. I need to get those little legs of his nice and strong so he can get back on track for his age. I know I’ll regret it when it happens, but we need him walking.

Somewhere in the middle of all this fun, I caught the telltale whiff of something in his pants. We all remember how much fun I had the last time I tried to change his poopy diaper and the carpet was a bit nice in here and I really didn’t have a bathroom to run to if I tossed my cookies again.

Plus, I have only changed one diaper thus far and I really only got as far as cleaning the kid up and Nancy put the new diaper on. So, I really was embarrassed and didn’t want the other dads (and mom) in the room critiquing my technique.

I started giving serious consideration to taking him back to the room where Nancy could help me if I got into a bind. But I quickly dismissed that idea because I knew if I did, there was no way Kai would ever be cooperative if he saw mom.

Granted, he may not be cooperative with me down in the playroom either, but it was more assured he wouldn’t let me do it if I went back to the room.

So, my new plan was to wait until everyone left and then change the diaper. It took awhile for that to happen and the entire time I was just sure everyone could smell his diaper and were asking themselves how I couldn’t smell it and want to change it.

Eventually everyone left. Then I waited a few more minutes to make sure they were really gone. There is a blind corner in the playroom where I took Kai, the new diaper and the package of baby wipes.

I knew I had to be quick before another family came in the room. I first checked for signs of blowout before putting him on the carpet. I needed to know if there was going to be a need for some kind of protective layer. Then, I whipped off his pants and unsnapped his onsey. Kai, made a quick attempt at being fussy and then seemed to start laughing.

I pulled the onset up to his arm pits and then popped open the diaper. The smell was nowhere near as bad as the last one I tried but I was warned by Jason about this kind of diaper. The “stuff” was baked onto Kai’s little butt. I had a to use a few wipes to just scrub him clean.

I remembered that the character on the diaper’s waistband was supposed to go on the front and I positioned Kai over the diaper. He made a reach for the dirty diaper and I went to move it out of his reach and then he was up on his knees and gone like a shot. I quickly grabbed him, but it was funny seeing how much fun he seemed to think crawling around naked was (well half-naked).

I got him repositioned on the diaper and strapped up. For some reason it didn’t look like it was on correctly, but I couldn’t figure out what I did wrong. So, I left it as it was. I figured if it was not going to fall off then I could have Nancy double-check my handiwork when I saw her again.

After I got Kai dressed and he had an opportunity to play a bit more, we saw Nancy come into the playroom. I don’t know how long we were down there but she basically came looking for us. I think she said we were down there for close to 30-45 minutes.

Nancy was armed with a camera and took a few pictures of us and I told her of my success with the diaper.

We didn’t stay long in the playroom before going back to the room. Nancy wanted to go to shopping therefore I needed to go get my camera and we needed to get shoes and socks on Kai.

The first place Nancy want to go was back to the store next to Subway where she saw a diaper bag she was interested in.

I took one look at the inside of the diaper bag and told her that I didn’t like it. Currently, we are not liking the use of a backpack as a diaper bag because it’s a giant sink hole for everything that is put inside it. It because a great chore to find anything especially if that object had any kind of weight to it because it all sinks to the bottom.

We decided to walk down Sha Mian Street to see what stores we ca me across that we hadn’t already seen. We came across a store (I think it was Helen’s Place) and they had a really nice selection of leather squeaky shoes. Squeaky shoes are exactly what their name says they are. They squeak and people have claimed they help promote walking. Nancy is wanting shoes for Kai but his feet are so darn small. The shoes he came to us in are a US size 4 but you can easily pull them off his feet even when tied tightly.

The shopkeeper told us that the smallest size she had was a size 2 and it was too large for Kai, but she knew that Jenny’s Place had shoes in smaller sizes. We had a hard time understanding her English and couldn’t figure out where she was telling us to go. So, she walked us over to the store which was down the opposite way along the same street. If you were coming from the White Swan you’d make a left on Sha Mian Street (the road with Starbucks on it) instead of a right.

The construction along this area is intense. In fact, when we got to Sherrry’s Place the sidewalk in front of her store was completely ripped out and there was muddy soil running all in front of the shops.

There as a plywood bridge for us to walk across in order to get into the store. Later we were told that another American dad put that there to make it easier for people to get into her shop.

I am amazed that many of these stores are staying open with all this construction. There are many that are completely obscured by the construction walls, scaffolding and construction netting (this green mesh that is wrapped around all the faces of the buildings being worked on).

Inside Sherry’s Place was a nice selection of kids squeaky shoes and they did indeed have a size 1 which is what we were thinking would fit Kai. They let us put the shoe on Kai to be absolutely sure before purchasing. In addition to the one pair of size 1, we also bought 2 more pairs in the next size up for Kai plus one pair for Kylee. Those 4 pairs of shoes cost of 145RMB (~US$21.50). That’s not bad for 4 pairs of kids shoes (US$5/shoe).

As we were shopping here another one of the families from our group came in and was shopping as well. After paying out we went across the hall to another shop and saw even more people from our group. This shop was tiny and we didn’t stay long because it was a bit cramped with all the Americans inside.

As we left, we decided to stop in a few more stores. One store was one who donates a good portion of their proceeds to China’s orphanages. We also looked inside a store that sold art and they had some hand stitched quilts Nancy was interested in. I vetoed the quilts because despite their uniqueness they weren’t really very Asian in design and the fabrics were pretty plain.

It was starting to get dark and we still needed to eat dinner, so we began our trek back to the hotel. On the way back home we stopped in the Tailor Shop because we were going to get one of the little traditional silk outfits tailored to fit Kai. Well, when the tailor saw the top and sized it up against Kai she told the shopkeeper to ask us to put it on him because it looked like it would fit him.

Well, sure enough, Kai has some broad shoulders and the shirt fit just fine. So,we didn’t have to pay extra for the tailoring. Then we picked Kai up another one in cotton so he could wear it more. In addition to Kai’s 2 outfits, we got Kylee two outfits and our niece Regan an dress.

This cost us 380RMB (~US$56.30) which isn’t too bad for 5 outfits four of which were silk.

On our way out, we were called into an art store that is adjacent to the Tailor Shop but in the same building. It turns out the owner was also a teacher who helped establish schools at the orphanages. In particular, the Lily Orphan Care Center in Luohe, Henan where Kai was officially cared for (he was really in New Hope, but officially he was from Luohe). He talked to us for a bit and explained his mission to build schools and showed us pictures of his students.

Next we went to 7-Eleven to pick up a couple more big bottles of water and headed back to the hotel.

We dropped our purchases off at the room and then decided we were going to try the Italian restaurant for dinner. I called Jason and Robyn’s room to see if they wanted to go as well, but there wasn’t an answer.

Looking at the crude map drawn for us to reference, if we hang a right on Sha Mian Street (basically make a right at Starbucks) we’d run right into the restaurant.

As we were about to leave the hotel, Nancy realized it was a bit chilly outside and asked me to go back to the room to get her and Kai’s coats.

I ran back up to the room and retrieved the coats and came back down to the first floor to find Kai and Nancy standing by the water looking at the waterfall and Koi in the giant water feature near the restaurant we ate breakfast at every morning.

We decided to attempt to go the Italian restaurant the way we saw on the map which was to make a right on Sha MIan Street and keep walking.

After we passed all the construction, we eventually ended up in territory that was distinctly different than where we started. The shops and stores catering to the adoptive families were now gone and it looked like very local-friendly hotels and apartments.

We passed a playground that was chock full of local families at play even though it was dark out and not very well illuminated.

Eventually, we ended up at the Italian Restaurant and from the outside it wasn’t fitting my expectations. One of Nancy’s friends from the Freshwater Group mentioned that they ate here all the time during their last adoption trip and for some reason I had in my mind the type of Italian restaurant with the red and white checkered table clothes and tomato-sauce based pasta dishes on the menu.

Well, the entrance was a bit posh in appearance and they had a menu on display outside where a hostess was standing at a podium. I was immediately concerned about the price and whether or not I’d find something I’d like to eat. For you see there is many different kinds of Italian food and I know that I’m not a big fan of Northern Italian cuisine and that is what I thought this would be.

Well, we get inside and immediately see Robyn, Jason and Ying. They told us they looked for us in the playroom and then called our room before heading out, but assumed (correctly) that we must be out shopping.

It’s times like this that I really missed being at home. If we were in the US, they could’ve just texted me (or called my cell) and asked what we were doing for dinner. Instead, we are stuck living like it was the early 90’s where you called someone on a home phone (in this case hotel) and if you didn’t get them, you were out of luck.

Jason immediately warned me about how expensive the beer was. It didn’t really impact me because I’m not that big of a beer drinker and when I do, it’s usually a Guinness Stout and I wouldn’t consider buying one of those in China.

I did find that there were different kinds of pasta dishes on the menu and opted for the spaghetti with meat sauce. I don’t recall the exact price in RMB but it roughly converted to US$8 and I thought that was a really good deal.

We continued to to talk to Robyn and Jason during our meal. One interesting thing was that when we got our drinks (once again brought to us in extremely tiny glasses), our Coke and Sprite came with crazy bendy straws. The straws definitely didn’t fit with the rest of the restaurant’s atmosphere.

It was also interesting to note that the chef at this restaurant was an actual Italian.

The food was nothing to write home about. I’ve definitely had better spaghetti at Olive Garden and Johnny Carino’s back home, but it was palatable. We also used this opportunity to let Kai try some spaghetti. We cut it up into tiny parts so that he could eat it without choking on it. We sure will be glad when his teeth come in like Robyn and Jason’s daughter Ying because she was easily chomping down on steamed vegetables. Kai is no way capable of doing anything like that yet.

Robyn and Jason left when we were halfway through our meal. We opted to not get any dessert and paid for our meal. I was a bit taken aback by the price because at US$8 per plate I wasn’t expecting a US$30-something price tag. Well, it turns out that sodas were almost as expensive as the spaghetti. This is constantly frustrating me. The fact that there is no potable drinking water means that every restaurant knows they have you backed into a corner. If you want to drink, you are going to have to buy it. There is no free option unless you really enjoy extreme intestinal discomfort and have a sick love affair with porcelain gods/goddesses.

The walk back to the hotel seemed to go a bit quicker than the trip to the restaurant.

When we got back to the room, we gave Kai his bath and I started working on this post. Unfortunately, it didn’t get finished as I was very tired and went to bed thinking that I’d get it done the next night. Well, that didn’t happen either (as can be told by the fact this is being posted after I got home).

The next day was our “Oath Day”, we were really excited about it since it’s the last step of the legal portion of this journey.

Until Tomorrow…..

Journey to Kai – Day 11 (Guangzhou Tour)

2009-11-30T10:46:00.001-06:00

What can I say, but a pattern has developed. Nancy goes to bed when Kai goes down in his crib and I stay up working on the blog posts. Kai wakes up periodically and I try and calm him down before he wakes Nancy up. That is how things are starting to fall into place while we are here in Guangzhou.

I went to bed around 2AM and 6:30AM came early. Some people would say, “What’s the point”, but these trip reports really let people know, in great detail, what we are doing. Some of those people reading these posts are our family back home that are missing out in bonding experiences that they would have gotten to experience if this was a family member who entered through usual means.

All the others enjoying these posts, are very much appreciated as well. There are a lot of been there done that folks. I’ve had a few of them e-mail us thanking for the detailed posts that helped jog their own memories of their trip to be introduced to their own family members.

After waking up, as usual, the computer is fired up and checked for e-mails, facebook status updates, and twitter replies.

Breakfast is also starting to fall into a routine. Once we sit down, I grab some yogurt and eggs for Kai and then Nancy goes and gets her food. Kai is still letting me feed him and we are getting better at shoveling in larger portions per spoonful so that we don’t take so long.

The hardest part of feeding him is keeping his attention. This kid loves to know what is going on around him.

I still, as of yet, have been able to get any decent photos of the breakfast buffet. Unlike a trip to Walt Disney World, people in a hotel typically aren’t used to people with cameras documenting every minute detail like they are at Disney. Even though most people here are on trips that will probably never be repeated, they still aren’t documenting every detail…well, I doubt they consider the breakfast buffet a detail worth documenting…haha

One of the cool things about the breakfast buffet is that they have decorated for Christmas. Guangzhou is pretty much the first city we’ve been in that has really gone to town with Christmas decorations. It could be due to the constant stream of Westerners.

Also, the area around the restaurant has a giant Koi Pond with a waterfall. A lot of the kids who are staying in this hotel are getting hours of enjoyment hanging out by the water and watching these giant fish.

Today is pretty much a free day and we have the opportunity for a half-day tour. We decided that it sounded interesting so we went back to the room to pack up Kai’s diaper bag and grab my gear. Then we met the group down on the first floor.

The first place we were going today was the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees. We piled on the bus and made our way to the temple. The ride wasn’t as exciting as the ones we had in Beijing. Apparently, it is outlawed to use the horn in Guangzhou as have motorcycles. The only motorized cycles allowed on the road are those licenses to handicapped people and they are a very specific model of orange colored bikes.

It didn’t take long to get to our destination, but due to all the construction in preparation for the 2010 Asian Games, and the narrow roads, it was harder for the bus to find a place to drop us off.

Before we were allowed to get off the bus, Grace informed us that there will be beggars there waiting to pounce on us and to just not make eye contact and keep moving.

We got off the bus but I didn’t really experience any of the beggars we were warned about.

Once we got inside the Temple, we were informed that this temple was built back in 537AD during the Liang Dynasty. That is got it’s name from a famous poet who visited and wrote the characters for Six Banyan Tree and the name stuck.

We were told that this was going to be a small Buddhist Temple, but if this was small, I’d like to see what they consider a large temple.

We also had the opportunity to get a Buddhist blessing for our children. I was rather impressed to see that almost if not all of the children were blessed. Nancy went in with Kai while I stayed behind the railing to document. We talked about it and I wanted to be there with them, but if I did, then there would be no photographic documentation of the event.

I not only took pictures, but I took video. I’m not sure how jumpy the video will be. I won’t know until I get home.

But the actual ceremony was nice. A monk rang a bell and beat a small drum while chanting, then he shook some water on all the families. Once he was done, everyone bowed 3 times toward Buddha while they were supposed to make a wish for the child.

After the ceremony, they allowed some time for pictures to be taken and then we wandered the grounds some more.

It is funny because my parents have dragged me to more than one of these Buddhist temples during my teenage years and some of them were pretty impressive, but I hated it. Now, I seem to really enjoy it. I know why that is and it’s because I now have photography as my crutch and I didn’t have that back then. Nancy could probably drag me to a lot of events if it had photographic potential.

We were only given 40 minutes at this location before we had to pile back on the bus and go to our next location.

Next on the itinerary was the Chen Clan Ancestral Temple (aka Old Chen House aka Chen Clan Academy).

From what we were told this home was built by the 3rd largest clan in all of China, the Chen Family. We also were told that Chen and Chan are the same family. This is the same clan that Jackie Chan is ancestrally tied to.

Sometime around 1959 the Chinese government assumed control of this compound and has maintained it ever since. Grace told us that this was done at no great upset of the family because it was costing them a fortune to maintain it and now it’ll be the government’s responsibility. Under the Government’s care, it has become a Provincial Folk Art Museum but the members of the Chen family still come to the house to pay their respects to their deceased Ancestors every years.

There were some really impressive relief carvings on the outside of the building and along the ridges of the roof. Plus we were taken through some exhibition halls showing examples of Chinese embroidery art and bone carving. The Embroidery was pretty impressive in the fact that many of the pieces you’d assume were painting when in fact it’s all sewn thread.

The bone carving was also impressive. The level of detail on the microscopic level was intense. Some of these pieces were huge yet the eye for detail was precise.

We had about 50 minutes to wander around this place before we all had to meet back up and go to our next location.

What I failed to mention was that all the CCAI groups in Guangzhou at this time were also doing the same tours. So, it was close to 30 families spread over multiple busses going to all the same locations. Plus, these tours were being enjoyed by families in town for adoptions with other agencies as well.

Our next stop was the Guangzhou Arts and Craft store. We had only 40 minutes here but this was were we were told to be able to pay better prices for top quality jade. Before going in we were given a quick lesson on jade’s 3 classes: A, B, and C. Class A jade is the best in all ways. The more green the jade the more expensive. Class B jade has some imperfections that needed to be removed by chemical processes. Class C is colored jade and is the cheapest in price and is what we are most likely seeing at all the souvenir stands around the hotel. I do kind of agree with one of the people I overheard saying that since we don’t believe in the mystic properties of jade what do we care about the quality. But, I’m sure it does matter if you ever want to resell it.

We went in and immediately Nancy saw a sandalwood carved family ball. We saw these in jade at the Jade Factory in Beijing. A solid piece of material is carved into multiple inlayed balls. The more layers the prosperity for more generations. She wanted one of these but I wanted her to do all her looking first.

I had to keep reminding her that with time crunches you cannot just stop and look at everything. She needed to scan the store, then go back to what interested her.

Nancy was looking at some jade pendants for Kai and herself. Apparently, all Chinese will get 3 pieces of jade, at a minimum, during their lifetime. At birth, parents will buy a piece, then you’ll get another when you are married, the 3rd will come from your kids. So, we wanted to get Kai a pendant (girls often get bracelets).

So, we picked out two jade pendants (the circle pendants represented family) and went back to looking at the carved balls. We did ask about the Jade carved ball but it was outrageously expensive because it was a Class A piece and was only about the size of a golf ball.

I broke down and got Nancy the sandalwood one she wanted. I personally think it’ll look good on the mantle at home. The jade pendant we got Kai will probably stay in storage until he graduates from high school. At the price we paid (not outrageous but still not cheap) I want to know he’ll respect the gift.

We paid for the purchases and then got in line to board the bus.

On the way back to the White Swan, Nancy reminded me that she needed to get something to eat and she didn’t want to go anywhere. She wanted me to bring her something. I hate when she asks me to do this, because I often cannot figure out what to feed myself and then she asks me to get something. I ask her what she wants, and she tells me that we’ve been married for almost 8 years and I should know this by now. Once again, I’m 38 and still don’t know what I want to eat.

I overheard some of the other families talking about Subway. Apparently, there was one on the island. I asked her about that, and she thought it was perfect. Eavesdropping pays off again….

The problem was that I didn’t know where Subway was located. So when we got off the bus, Nancy went back to the room while i waited for Grace to get off so I could ask her where it was located. One of the other families asked me what I was waiting for so I told them. They were gracious enough to tell me where I needed to go.

Once I got back to the room, I wrote down what Nancy wanted from Subway and went on my way. I was also tasked to bring back our clean laundry. I decided due to how much laundry I was picking up, that I’d do that on my way back instead of carrying it all over the place.

Subway was a bit tricky to locate since it’s storefront was covered up with construction walls. It was also tiny. But, I did find it and went in to order our food.

The first thing I noticed was that the menu was reduced and so was the available selections of bread. The “sandwich artist” also was very frugal with the toppings. I swear, when asked for pickles they only put 3 on it. In the United States that pile that stuff on.

I got my usually Italian BMT, but when I asked for mustard, I was expecting yellow mustard and she put honey mustard on it. Apparently, that was the only mustard they have available. I was wondering what this was going to taste like.

The sandwiches came out to 70RMB (~US$11) and I paid and got on my way to get the laundry. When I walked into Michael’s Place, Michael wasn’t there. I told the person who greeted me that I was there to pick up my laundry. They told me it was ready and led me to two sacks of clothes. They asked me which one was mine. I had to look and could tell the first one wasn’t mine because it contained button down dress shirts.

In the second bag there was a claim ticket in it and I could see Nancy’s name on it.

The final bill game to 96RMB (~US$14). I was pleasantly surprised at the price considering the amount of clothes we gave them would’ve easily filled one or two laundry baskets at home.

The bag of clothes was extremely heavy and I was glad I was only having to walk a short distance back to the hotel.

Once I got back to the hotel I had to show Nancy how neatly they bundled our laundry. It was in 3 bundles based on price point for that particular garment. Then the final cleaned bundle was wrapped in sealed plastic. Not the thin Saran Wrap type but thick clear plastic like you’d find a piece of hard candy wrapped in. It also crinkled like that too.

To top it off Kai was down for a nap (a late one) and I didn’t want to wake him up.

Nancy and I sat down to eat our sandwiches. I can tell you one thing, honey mustard tastes horrible on an Italian BMT. I almost couldn’t finish mine.

After eating, I ran by Jason and Robyn’s room to see if they were still going to do the group dinner this evening which was going to be Thai. They were in the same boat as us that they ate a late lunch (Papa John’s for them) but they were going to go anyway.

Well, Kai didn’t stay down for long and he had energy and we had no way to expend it in our tiny hotel room. So, we decided to try and track down the Swan Room.

The Swan Room is a play room in the hotel sponsored by Mattel.

We went down to the first floor but first Nancy wanted to go by the water and allow Kai to look at the fish. I took some pictures of them relaxing by the water and some general pictures of the area.

Then, we decided to try and locate the Swan Room. Well, after some wandering we couldn’t find it. So, instead of wandering aimlessly, we went to the second floor to find the concierge. We asked her where it was located. She asked me if I had my room key, which I responded, “yes”. She said that it was hard to explain where it was and to just follow her.

She took us back to the first floor and was heading toward the location where we met every morning when we were going to go somewhere off property.

I felt real stupid when she showed us that it was literally right next to that location we meet as a group.

We used our room key to go inside and the room was not only bright and well stocked, but it was clean too and the toys were not in disrepair.

There was another couple families in the room when we got there. Kai was originally a bit apprehensive about what to do. It’s very well possible he had never seen a room this large and full of toys that he was allowed to freely play with. But, I highly doubt that was the case considering I’ve seen pictures of New Hope where he was a resident most of his young life.

Nancy ended up taking him to the rocking horses and putting him on one. He enjoyed himself for a bit, then he got bored. Well there were two others there and he wanted to ride all three.

Then he got down on the ground and crawled quite a bit. Then he kept finding toys that interested him. With each new toy he quickly figured out how to interact with it. It was awesome to sit there and watch the wheels turn inside his little head. Based on what I’m seeing, Kai is a very bright boy. He’s also very inquisitive which for parents is a blessing and a curse. I’m sure my parents remember that time when I took an old vacuum cleaner apart.

The highlight of the excursion was when he found the toy that is some kind of convertible toy that grows with your kid. It starts out as one that the kid can ride on and push himself along with his feet and then later, it converts so they can walk behind it.

Well, Kai pulled himself up and was walking with it. He wasn’t just slowly plodding along, he was zooming. He just would walk until he got stopped by something (like a wall). Then one of us would turn him around and he’d keep going. He did this for what seemed like hours and was just laughing and smiling the whole time.

I could swear he finally saw a bit of freedom and enjoyed every second of it. The funny part was that his little butt couldn’t hold up his pants so they kept falling down and we had to keep pulling them back up.

Not only did I get photos of this, but we recorded some video too.

Eventually it was getting close to 4:30PM and we had to be meeting the group at 5PM at the first floor elevators so we could walk to the Thai restaurant together.

So, we gathered up our stuff, put our shoes back on and made our way back to the room where we made sure we had enough stuff to cover any incident with Kai.

The walk to the Thai restaurant was quick. It actually wasn’t far from Subway.

Once inside it quickly plunged into chaos. Remember how I told you that several CCAI groups were doing the tours with us this morning. Well, this was another event where we were all at the same place at the same time. So the entire restaurant was CCAI families.

To top it off, even though we know the restaurant knew we were coming, they really didn’t seem to know how to handle a group that large where it was predetermined that every family would have a separate check.

They tried giving everyone a piece of paper so your order could be put on it and then they wrote a number on the placemat of one of the members of the group, but after they had taken your order and submitted it, many people were getting the wrong copies of their order tickets back and getting someone else's.

Also, even after you’d already gotten your food someone would come to you and try to put another plate down of food you didn’t even order.

There were also these chips they put down that Kai absolutely loved despite them having a slight kick to them. The taste reminded me a bit of Lays Barbeque Potato Chips. Later I found out they were chips made out of prawn.

We really had a hard time finding food that we were interested in. So I got the beef satay, Nancy got the Thai-style fried rice, and kai got steamed eggs.

I fed Kai while I tried to eat my satay. Since my food was basically meet on a stick, it was easier for me to eat my food and feed Kai than it was for Nancy to eat rice and feed him.

The food really wasn’t that great in my opinion, but I really am not a fan of Thai food.

When we got the bill we were a bit shocked at how high it was considering the price of the entrees we got.

Since the receipt was all in mandarin there was no way to know what we got charged for.

Later, outside, I found out that they charged us for the moist toilettes they gave us when we sat down and those prawn chips that none of us asked for.

Add in the outrageous price for drinks (since we cannot drink the tap water) and you have an expensive meal.

After dinner, Robyn,Jason, Ying, Nancy, Kai and me decided to poke our heads into some shops. The first shop was one near subway. Sure enough, the shop keepers start chatting us up wanting to know about our kids. There really wasn’t anything in this shop that interested us.

The rest of the night was seeing us going in and out of shops. We eventually ended up in one where Jason and Robyn found some shirts they bought and Nancy liked the people who ran it and told us they could tailor o ne of the little silk suits for Kai so he’d have one for his group picture on Wednesday. Apparently, it’s a tradition to get your photo on some red couch here at the White Swan and they dress the kids in the “traditional” silk suits (not suits like white collar workers wear).

We were told to come back the next day when the tailor was back. She didn’t work after 6PM and it was now way past 6.

One thing is for sure, these shop keepers work for their money. Jason asked about a shirt depicting a famous military figure from the time of the founding of People’s Republic of China and one of them ran to another store they own and came back with one. You could tell they were rather impressed he knew who this person was. I honestly didn’t, so he had to explain to me who he was. After he filled me in, I vaguely remembered the history from when we were taught it back at my days at Singapore American School.

This was the last store we stopped off at so it was back to the hotel room.

We said our goodbyes on the 10th floor and went to our respective rooms.

Back in the room, Kai was rather rambunctious. Since he had that late nap the last thing he wanted to do was go to bed.

So, we decided to give him a bath. He is starting to get really wired at bath time and his splashing is getting more and more aggressive. Plus, he finds new ways to splash. He’s also starting to jump up and stand in the middle of getting washed and trying to walk in the tub.

At one point, he fell but caught himself but still managed to land face first in the water. We think he inhaled some of the water but didn’t drink it. He didn’t scream or cry but we didn’t know what that would mean.

Well, when we were drying him off, I felt this distinct vibration coming from his middle back. I told Nancy he was going to blow and sure enough, those steamed eggs decided it was time to revisit us. So, two towels were now soiled and unusable.

So, we threw him back in the tub and cleaned him up again.

This time, we had to use one of the big, adult towels to dry him off and again, he threw up. This time it was after we got the pajamas on him, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the first time.

We eventually got him all ready for bed and the vomiting ceased. We think we may have overfed him but it’s hard to tell when enough is enough when he keeps asking for more.

He still didn’t want to go to bed, but Nancy was desperate for some shut eye so she put him in the crib. Once the lights were out he got the hint and laid down.

I, of course, went to the computer and worked on the blog post. Kai once again woke up several times and I tried to console him.

At one point, he just was inconsolable so I picked him up and walked around the room with him. He eventually reached for his bottle and I knew he’d lay back down. Sure enough it worked.

I had over 300 pictures taken this day and I wasn’t going to stay up waiting for it, so I set up the process to start and went to bed.

The next day was our consulate appointment. We didn’t have to do anything but sit in our room to wait for a phone call which either would say we had a problem or we were fine.

So, until tomorrow….

So far….. (Nancy’s version)

2009-11-30T01:34:00.001-06:00

So far I have learned more than I ever thought possible! This last week has been a crash course in parenting 101. Some of my highlights (sorry that is all I have time for).

-This new little man loves his momma! He wants to be with his momma all of the time!

-No matter how much is on his face, he can’t stand to have anything on his hands and will let you know the instant that he gets anything on his little fingers.

-Kai is going to be a cuddler! On the bus yesterday as we were going to tour the 6 Banyan Tree temple, he decided to lay his head on my chest- just to cuddle. It wasn’t even close to nap time yet. At nap time and bed time he would much prefer me to any crib. He also has no problem with holding on to me when I carry him. He acts like he was carried a lot and knows what to do, which is very reassuring to me.

-Kai loves to sing! He must have had someone sing to him because he is constantly singing the same little tune. If I hum or sing to him, he will sing back to me.

-He already has me totally and completely wrapped around his precious little fingers. I have already told him countless times that I will do anything for him and buy him anything (good thing he won’t remember this time right ;)

-He has started a new thing where he likes to crinkle his nose. He will scrunch up his nose and then giggle. He especially liked doing this on our plane ride from Zhengzhou with two younger females (early 20’s) that were cattycorner from us. What a little flirt already!

-He has learned to wave and loves to wave hello and goodbye to everyone around us.

-Kai is super smart! It take him no time at all to figure out a new toy (even complex ones) and to figure out how to get around whatever we are asking him NOT to do.

-If he can turn an object into a percussion instrument (anything that you can hit, strike, strum, or bang) he will! HE IS ALL BOY! He may just take after his momma with the drums though and that is OK by me.

-He loves to people watch. He is fascinated by others. No matter where we are, he can stay entertained for a relatively longtime (for his age) just by watching people. It’s only a problem at feeding times when we need his attention, but otherwise he is just social and will interact with the people he is watching.

-For right now a bottle can cure just about anything. There is rarely a time that this boy doesn’t have a bottle in his mouth! Sometimes he uses it for eating but most of the time he just chews on it. It is his pacifier. If he gets fussy- give him his bottle. If he gets tired- give him his bottle. I am not going to fight this one any time soon. It is helping us to have the kid that everyone else envies while we are out and about. They all just think that he eats a lot, and that is fine by me. He does need to chunk up but I am sure that his bottle will be the way to get that done.

-He has no problem sharing things unless it is his mommy’s lap. He will share his cheerios, toys, bottle- but a little girl tried to climb into my lap in the playroom and he made a direct line over to reclaim the lap. No violence, just lots of whimpering and dirty looks. It should be interesting to see what kind of arrangement Belle and him work out when we get home.

-Kai is slowly warming up to his daddy. Just last night they were able to get some cuddle time in and he sat on his lap for Skype calls this morning. It may be a slow progression (slower than Ray would like) but I see changes in the interaction every day. Soon enough they will be inseparable buddies. And Ray is doing AWESOME as a dad! I know that he is hard on himself, but he is doing amazing!

-Many of the locals think that Kai is too pretty to be a boy. Even the doctor at the physical kept repeating- Oh it’s a boy- in a very surprised tone once the diaper was removed. His huge eyes and little dimple on his right cheek that just jumps out at you when he smiles are hard to resist. (again this boy has me suckered)

-The things that I was most worried about and the build up of anxiety surrounding these issues- squatty potties, changing diapers while being out in strange surroundings, bonding issues, etc have really not been that big of a deal. Feeling crummy with terrible mattresses and not getting a good nights sleep is the worst! I am not much of a complainer (worrier yes, but complainer no) but you try sleeping on the floor (basically on these mattresses) while being 6 months pregnant and see how your back feels in the morning. Add to that a 17 lb weight that you can’t hand off all day- the exhaustion may just get me by the end of the trip. BUT would I trade in the momentary discomfort and fatigue for missing out on this trip? NEVER!!!!!!!

I know that I am probably leaving out over a hundred things that I want to remember forever. I will just have to blame that on the fatigue for now. Hopefully I will be able to get them all down before the real chaos starts- once we are home.

Journey to Kai – Day 10 (Clinic Day)

2009-11-29T10:53:00.001-06:00

Kai really didn’t have time to be fussy this evening because we had to be up at 6AM and he only went down around 11PM the previous night. Up until now, Kai was getting a good 12 hours of sleep every night. So, we knew he was going to be a handful today.

The alarm hit us hard but on the plus side, we had air conditioning. With Nancy having a respiratory issue she didn’t want it too cold but sometimes around 2AM she told me she was too hot and allowed me to cool the room down a bit more.

As usual we got up and checked our e-mail and saw that a few family members had replied to our email about arriving in Guangzhou. We are starting to get the pattern down on how long it takes to get Kai ready for breakfast. With the nights being so late, I’m not getting to shower before bed like I prefer so we have to both shower in the morning.

I let Nancy shower first while I play on the computer and then I shower next.

We had been hearing about the White Swan’s breakfast buffet for months on the Internet and from the other families in our group and now that we are finally at the White Swan we were going to get an opportunity to see what all the hype was about.

I wasn’t 100% sure where the restaurant serving breakfast was located so we stopped on the 2nd floor to talk to reception and they pointed us to the location which is on the 1st floor.

This is where things definitely went bizzaro on us. Up until now we were one family amongst about 13 that consisted of “white people”, as soon as we walked into the dining room for the breakfast buffet, this gigantic dining area was filled with families of white people and their Chinese kids.

I hope people aren’t offended by the use of the term “white people” but in reality, that is what we are talking about here. I haven’t seen a single adoptive family that wasn’t white while in China. So, we often just refer to ourselves as the “white people”. But, here in China, the white people are an overwhelming minority and as seen in yesterday’s post, we do experience a bit of different treatment that isn’t always fair (our being asked to not board the plane until every Chinese person has boarded).

The breakfast spread in the restaurant was fantastic. Take the breakfast buffets at our last two hotels and combine them and you still wouldn’t have a buffet as large as this one. There were tons of fruit and bread options and the hot food options were ranged from continental breakfast standards (sausage, eggs, pancakes and French Toast) to Asian breakfast items.

The restaurant has a pretty good view of the Pearl River and they seat us near one of the windows overlooking it. They also had a real easy time conjuring up a high chair which seemed to be a rather difficult feat in Zhengzhou.

I immediately went to locate eggs and yogurt for Kai. I found the yogurt rather quickly but I couldn’t find the egg station to get him his scrambled eggs.

Instead, I found the scrambled eggs in one of the chaffing dishes in the hot food line.

I came back to the table and proceeded to feed him. Fortunately, he likes to eat and makes it pretty simple to feed him. The hard part is that he likes to people watch and if he’s distracted by something more entertaining he won’t pay attention to the person trying to feed him.

I sort of had an appetite but not really, so I ate light. Nancy did the same thing and her voice is now completely gone.

The sickness thing is really starting to suck because we are now in the warm part of our journey and we cannot enjoy it.

Once breakfast was done, we headed back to the room to get ready and to make sure that we had everything on Grace and Maggie’s checklist for today.

It’s pretty nice because every night we get a letter slid under our door telling us everything we need to know, in detail about the next day. It includes the weather forecast, events with times and places we need to be and what we need to bring for each event. They even provide checklists for the fun events.

Well, today wasn’t a fun event. This was the very much known about trip to the clinic for Kai’s physical. This is part of the US Consulate’s requirements for his visa to come into the country.

I bet you are wondering why he needs a Visa when he’s going to become a US Citizen. Well, he’s not a citizen until he clears US Customs in the United States. Well, to get to that checkpoint, he’ll need a visa to travel. So, while he’s on that flight home, the United States still considers him a Chinese Citizen and he, in fact, will be flying on a Chinese Passport. What is funny, is that from my understanding, that since we are the legal guardians of Kai after signing the papers in Zhengzhou he is really not a citizen of China anymore. So, if anything goes wrong with his visa application he essentially becomes a kid without a country.

We got all the stuff together that we needed. Instead of trying to dig out just the papers we were told to bring, I brought the entire packet. In addition to that we packed up Nancy’s backpack with formula, diapers, wipes, toys, etc for Kai. I had my shoulder bag with the video camera and had my camera around my neck. Since, Kai won’t let me carry him, Nancy was using the ERGObaby carrier and I had the backpack being utilized as the diaper bag on my back.

We met everyone at the designated location on the first floor of the White Swan and when all heads were counted we headed out the back door and started walking. Well, as luck would have it, the weather decided to rain on us. It wasn’t a driving rain but enough of a drizzle that I had to worry about my camera.

Since it was warm enough that I didn’t need to be wearing my fleece pullover (I had it wrapped around my waste in case it was needed), I used it to shield the camera.

The first place we were heading was to the Victory Hotel to pick up our group members staying there. Everything is pretty close here, so it wasn’t that long of a walk to get there.

Once we had them we had to go to where our kid’s visa pictures were going to be taken.

The place the pictures were to be taken was tiny so only a couple families could be in there at a time. So all the rest of us were lined up outside. There was some shielding form the rain but not for everyone.

I also forgot to mention that there is a whole lot of construction going on. Alot of the construction tarps and canopies were providing shelter. The construction is in part due to the fact that Guangzhou is hosting the 2010 Asian Games and they need to get everything spit polished for the ever scrutinizing eye of the world media.

When it was our turn to go in and get Kai’s visa picture, we were faced with a very tiny room with a high chair against a wall. Next to the chair was another chair for a parent to sit in. We weren’t allowed to touch the child and obviously the child had to look at the camera. Maggie stood behind the lady taking the picture with a squeaky toy making a lot of noise to draw the attention of the child and have them look at the camera.

You could tell this wasn’t her first rodeo and she was a pro at getting the kids to look their best for their visa photo. If only someone like that could’ve been around for my visa photo. I looked like I had been hauled in for a mug shot after a heavy round of partying.

After the picture we were to get in the next line for the clinic next door. The clinic we were going to was literally the next building over.

When we walked in the place was what you’d imagine a clinic in China to be like. It was very open and the technology didn’t look to cutting edge. There was a lot of tile that didn’t look dirty but at the same time didn’t have that feeling of surgery ready sanitization that you often get the feeling of from American medical facilities.

It reminded me more of a high school cafeteria than it did a medical clinic.

There was a doorway in the back that every person who has ever read a travelogue of a trip to bring home a new family member form China has seen. Outside that door were two rows of metal benches and that’s where Nancy and I parked our butts. Many other people crammed their selves inside the waiting area inside.

I did try to capture some pictures but it quickly was getting very crowded. For you see, there are limited hours for this clinic on a Saturday and there were groups of adoptive families with kids from many different provinces using many different agencies all converging in Guangzhou at the same time and were all here on Saturday.

In addition to all the adoptive families, there were also local families in the clinic getting their needs taken care of.

We got a bit lucky in the fact that we were sitting in the outside hallway because that is where Grace got to first to hand out the paperwork that we needed to fill out before any of the doctors would see us.

It was a pretty simple 4 question sheet and a signature, then we were told to visit 3 stations: ENT, “Height, Weight, and Vision”, and “Surgery and Examination”.

As soon as we signed, the doctor in the ENT room must’ve seen that I had done so because she motioned us into her little room. I’m not sure what she was doing, but she was making a lot of noise and I guess she was making sure that Kai’s reactions to the noises were as expected. Then she looked into his ears and nose which he hated a lot. The way he was screaming, you would’ve thought they were poking him with needles.

After we finished up in that room, we noticed a long line for the “Height, Weight, and Vision” so we went to the ‘Surgery and Examination” room. It didn’t take long for us to get in there and this time we had a male doctor.

He asked us to remove Kai’s shoes and socks. Then he proceeded to look Kai over. If I didn’t know any better the way he was looking Kai over was like he was inspecting a head of cattle before buying it. When he took his diaper off you could see the surprise on his face and he looked at us and exclaimed, “A boy!”. After that, everything he looked at, he just kept saying, “A boy!”. It was kind of funny. He had me sign something and then it was off to the next room.

I can tell you one thing, this place was muggy and hot and it was technically considered the winter time in Guangzhou. I couldn’t image how miserable it would be in this clinic in the height of the hot season.

When we got into the last and final room we knew there wasn’t any way they could test the vision of a 18 month old. So they just weighed him (7.8kg) and measured his height (we didn’t see that measurement). They had us sign something and then we had to find Grace.

I couldn’t even use the term “organize chaos” to describe this process. It was strictly unadulterated chaos. It was every family for itself and things were pretty courteous amongst families that knew each other but amongst strangers, the game was on.

Since we are a Hague Convention Family, Kai is going to need to have all his shots current before the US Government will allow him to have a visa. So, Grace was facilitating with the vaccination registration people to make sure we were put in a spot in the line so that we got the shots and got the correct ones.

The crowd around the area to get the actual shots was immense but we were amazed at how quickly we got notice from Grace that we were next in line.

None of the nurses giving the shots seemed to speak English. They quickly prepped all the needles. Based on the shot record printout I was given by Grace, it looked like Kai was going to get 4 injections. I appear to have read it correctly because the nurses prepped 4 syringes. One of the nurses handed me the 4 empty cardboard boxes for the vaccines but as luck would have it, they were all in Mandarin and, as you know, I don’t read Mandarin.

Kai was a trooper. They gave him a shot in each leg and each arm for the total of 4 that he was due.

After we were done, we were told to wait 20 minutes before leaving just in case he had any kind of negative reaction to any of the vaccines.

It turned out that Jason and Robyn had gotten done with their stations with their daughter but were in a predicament. From what they were led to believe from their daughter’s Chinese caregivers she was allergic to a whole slew of medications and no one wanted to give her shots without knowing if it could harm her. So, they were either going to have to give her shots anyway or leave. They were waiting to find out from Grace what to do.

Since we had to wait 20 minutes anyway we told them we would wait for them and we’d walk back to the hotel together.

Our 20 minutes passed and Robyn told us she was just waiting to speak to Grace but was under the impression that they were just going to make their daughter get the TB skin test (she was 2 which means new US CDC law requires that all immigrants be free from TB before entering the country) and then leave, but she needed verification on that. She told us if we were tired of waiting to just leave and they would understand.

We waited a bit more and we decided to just head on. As we were walking into the main lobby we saw that Robyn was talking to Grace and we decided to wait a bit more to see what she had to say. It turns out that since they had to come back on Monday to get their daughter’s skin test read, the could just get the shots done then if it turns out it was necessary because allergies were not standing in the way.

As I mentioned earlier, there was a ton of construction going on. This, unfortunately, had the affect of masking all the landmarks. Everything looked the same with all the construction walls and scaffolding.

Fortunately, Jason remembered something that told him that we need to turn and got us going in the right direction back to the hotel.

At least, now, it wasn’t raining anymore.

It really seemed like it took less time to get back to the hotel than it did to get to the clinic. It may have been due to the fact that only 4 adults and 2 kids were going back when 13 families were in the group originally heading over.

Our next event for the day was at Grace and Maggie’s room at 3PM to fill out our consulate appointment paperwork. It was something like 11AM now and it was definitely nap time.

We were pretty impressed in how quickly Kai bounced back from 4 injections. He was back to his normal self pretty much by the time we sat down with Robyn and Jason waiting for our 20 minutes to end. So, the trip back to the hotel wasn’t one that entailed a screaming child.

When we got back to the room, Nancy took some Benadryl and Kai was put in the crib. Both were out for the count rather quickly.

While Kai and Nancy were napping, someone from the hotel brought by our Adoption Barbie. Apparently, Mattel toys makes a special Barbie for the White Swan hotel that has her holding a Chinese Baby. These things are highly coveted by the families who adopt from China. Even though Kai is a boy and probably will never be interested in playing with Barbie's (but it wouldn’t matter if he did), it will go in the display case of other collectibles.

I spent the time watching a bit of TV and also working on blog posts and surfing the Internet.

Sometime around 2PM, I really noticed an all too familiar smell coming from Kai’s direction.

I tried to ignore it as much as I could. I knew that Kai was not going to have much joy in my attempting to go anywhere near him.

But, he eventually woke up on his own and I was keeping him in his crib so I could keep working. But that odor was getting a bit too much. So, I picked him up out of crib and put him on my bed to change him. As soon as I popped open that diaper, I was like, “WHOA!”. Wouldn't you know it, the first time I try to be brave, I get enough mortar in his diaper to mason the entire Great Wall of China.

So, I quickly grab a towel and put him on it. I didn’t want to mess up the sheets on my bed. Then I started trying to remove the diaper. I should point out that Kai is not screaming or freaking out any more than he does with Nancy. In fact, when I reacted the way I did with the discover inside his diaper, he laughed at me.

Now, Nancy has woken up as I’m trying to get this diaper situation resolved.

Now, the embarrassing part. The stench was more than I could handle and I should point out that I have a rather diminished sense of smell. I actually tossed my cookies while trying to change his diaper. I’d like to blame it on being sick, but I pretty much did the same thing in June when my nephew Collin tossed his cookies while we were visiting them during our Disneyland trip for Nancy’s birthday. Certain smells just trigger my gag reflex.

Nancy was going to jump in and “do it” for me. I refused to let her. I told her I was going to finish it. I had Kai’s legs up in the air holding his two ankles with one hand while scrubbing him clean with baby wipes with the other. This was a 5 wipe job and then it came to the part, even as a boy, I didn’t know what to do with…..the uncircumcised penis. Nancy had warned me earlier that we had to clean it and I was trying to figure out how to get that darn skin out of the way so I could make sure no poop got where it wasn’t supposed to. That’s when Nancy got frustrated and pushed me aside and was going to do it herself.

Fortunately for my ego, she wasn’t able to manage it any easier but she did get it to happen. Then we couldn’t get it all to snap back to the way it was before we started. Now Kai was really screaming. You’d think we were poking him with red hot irons. This boy definitely doesn’t like anyone touching his boy parts.

We got a bit snippy at each other. I always view Nancy as being the super nurse who knows everything and kept asking her what is going on and she didn’t know and we were both kind of freaking out because we didn’t know if we broke him. I finally said, let’s just put his diaper back on him and if he’s still having problems on the next diaper change we’ll have to start seeking out answers from other parents of boys.

The next challenge was trying to find a stupid empty plastic Wal-Mart bag to toss all that stinky toxic waste into.

Since one whole large suitcase was full of dirty clothes and the rest were still pretty much packed we had no idea where anything was. Eventually, Nancy found a bag and I tied everything tightly inside and put in the bathroom trash.

After I came out of the trash, I very proudly pointed out to Nancy that:

I attempted the diaper change unsolicited
I had everything under control until the end
If Kai had been circumcised, I would’ve had the diaper on him without needing any help.

She gave me that victory :)

She did say that she wasn’t going to sit there and watch me get physically sick while changing diapers. I told her that my mom didn’t do throw up and poppy diapers so it probably runs in the family but I will do it even if it means I drop a couple pant sizes due to stench induced bulimia.

After we got him situated, it was time for me to go to Grace and Maggie’s room to get the US Consulate paperwork situated.

There were only 4 Hague-convention families so it should go quickly. I was running a bit late but when I showed up they hadn’t started yet.

I sat down on one of the beds and Grace handed me a copy of Kai’s passport and some other information that I’d need to finish the paperwork. Plus, she gave me the application form that we’d be filling out.

I did notice that Jason or Robyn weren’t there and I was going to call them because I was worried they fell asleep or something but before I could get to the phone, Grace had started the process and I didn’t want to miss a step.

It was great because they told us exactly how to fill out the forms. That was really helpful because nothing about any form provided by the US Government has been intuitive.

What made me laugh was that we had this huge checklist of documents that we needed to bring and so far we’ve only referenced a few of them and I have no idea what the rest are for. I guess they are here in case we have any issues arise at the Consulate’s Office about our application for a visa.

Robyn did arrive halfway through the instruction. After I had all my paperwork done (and I needed a lot of help figuring out what in the heck I had and needed), I saw that Robyn was really frustrated. Apparently, all their paperwork was in a very organized format but due to the chaos at the clinic and their desperate search for the paperwork from their daughter’s caregivers listing her allergies, all her paperwork was now out of order.

So, I sat down with her and took half her stack and helped her look for the forms she needed to finish her paperwork. Then, I told her what information came from what form and went where on the application.

I headed back to the room and Nancy was ready to track down a place to get some laundry done. She had tasked me with asking Grace the name of a place to get laundry done outside the hotel since the hotel’s rates were so high. She also wanted to know how the process worked.

Grace had given me the name of 3 places she’d recommend and told me that if you dropped off in the morning, you got it back that night. If you dropped off in the afternoon, you got it back the next day.

Nancy had all the laundry in plastic bags and ready to go. We threw Kai into the carrier and away we went. She wanted to try Michael’s Place because she swore she had heard the name mentioned by friends either online or through her Freshwater Ladies (her group of friends back home that all have adopted from China and they meet at Panera every Tuesday to just discuss things that are going on)

We got to meet Michael and he was very friendly. He told us to come back tomorrow and our laundry would be ready. It sure was a relief to have that taken care of. We were quickly running out of clean clothes and I’ve been wearing some items multiple days in a row to make sure I didn’t run out of clothes.

After we dropped off the laundry, we decided to do some window shopping. I had to remind Nancy that you just look and show no interest and not to linger.

Well, it is a lot harder than it sounds on paper. The shop owners really work for their money. They talk to you, want to hear your story and try to find something that they can shove into your hands and get you to buy.

At one store, Nancy’s Achilles heel was found and that was something called “squeaky shoes”. She even said she’d buy them without asking the price. I had to ask for her. I told her this wasn’t the States and prices weren’t fixed and by saying you’ll buy before prices was discussed you pretty much allowed her to set any price she wanted. Fortunately, the shop keeper was kind and set a reasonable price of 45RMB (about US$6.60). I did try a ploy and opened my wallet and claimed I didn’t have any money. But she didn’t try to hard sell only told me she’d hold them for us.

In reality, there is a big counterfeiting problem here and we were told to be wary of where we spend large bills where larger bills would come back (i.e. give a 100 with a 50 being part of the change back). So, I needed to split a 100 somewhere safe. We were planning on going to 7-Eleven anyway to get water so that would be where.

7-Eleven was a couple doors down so we eventually made our way there after looking in all the shops between. In one of the shops, there was a very dirty dog. Kai seemed to not show any fear and an interest in getting closer to the dog. So we hope that means he’ll accept Belle and Coco.

7-Eleven was a tiny little shop and unfortunately,didn’t sell water by the case. It really is hard to stay hydrated when you only get 2 small bottles of water for free each day and the tap water is not potable. You have to boil water and then it takes forever to cool off. Plus, I still am wary of drinking boiled water.

So, we grabbed to 1.5litre bottles and some goldfish crackers and made our way back to the shop to pick up the shoes.

After paying our 45RMB we made our way back to the hotel and parked our buts for awhile.

Eventually, Nancy got hungry for dinner (we didn’t eat lunch) and I asked if we should see what Robyn and Jason were doing. I walked down to the room but they had the “Do not Disturb” sign on the door so I didn’t knock.

I went back to the room and notified Nancy so we decided to head out. Just as we were leaving, the phone rang. I answered and it was Jason. He was asking about 7-Eleven and wanted to know if we needed anything. I told him we just got back from there and we were going to get some food from Lucy’s and it we’ll pass right by 7-Eleven on our way and we could just show them.

They were interested in food, so we decided to all go to Lucy’s together.

The walk to Lucy’s wasn’t too bad. We did get stopped a couple times by shopkeepers with flyers. With all the construction, many of the stores are almost hidden by all the tarps, scaffolding and debris. They really have to draw attention to themselves to get us to their stores.

When we walked into Lucy’s you could quickly tell that they were trying to look like an American restaurant. They had lots of US license plates and posters from US movies on the walls. In fact, I saw a vanity plate for Walt Disney World on the wall behind the table they sat us at.

They also made it clear you don’t tip the wait people and they don’t accept US$100 or HK$1000 bills (probably due to the counterfeiting problem I mentioned earlier).

There were other families from our group there already, plus families who went there for lunch recommended it.

The service was something to be desired though. It took forever to get someone to take our order and then a longer time to get the food to us and even longer to get a bill. The food was really good though.

All the adults got the “Great American Burger” with cheese and Kai got chicken congee and Ying had a steamed vegetable plate.

We scarfed down our food and drinks and paid our bill as soon as we could get it brought to us. What shocked was that all our food came to 108RMB (~US$16) for all that food.

As we walked back to the hotel, We parted ways at the 7-Eleven as Robyn and Jason needed to make a quick run for snacks and stuff and we needed to get Kai a bath. Especially since he decided to spit up a bit of his dinner. We are now learning that Kai will eat more than his stomach can hold. So, we are going to have to stop him a bit sooner.

When we got back to the room we wasted no time getting him bathed and Nancy rocked him to sleep with his nightly bottle. Shortly after he was in the crib, Nancy was out too.

I stayed up a lot later working on 2 blog posts to get caught up to Friday. While I worked on the posts, Kai would frequently wake up crying and then quickly fall back to sleep. I would go over to his crib and make sure all was fine because we do need to worry about aspiration. One time he didn’t got back to sleep and it was because his arm had gotten caught in the crib bumper and he couldn’t roll over.

Another time I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He had his bottle, he wasn’t stuck, he wasn’t cold and he wasn’t hot. Well, I picked him up and stroked the back of his head (one of my mother-in-law’s friends was an expat in China and fostered kids and told her to pass onto us that Chinese console their kids by stoking the back of their heads). Eventually, he stopped crying and I laid him back in his crib.

I did all this without waking Nancy. Around 1AM I got the final post done and went to bed. The next day was a half-day touring day and it sounded like it was going to be fun.

Until Tomorrow…..

Journey to Kai – Day 09 (Travel to Guangzhou)

2009-11-28T10:55:00.001-06:00

I’m actually writing this late on Saturday night and into Sunday. So, the details may be a bit fuzzy.

As I said in the previous day’s post, we may have gone to bed at 9PM, but the fun only began. Both Nancy and I were up and down all night. Even though we were taking Tylenol, we could tell our fevers were getting worse. I really was getting worried that we weren’t going to be able to get out of the airport. China is really vigilant about foreigners and fevers. I was sure there would be temperature scanners at the airport and we’d get busted.

Nancy was sure that the Tylenol would do the trick. It’s a long standing method to bypass the temperature checks if you time it correctly. So we were taking it every 6 hours on the dot.

Well, sometime in the middle of the night I became unbearably hot. The kind of hot where you just want to rip off all your clothes and the sheets. Then, it just ended. I wasn’t freezing cold that was common with the shifts in temperature when you are running a fever, but more of a comfortable feeling. I told Nancy I think I just busted my fever. She felt hers busted sometime recently too. For the record, she never recorded a fever on the thermometer and refused to do frequent checks of it.

Kai pretty much slept through the night, but he does cry in his sleep a couple times but that is pretty tolerable considering how bad others are having it even with their own bio-children.

6AM came freakishly early. We did fire up the laptop to see if Nancy’s dad was on Skype. It was still Thanksgiving in the United States and she wanted to get a call in while her oldest sister and her brother were still at her dad’s house for Thanksgiving with their respective families.

We had a really difficult time getting a video connection today and that hasn’t been the case prior. My assumption, based on the time in the US was that many people were using Skype as a means to have family calls for free without using long distance charges.

We eventually connected and Nancy and Kai got to talk to the various cousins and siblings. I was pretty much horizontal on the bed.

I was still wicked nauseous and had no desire to eat. Nancy told me to just stay in the room but I could tell that she really needed me to help her with Kai so I went anyway, but I must admit I wasn’t the most pleasant camper in the troop. I really did try to not let my bad mood and sickness spill over, but with Nancy being sick too, we were just one giant keg of nitroglycerin sitting on the San Andreas Fault line.

At breakfast, Kai was pretty good about eating. I on the other hand ate nothing. Nancy nibbled and she had to because even if she’s sick, Kylee has to eat and that can be hard when you are tossing your cookies (for the record, Nancy still has yet to throw up and I think she’s only done so once in our entire marriage).

At breakfast we found out there were several other families that have been bitten by some kind of bug and one mother was having almost the same exact symptoms as I was. I was glad I wasn’t alone which means that several of us must’ve gotten into the same thing and got us sick.

After breakfast we went back to the room and Nancy did some more packing. I try to help packing, but I learned a long time ago, that I just get in the way. I did get my laptop packed up and had it ready to go.

Kai was being really rambunctious so we decided to take him up the playroom. That trip didn’t last long. Nancy put him in the ball pit but he wasn’t having anything to do with that. Then she put him on the floor and he just sort of sat there and didn’t want to do anything. So, we went back to the room.

We did get a call from Yisha to go to her room to pick up Kai’s passport. When we got there, once again, all the families were there. In addition to Kai’s passport, we got his immunization records and is “searching ad”. This is an ad put in the local paper with the child’s picture and description. It is part of the process that must be followed to track down the child’s family before they are officially listed as abandoned. Unfortunately, the copy of Kai’s ad is a really bad one. You can make out the Chinese characters, but not his picture. Also while I was there I paid our new gas tax fee of 100RMB (roughly US$14.81)

Some people had some really nice official immunization shot record booklets, but I just had a simple computer printout.

I ran into Jason and Robyn down there and told them how crappy we were feeling. They told us that they were heading to the playroom and offered to take Kai and watch him for us so we could get some rest. I told them that he didn’t want to be there the first time we took him so I doubt he’d be a very willing participant.

When I got back to the room, I told Nancy about Jason and Robyn’s offer and she was appreciative but said I made the right decision.

We didn’t need to have our luggage out for the bellmen until 2:20PM and it was around 11AM. Kai was getting tired so we put him in the crib and then we laid down. I set the alarm for 1PM. That would give us a little over an hour to pack before we needed to have the luggage out for them to collect.

Those 2 hours went very quickly, but it was very productive. I felt a bit more refreshed after I woke up. The fact that I took a nap speaks volumes since I never take naps.

Nancy was a highly efficient packing machine at this point. She had the bags packed and ready for collection way before the 2:20PM deadline. I was insistent that Nancy pack my winter coat because I didn’t want to deal with it on this trip. I felt that I’d prefer to be a bit uncomfortable for a short time than uncomfortable for a long time having to haul that jacket around when I didn’t need it anymore. Nancy and Kai were bundled up.

At 2PM I went downstairs and settled up the room bill. We had put a few meals onto the room instead of paying cash. I put it on our Credit Union Visa because we would only get a 1% foreign currency exchange fee on that card. According to the receipt we had only racked up about US$80 in meal charges on the room which wasn’t too bad. One of the more expensive was room service (of course).

I went back to the room and we just waited for the time to put the bags out.

We didn’t need to be at the lobby until 3PM, but I didn’t want to go down until the bags had been collected. I just so happened to poke my head out into the hallway when the bellman was collecting our bags, so I tipped him while he was there.

Then, we went to the lobby. There was a lot of standing around and chit chat going on. As usual, my sciatica was flaring up fast. It’s worse on hard, unpadded surfaces like concrete, asphalt and marble. I have found that if I crouch down and put all my weight on my toes, the pain goes away. I’ve been doing this a lot on this trip and I really don’t care what people think of me doing it.

People were getting their pictures taken with Yisha in front of the giant, rather pathetic Christmas tree in the lobby (they had an actual real Evergreen which I assumed based on it’s thread bareness was local).

We asked one of the dads to take our picture. He asked me to hand over the huge camera and was surprised when I gave him my little point & shoot. I informed him that the big camera has to be specially packed into the rolling bag so it’s staying put until we get to Guangzhou.

I was so glad when the bus rolled up to allow us to get on. They were using a separate van for the rolling carry-ons so I took those bags to the van so they could be loaded. I waited until I saw them get loaded before I went to board the bus. Nancy was already there with Kai.

The bus ride was claustrophobic like all of them have been except I now have more lap baggage being that I have my big electronics backpack and Nancy’s backpack which is now serving as Kai’s diaper bag.

Once again, I was cranky and Nancy was having none of it. In all honesty, I’m a lot like a dog when it gets sick. I want to curl up somewhere be left alone and if not left alone, I bite. I’ve always been this way. Before Kai, I’ve always been able to recuperate this way, I’m having a hard time with the idea that I’m no longer allowed to take care of myself first if that means that Kai will be neglected. I’m putting him first, just having a hard time with it.

When we got to the airport, Yisha was insistent that the moms and kids go into the airport where it was warm and that the dads stay and bring the luggage in.

When we were all in, then the dads were told to line up at the group check in counter. I must say that compared to the Beijing check in, this was much more efficient. Yisha was at the counter with everyone’s passports and their boarding passes. When you walked up to the counter, she pulled your stuff out and worked with the gate agent to get you processed. They stapled the baggage claim tickets to the dad’s boarding pass and you went and waited with the others until all the dads were done. We had a 20kg limit per adult plus an additional 10kg for Kai. Our bags came in at 11kg and 19 kg. So we were looking good. Even if we went over, they were combining all the weight allowances for the whole group and adding all the actual weights to determine if we needed to pay fines. From what we were told, using this method, they’ve never had an overage fee assessed.

The next step was security. This is when we said goodbye to Rita and Yisha. Unlike in the US where you see a person who checks your boarding pass and then you enter a long line for x-ray and metal detector, here they used the person who checked your boarding pass as a traffic cop. It appeared as if they were only letting one family through at a time. This really helped alleviate the pressure that one feels to get through security.

Based on what happened in Beijing, I decided to remove a few more items from my bag to hopefully get it through the first time and I was successful. I repacked my bag on the other side and was able to rejoin Nancy without causing her any alarm about my safety…hehe.

We had plenty of time to get to our gate this time and Nancy sat down and asked me to locate some water. Next to the bathrooms was actually a boiled water room. So, I went back and got one of Kai’s bottles and filled it up with the boiling water. Unfortunately, Kai isn’t accustomed to drinking formula at such lava-like temperatures like other babies in China, so I was going to have to wait for it to cool down and we had no idea how long that was going to take. Fortunately, another family had water and gave us the 4 oz we needed to make Kai a bottle. In thanks, we gave them one of our Enfamil packets since their formula all was in their checked luggage.

Our flight didn’t board on time and nothing about the boarding announcements was in English so we had no idea why. But, we got in line when we noticed everyone else doing so.

When we were about to board the plane a stewardess in very broken English said us Americans have too much luggage and must stand aside. They then let all the Chinese patrons board. We, of course, observed that they weren’t boarding with any less luggage than we were. In fact, some were boarding with more.

After everyone else was allowed to board, we were. As we were afraid, we were then told there was no overhead storage and we were going to have to gate check our bags. I was a bit nervous because my very expensive camera was in one of those bags and I wasn’t allowed to get it out and carry it onto the plane. At least it was going to be delivered to me on the gang plank when we got to Guangzhou.

We found our seats and sat down…or at least attempted to do so. I’ve never been on a plane so small. They said this was a 737-300 but we could barely fit into our seats. I’m 5’3” tall and my knees were cracking on the seat in front of me. I could barely get my backpack down between the crack where my legs were supposed to go so I could stow it under the seat in front of me. To top it off, the seats were very narrow. Now, I have an idea what it must fee like for a normal sized person on an US domestic carrier. I could only image how much pain they were in on this flight.

We were really worried about how Kai was going to do on his first flight. Well, he did remarkably well. With the cramped quarters it was impossible for Nancy to eat. I tried my best to help her by feeding her (since I could put my tray table down), but it was almost impossible to do.

To top it off, Nancy was sure Kai had a soiled diaper, but they were constantly bringing the carts up and down the aisle so she couldn’t get out. I was also, at this point holding all the jackets and Kai’s socks (he was wearing his snow suit so had no shoes on). Combine that with the zero leg clearance, I was miserable.

Nancy finally got a break in the action and made her way to the back of the plane where a line had already developed that looked like it consisted of every family in our group.

After what seemed like an eternity, Nancy came back to inform me that his diaper was clean and dry. So, we just say back and waited for the descent to begin.

It finally came, but as we were descending, I dropped Kai’s container of Cheerios and managed to lose one of his socks. The Cheerios went between the legs of the gentlemen to my left who made no effort to help me even though he watched it pop out of my hands and fly into his personal space.

I must say, I’ve never been the biggest fan of kids on planes but I have always tried to help the parents when I could and now I have a better appreciation for what they’ve gone through. I am just glad that Kai was not a screamer. But, this was only his first flight. In fact, he spent most of the flight flirting with the girls two rows back and all the stewardesses.

The landing came none too soon. As with what seems to be common in Chinese culture, everyone pops up and gathers their stuff and starts moving toward the doors before we’ve even come to a full and complete stop. So, here we were in row 8 and weren’t even going to be able to get out until the entire plane had disembarked. To top it off, I still had to find my Cheerios and the missing sock.

At least, once the lights came on, I caught the glimpse of what might’ve been the Cheerios and was able to dig it out from under the seat in front of the guy in front of me, without any help from him. Despite the fact, that at one point, I practically had my head in his lap.

The sock, I found with a stroke of luck. It was actually under my seat and I had to perform some serious contortionist moves to get it off the floor.

Well, we eventually made it off the plane and were waiting for our gate checked bags when we were told they would be sent to baggage claim. Well, I could only hope that all that padding Nancy put around my camera with the clothes protected it.

We made our way to baggage claim and followed the masses. It was pretty late in Guangzhou (some time past 9PM) so there weren’t too many flights arriving.

Nancy was tired and sore so she sat in some of the chairs to the side, while I tried to muscle my way in to the conveyor belt.

One thing that always bothered me is that an entire family will try and stand there and wait for the bags. Please, have one representative there or at least 2 (one on each side of the loop) and have all the others wait in a clear and safe distance. It does no good to the general well being of the mass as a whole to have a kid standing there to just holler out when they see the bag.

The odd thing was that our checked bags came out before our gate checked, but all 4 bags did arrive.

I was going to manhandle all four rolling bags to the bus, because I did it before and I am just good like that, but I guess, with everything else that has happened all day and with us both being easily irritable, Nancy insisted I use a luggage trolley. Apparently, they are free here and free is my kind of price.

I have to admit that it was a heck of a lot easier to move the luggage this way.

We made our way to our CCAI reps, Grace and Maggie, were taking roll call when we arrived. After everyone was accounted for, we made our way to the bus. One nice thing is that one of the families that was with us in Beijing, who didn’t go to Zhengzhou was rejoining us here.

The first thing we noticed after leaving the baggage claim area was how warm it was in Guangzhou. We left Zhengzhou needing winter coats and here it was balmy enough for shorts and a t-shirt.

We finally made it to the bus and apparently half of our group was going to the White Swan (the most common hotel for adoptive families) and the other half the Victory (often chosen by parents who this isn’t their first adoption because it’s cheaper). They had us group our luggage by which hotel we were going to.

Nancy and Kai were already on the bus and Nancy was doing her best to keep Kai awake. We knew if he fell asleep on the bus there would be no getting him back to sleep without help from Benadryl.

Once on the bus, we were introduced to our guides and given the high-level itinerary for the week. We were also informed that each night they’d provide us a more detailed itinerary for the next day with the weather report and what we need to bring to each appointment.

They also passed out some bottled water. Bottled water is our lifeblood since none of the tap water is potable and unless it’s bottled you cannot drink it. You also must not drink water out of any bottle that has had the seal broken when you receive it because it’s not unheard of where bottles have been refilled from a tap and then resold.

The ride to the hotel was pretty scenic. The quality of the high rise apartments seemed to be a notch higher than what we were used to seeing in Zhengzhou.

When we got to the White Swan all families were told to get off the bus. Apparently, the Victory wasn’t equipped for such large busses so they were going to have to move all of them to a smaller van to get them to their hotel.

We were also told that all our bags including our carry ons will be brought to our rooms and to just make our way to the lobby to check-in.

When I got to the lobby, Nancy and Kai were already in there sitting on the couches trying to stay away. I got in line and waited for my turn.

When I got to the front of the line, our guide Grace was facilitating by making sure there was no communication problems between the person checking us in and us because of language problems. I secured the room with my credit union visa and got our room keys. I grabbed Nancy and we went to the room.

It now was somewhere around 10:30-11:00PM. Nancy immediately put Kai in the crib and she was starting to crash out herself but we still didn’t have our luggage.

I kept looking in the hallway for our luggage and it just never seemed to come. Eventually I started wandering the hall to see if anyone else had gotten their yet. It appears that most of the families were in the same boat. Finally, one of the other dads went looking for it and came back to report that it was in the service elevator lobby.

I went there to tell the bellhop which bags were mine and he hauled them to my room where I tipped him.

I brought the bags into the room where Nancy quickly unpacked them so we could find clean clothes. We were desperately going to need to get clothes cleaned tomorrow.

I fired up the laptop, paid my 300RMB (~US$44) for a 7 day window of service (the more days you bought the cheaper the per day cost) and sent out an e-mail letting everyone know we had made it to Guangzhou alright.

Up to this point, I am 2 days behind on my trip reports and honestly, I was too sick to care. I joked that I wanted to just throw up on the blog, “Sick and cannot remember what I did” and leave it at that. But, ultimately this is a journal for Kai’s future reference and I knew it would get done eventually.

Nancy and Kai were now fast asleep and I was not far behind them. One of the nice things is that we now have air conditioning and can be comfortable.

Well, after reading these last two posts, I guess I may have given the impression that Nancy and I may be fighting a lot and that isn’t the case. We have both been sick and during tense moments or moments of stress, we tend to snipe at each other a bit, but a majority of the time, despite the illness, we have been having a good time getting to know our son. I felt that people who sugar coat the trip reports don’t really do a service to those people who read these wanting to know how the trips are. This isn’t a vacation ya’ll this is real life and in our case, the start of parenthood in a foreign country with nothing familiar around us and to top it off sick. I’d be hard pressed to find any well adjusted couple not be getting a bit agitated with each other at this point and if they claim they are, I’d say they were lying or needing to have their names submitted for sainthood.

Well, tomorrow is one of the day’s we’ve been dreading….the infamous physical examination and inoculation day….oh joy

Journey to Kai – Day 08 (Thanksgiving)

2009-11-28T09:18:00.001-06:00

I’m going to have to apologize in advance because I’m writing this on Saturday (3 days after the event) so the details might be a bit fuzzy and lacking. You’ll see why later in the post why it took 3 days to get it onto “paper”

After another late night getting the blog posts current, I finally went to bed around 1AM.

We woke up around 6AM (this is a growing trend for us as we figure out how long it takes to get Kai up and ready to go). We decided to see if anyone was on Skype. We knew it was early enough for Nancy’s dad to be up so we sent him a text via Google Voice to tell him to jump on Skype. While we waited for him to show up, we talked to my mom on Skype while we waited for Nancy’s dad to jump on.

We were able to have a nice talk with my mom before that happened and the we switched to talking to Nancy’s dad. Up to this point, Nancy’s dad was the only family member on Skype that hasn’t had an opportunity to see Kai yet. So, we wanted to make a point to try and make that happen today.

After getting our conversations in, we made our way down to breakfast. We were touring the Henan Museum. Yisha told us that this museum was the 3rd largest in China and it had just recently undergone a renovation and reopened on November 18th.

We were able to secure a high chair at breakfast again (only a few available in the restaurant) and I did my part by being the primary person to feed Kai. We are hoping that by my continual assumption of this role will eventually help Kai realize that I’m someone he can trust.

I didn’t get to eat much again. I’m finding that when you are on a timetable, and your child can only take very tiny portions (just a fraction of the surface of an infant-sized spoon) you are the one that doesn’t get to eat.

After finishing breakfast, we went back to the room to gather our belongings so that we can go to the Museum. This is always fun now because you always seem to forget something for the child.

We were supposed to meet in the lobby around 9AM and once again we were just cutting it close.

Today, the temperature took a dive and it was much colder than the previous days. So, the 5 foot walk from the hotel lobby and the bus, was a bit nippy. Not to mention the bus temperature wasn’t up to the typical Chinese preference of sweltering.

As has been happening lately, I’ve felt very claustrophobic on the busses. With Kai not wanting to be held by anyone but Nancy that means that the only role I can fill is that of pack mule. I don’t use that term in a derogatory way it’s just the truth. With Nancy being pregnant and carrying Kai with the ERGObaby carrier, she just cannot carry anything else, so I do.

So, when I’m sitting in those tiny seats on the Chinese tour busses, I’m holding: my shoulder bag with my camera supplied (and extra storage for Kai’s stuff), Kai’s diaper bag (aka Nancy’s backpack), and my Nikon D300. It really becomes hard to move and to top it off, Nancy and I crammed into those seats. I still don’t know how the families with more average sized adults are coping. With my being 5’3”, I’m quite a bit smaller than average.

It wasn’t long after we pulled away from the hotel, my stomach was starting to not feel so good. I mentioned something to Nancy and she said she was feeling the same way.

By the time we got to the museum, we were both ready to throw up. It felt like car sickness but I’ve been on enough of these busses to know that it couldn’t be car sickness or I’d have been suffering the whole time.

Our first inclination was to blame the McDonald’s we had the previous day.

As time passed we quickly got exponentially worse. By the time we actually got into the Museum, we were ready to die.

We were told that we were going to be at the museum for 2 hours and that just seemed like torture and there was no real easy way for us to get back to the hotel.

We did have to go through security to enter the museum. That entailed running our bags through an x-ray machine and us walking through a metal detector.

The museum was laid out with numbered rooms with each increasing number representing a different dynasty of Chinese history.

I must say that Chinese history and archaeology is extremely fascinating. What is really cool is to see an artifact and see it dated back something like 8000 years way deep into the BC. Sometimes, I’m amazed at how advanced their art, society and infrastructure was for such an ancient time period.

About 30 minutes after arriving at the museum, the nausea was really getting to Nancy so she we went to the restroom so that she could try and throw up. She wasn’t in there very long when she came out and said that there weren’t any western toilets in the bathroom and she just couldn’t stare at that hole in the ground any longer and try to think about throwing up.

The whole time she was in there, Kai was sitting in my lap and wasn’t being really fussy.

We also knew that Kai possibly had a messy diaper because he was exceptionally fussy and we heard some rumbling noises on our way to the restroom.

Nancy had informed me there wasn’t anywhere in the ladies restroom to change Kai because there weren’t any counters (the sinks for the bathrooms are on the outside of the restroom and shared between the men and women) and the floor was sopping wet (the floors in the bathrooms are always wet).

So, we decided to go all commando on the situation and drop his trousers and change his diaper right there on the bench near the bathroom.

That is when we found out the extent of the damage. Kai had his first blowout since coming into our family. It was up his back and smelled to high heaven. He was wearing a Chinese diaper which don’t seem to go as high up the waist as diapers acquired in America do.

Oh, it was messy and Nancy was having to change the diaper in full view of the bathroom going public. We were quickly getting an audience of mostly older Chinese. To add insult to injury, we didn’t bring a second set of clothes for the little guy, so even though we were able to change his diaper, we were going to have to put his clothes back on that has some mess on it.

As I was coming back to Nancy after locating a place to toss all that toxic waste, Nancy told me, “And that is why I told you to bring more than one pair of pants”. I was like, “What?” and she told me to look down. Well, you see, when I was holding Kai in my lap while Nancy was in the bathroom, all of Kai’s “overflow” was seeping into the crotch and inner thigh of my pants. So, now I looked like I had a bout of incontinence and had a huge stinky wet spot on my pants.

Now mind you, both Nancy and I were now feeling violently ill and now I know why they use that term violently, because you want to kill anyone around you and when spouses are both that way at the same time, lookout a missing button on your shirt could start a nuclear melt down.

Fortunately, our altercations were mainly snide remarks, dirty looks, and a few statements with raised voices and things weren’t helped by the fact that Kai wouldn’t let me touch him to help so I get to stand around feeling useless (I wouldn’t know what to do even if he would let me).

Once we got him in a new diaper, Nancy put him back in the ERGObaby carrier because she didn’t want people to see him with his giant poop stain on his back.

To top things off on this fabulous day was that both Nancy and I suffer from sciatica and Kai won’t let me carry him in the baby carrier so Nancy has to do it and his weight, plus Kylee’s weight really puts pressure on her back that doesn’t ever get relief. My sciatica is so bad that if I stand still for more than a few seconds, I have a pain that is so painful that it brings me to tears. At home, our backs seems to get reset when we sleep, but here in China, they like to fill their mattresses with bricks and our backs just pick up the pain where they left off the previous day and build on it. So, my first steps out of bed in the morning are tear inducing and so are Nancy’s.

One of the funny things that was going on in the museum was that random people were coming up to people from our group and asking to have their picture taken with them. I had multiple people do this with me. The funniest was when this 20-something girl ran up all giddy, grabbed my arm like it was a prom photo and smiled brightly as her boyfriend (I didn’t see a ring) took our picture.

There was one family in our group that had 3 older boys and I swear by the time we were done at the museum several queues had formed of people waiting to have their picture taken with them. It was like a Character Meet-and-Greet at a Disney theme park.

Needless to say, we were rather excited when it was time to leave the museum. All we wanted to do was go back to the room and puke and pass out. But, despite all the misery we really did enjoy the museum and highly recommend anyone going to the Zhengzhou region, to stop by and visit the museum. We are just upset that we couldn’t have enjoyed it more because it was really impressive.

The ride back to the hotel was a really long one and we were so agitated that we were just sniping at each other the whole way. I know that I was probably the biggest instigator because I don’t do sick well and I rarely get sick and when I do, I’m usually really miserable.

On the way back to the hotel we were informed that Mama Mia was going to be holding a Thanksgiving Buffet and that you had to get reservations. Most people were going to be there at either 5:30PM or 6:00PM.

Jason and Robyn wanted to know when we were going but we couldn’t tell them. We were informed at the museum that there was an extra step we had to take in order to secure Kai’s Chinese Passport. This was due to the fact that our trip was so last minute they didn’t have time to do his “interview”. So, we were going to have to physically take him to a passport office so they could see him before they would release the passport. We knew that Yisha was going to call us some time around 2PM to tell us when and where we needed to be.

So, I told Jason that I’d have to get back to him on dinner.

When our bus got back to the hotel we didn’t waste any time getting back to the room.

The unfortunate thing for us was that Kai slept on the bus ride home. That was unfortunate because it meant he wouldn’t go back to sleep once we got back to the room. We so desperately needed him to get back to sleep so we could take a nap.

As I was lounging around on the bed hoping I’d feel better, I eventually got so nauseous I ended up deciding to just get it over with and made myself get sick in the bathroom. I know it’s not pleasant but it often makes my stomach feel better if I just get it over with. I was sure I had gotten some bad food (now I was pretty sure it was at breakfast).

It did indeed make me feel a lot better. I ended up deciding to take a shower because I just felt so bad, I thought a shower might help refresh me. That, unfortunately, was not a good idea either. I was feeling better before the shower then after the shower I felt worse than before.

2PM came and went and we heard nothing about what to do in regards to Kai’s passport. So, I went to Jason’s room and we decided to go get our reservations. It turns out that the Thanksgiving buffet must’ve been popular for more than just the hotel guests because we were told that the reservations were almost filled up. We were able to secure a table for 6PM.

I went back to our room and just as I was fighting sleep we got a call from Rita (Yisha’s assistant) asking us to meet her in the lobby with Kai.

We grabbed Kai and headed downstairs. Rita was there already waiting for us. She was trying to tell us we weren’t dressed well enough. We had thought that we would be driving to where we needed to go, but apparently, it’s in walking distance. So, we had to run back upstairs to get our winter coats and get some warmer clothes for Kai.

Once we were properly attired we headed on our way. Apparently, the place we were going was near the park we were at the previous day.

It was cold outside, really cold. To top it off, Nancy couldn’t carry him the entire way because we didn’t bring the carrier.

So, we decided it was just too important for Nancy’s comfort for me to take him for a bit and just deal with the screaming. Well, he ended up screaming for a bit, but between the attention from Rita and his being able to see Nancy, he calmed down rather quickly.

But, in my effort to pay attention to Kai and avoid getting hit by bicycles and mopeds I didn’t notice a giant concrete pylon in my way and cracked my knee into it pretty hard. I managed to keep going without dropping Kai but it sure hurt like crazy.

We finally got to the passport office where we sat down while some paperwork was passed to the officers. A gentleman came up to us, said in English, “If you have a happy life, he will have a happy life” and gave us Kai’s passport.

We had to give Rita Kai’s passport because it was needed to finalize the notarizations we initiated yesterday.

We walked our way back to the hotel and Rita went back to the notarization office to drop off Kai’s passport.

We went back to the room and tried to settle in. Fully clothed, neither of us could get warm. I even climbed under the covers with all my clothes on and was still shivering. I knew this was a bad sign, so I got out the thermometer….sure enough I was running a fever. I knew enough to know that I didn’t have the flu, but China freaks out with foreigners with a temperature. So, I had these waves of panic about us getting quarantined and not able to leave Zhengzhou.

We both started popping Tylenol and I started my Z-Pak and Nancy started her antibiotics.

At this point we were still waiting for a phone call from Yisha to tell us when we could come and review the notarized documents. She originally stated that it would be around 4, but that came and went.

Around 4:30, we got the call and I went to her room to review the documents. I thought it was going to be one family at a time, but it was all of us. The room was hot and it just made it harder for me to concentrate because I was feeling so yucky.

I reviewed the documents as I was asked, then paid my money for the use of the bus while we were in Zhengzhou. We were also informed that China had instituted a new fuel tax and it would impact our flight the next day. So we were told that we’d need to have another $100RMB the next day.

We were told to have our spouse review the documents as well and if anything was wrong to bring them back to her so they could be corrected the next day.

When I got back to the room, Kai was till in full effect driving Nancy nuts. She tried her best to review the documents.

At this point, we decided it would be stupid to try and go to the dinner so I went to Jason’s room to tell him we would be trying to rest and to go without us.

Then I went back to the room. All during this time, we were also trying to pack. This was just exacerbated by the feeling of yuckiness and the fact that Kai was always underfoot.

There was one breakthrough moment in the evening though. Nancy was needing to do some packing and Kai let me pick him up and put him on my lap while I worked on the computer. That may seem trivial, but it’s not.

I honestly have a lot more respect for parents. At least with pets, you can just contain them somewhere and get your work done. But, with children you cannot.

Kai was like the Energizer Bunny this evening. His usual bedtime came and went and still wasn’t tired. We were exhausted and had decided we could finish packing the next day but we needed Kai to go to sleep.

We decided to give Benadryl a shot this evening. We needed to test it on him anyway because on some kids it makes them more amped up than sedated. The last thing we wanted to do was try it on him on a plane and have a psycho kid until the medicine wore off.

Well, it didn’t kick in right away and Nancy wanted to go to sleep. I know she wanted to keep having Kai sleep in a bed with us, but I told her that it would be in everyone’s best interest if Kai slept in a crib that evening. Even though he wasn’t getting tired, I told her to put him in the crib and we’ll turn out the lights. With his life in an orphanage and the foster facility, I was sure he would know what it means when the lights go out.

Sure enough as soon as we turned the lights out he was laying down in no time. We did learn something interesting. We found out why he does the weird stuff with his legs and arms while sleeping in the bed.

When he’s in his crib, he likes to push his feet through the individual paces between the slats and then grab on to different rungs with his hands. I guess this is one of his self-soothing techniques.

Kai eventually went to sleep and so did we and it was around 9PM. Well, I say we went to sleep but the fun was just beginning.

Until Tomorrow

Journey to Kai – Day 07 (The Free Day)

2009-11-25T08:09:00.001-06:00

Once again, I was up until 1AM. These trip reports don’t write themselves and I like to provide as much detail as possible. Not only will these trip reports help us when it comes time to show Kai all about our trip to China to bring him home, but all those people who are waiting anxiously to be where we are right now will benefit, I hope, by reading about what we are doing.

I also got to enjoy some conversation with the online friends back home because it was the beginning of their day while it was the end of mine.

Kai really didn’t wake up in the middle of the night this time. He did have a moment where Nancy felt that he was running a bit warm so she gave him some Children’s Tylenol just in case. She is also thinking of starting him on his antibiotics today because his cough is getting a lot more wet and more frequent. We are noticing that a lot of the cleft lip and palate kids are having a cough that has been slowly getting worse.

For those who haven’t been to China, the pollution is very noticeable. At noon we still cannot see buildings that are further than across the street. It looks like fog but it’s not and breathing it often is reminiscent of being in a room full of smokers. It does get better as the day goes on, but it’s still different.

China is a country with a fast growing middle class and lots of industrial growth. I cannot bring myself to blame them for the situation they are in because if the United States was as large as China when they were at this phase of their development they would’ve trashed our air to this extent a long time ago. Plus, more ecologically friendly ways of doing things are very expensive and not very common so it hinders growth. If you really want too see, first hand, the impact of progress come to China. It might make you want to support efforts to make it easier to clean things up and device methods to prevent it from getting dirty in the first place.

That is my PSA for today…haha

We woke up around 7AM and fired up the computer. We decided to launch Skype and see who was online. It turns out that quite a few people were online. Nancy’s sister, Julie, was on and her daughter, our niece, missed out on meeting Kai the last time we spoke to her, so we made sure to call her first.

It looks like our timing was impeccable because they were on the way out to go to Disneyland. Regan was excited to see Kai. Kai was sort of just ambivalent about the whole thing but would occasionally point at people on the computer. While we were talking with Julie and Regan, my friend Tim was calling in. We hung up with Julie so we could talk with Tim and his family. They are one of the many aunts and uncles Kai will have the pleasure of knowing.

We had a great talk with Tim, Karen and his son Billy. Karen and Tim have been very supportive along the way with Tim often being the voice of reason with me and helping to get me “off the water tower” when I freak out. We had a great talk with them and Billy was excited to see Kai even though he still really didn’t grasp the concept of adoption and that we were in China and why we were there.

We ended up having to cut the conversation short because it was getting late and we were worried about being able to get some breakfast.

We gathered up Kai’s backpack and headed downstairs to get some food. As we walked up to the restaurant they told us it was too full and took us up one floor to Mama Mia and told us we could eat there.

We did put Kai into a high chair this time. He didn’t really like it at first but settled in quickly.

Sure enough there was plenty of room but all the food downstairs wasn’t on this buffet. I went and got some congee for Kai since we couldn’t find a place to ask for some scrambled eggs.

The first two spoonfuls of congee Kai loved, but the third must’ve been hotter than the previous two because he acted like I shoved napalm into his mouth. At that point, he lost trust in me and wouldn’t let me feed him anymore.

After several failed attempts he did let me hand feed him some Cheerios again. Nancy ended up finding a person to make some eggs and ordered two eggs scrambled.

I continued to try and feed Kai a combination of steamed buns, Cheerios, and congee until the eggs arrived. He was much more open to the eggs once they arrived.

On one of Nancy’s runs back tot he buffet she brought back some yogurt for us to try and feed him.

Apparently, Kai loves plain yogurt because he wasn’t having anything to do with the eggs and congee after we started feeding him the yogurt.

The downside to feeding Kai yogurt was that it was extremely messy. I could feed him just off the yogurt that missed his mouth and ended upon his cheeks and chin.

Now mind you, except for the few minutes I ran back to the room to get our camera, I fed Kai the entire time. He was very open to me doing that and only got a bit fussy when Nancy was out of sight but I could distract him with the yogurt.

By the time Nancy got done eating they were telling us they were shutting the buffet down, so I ran quickly to get some food. When I sat down to eat the food was cold so I really didn’t eat much except a few steamed buns. I am good at going without food so I wasn’t too upset and the meal didn’t cost me anything. I was just glad Nancy got to eat.

We went back to the room and I hopped back onto the computer. I only did that for a little bit and eventually ended up on the floor with Nancy and Kai playing with the stacking cups. Now Nancy will tell you she really didn’t think much of the advice from previous families about bringing the stacking cups, but they have quickly become Kai’s favorite toy.

After a serious blowout in his diaper we got Kai dressed an took him up to the 5th floor where a little play area had been setup. It wasn’t anything fabulous based on what you’d expect in the US, but it apparently was highly entertaining to the kids. One of the other families were up there with their little girl. Kai saw the ball pit and wanted inside so Nancy climbed in there and played with Kai. We suspected he’d like the ball pit since we have a picture of him playing in a ball pit at his foster home facility.

Kai has already exhibited some signs on not wanting to share with kids but I don’t blame him since he’s had to share for so long and now he actually has some things of his own and he’s going to hold tight.

We pulled him out of the ball pit and let him crawl around on the floor. He had a blast and eventually found a rocking horse. He climbed onboard and after a brief moment of Nancy propelling him, he took over and rocked himself and enjoyed every minute of it.

About this time, Robyn and Jason showed up with their daughter and the kids played while we talked. Kai did, at one point, go up to Jason and plopped himself into Jason’s lap and let Jason hold him. That hurt a bit, but I guess with Jason having a son at home already, he put off that parent vibe which Kai picked up on.

Eventually the kids started exhibiting the signs of needing a nap and we left and went back to our rooms. It didn’t take much to get Kai down for a nap and Nancy laid down too. While they napped, I worked on this post while watching some seriously old American TV (So you think you can dance).

After a couple hours of nap time (for Kai and Nancy), I woke up Nancy asking her how much longer we were going to let Kai sleep. It was decided that we were going to get him up.

He arose relatively painlessly and we got him dressed for going outside. We had decided we were going to go check out the park down the road.

We strapped Kai into the ERGOBaby carrier and I grabbed the backpack and my shoulder bag and we headed on out.

The park was only a couple blocks from the hotel and it wasn’t really a very exciting place to go. It was very dead…literally. All the plant life was dead and it pretty much gave it a very gloomy hue.

As we walked around we saw a lot of 20-something locals sitting on park benches cuddling or making out. There was also a really nasty pond with quite a few people surrounding it with long bamboo fishing poles trying to hook “the big one”.

For the most part we were the main event at the park. Many times someone would walk past us and then double back and carefully look at the face of the kid in our baby carrier. Many of them would then smile and wave at Kai and look at us with inquisitive looks. In Zhengzhou it’s not very common to see Anglo looking people and English is not really spoken here.

At one point we ran into a really run down outdoor roller skating rink. Kai was really fascinated with the activities within the fenced-in rink. So we stopped so he could watch. Many of the young adults who were skating came buy you gawk at our son. I cannot even imagine a similar scenario that we’d might encounter in the United States.

While we were watching the people skate, an older gentleman came by to look at us and then he noticed that Kai only had on one layer of clothes. Then he started rattling something off in Mandarin while pointing out that skin was visible under Kai’s pants. We are pretty sure we were getting the “Clothing Nazi” lecture. It is relatively known in the Chinese Adoption community that the older people will lecture you about not bundling up your kids outside. The culture dictates that we load on the layers just like how he was when we got him on Monday. We weren’t going to do that and Kai really seemed comfortable with the single layer plus being in the ERGObaby, he was getting a lot of warmth from Nancy’s body.

We just kept wandering and hoping that we’d run into the shopping mall the had the McDonald’s, but that wasn’t going to be the case.

What did happen was that we were dumped onto a street with no sidewalk. So we followed it around knowing that it will eventually take us to the main road we wanted to be walking on. It was pretty interesting because we knew that cars were not going to be looking out for us and it was our responsibility to avoid getting hit by a car or bicycle.

When we got back to the main road we knew we were still a ways away from the McDonald’s.

The crowds were increasing as we were getting closer and I was getting nervous about our safety because I was always taught when I lived in Singapore that it wasn’t wise to go out into local populations where English isn’t spoken without being in a group and without at least having someone who spoke the native language to translate. Here we were wandering out with no way to communicate if we needed help.

Eventually we got to this point where we had to cross 6 lanes of traffic to get to the McDonald’s. I think I mentioned that stop lights really aren’t adhered to. So, even though we had the light to tell us that it was safe to walk in the crosswalk, cars and bikes were still zooming through the intersection. So, it kind of felt like a real live version of the classic arcade game Frogger.

When we walked into McDonald’s heads turned. The signs over the register where you pick your Value Meal was all in Chinese Characters. So, we had to look at the pictures to figure out what we wanted. Fortunately, when we got to the register the girl whipped out a mat that had the items with English descriptions. We pointed at what we wanted, but they still didn’t speak English.

After they rung up our order she took off and came back with a boy in his 20’s and he spoke very crude and broken English. He basically told us the price and told us to have a good day.

As we were looking for a place to sit it dawned on us that we didn’t tell them to not put ice in our Coke’s. The water here isn’t potable to Westerners so even the ice is off limits. So, we had to throw the drinks away.

There were a lot of signs around the various seating areas (it was a 2-story McDonald’s) but it was all in Mandarin so we had no idea what the signs were saying.

So, we grabbed a seat in the corner downstairs. As we were eating I noticed a couple young ladies in a different McDonald’s uniform consisting mostly of red and were talking on a Microphone. I had no idea what they were saying but it looked like they were seating people. So, I still have no idea if we broke the rules for seating ourselves.

As we ate our food, Nancy decided to give Kai some French fries. He loved them and begged for more. Nancy only gave him a few but he absolutely loved the. I tell you McDonald’s French fries are like crack. You get one hit and you are hooked for life.

After eating our food, it was getting late so we decided to walk back to our hotel. It was an uneventful walk except that it has become apparent that the cars and bikes ride on the road and they ride on the sidewalks. So, you have to always be on your guard.

When we got back to the hotel people from our travel group were in the lobby so we stayed and talk to them. It was nice catching up and hearing what people were up to on their free day. Many people went out for walks like we did and many had similar experiences where people were gawking and in many cases taking pictures with their camera phones.

Our lobby has a small Christmas store and Nancy decided to buy a small Christmas ornament to mark the occasion.

The store had a snowman outside that was actually made from ice. I don’t think I’ve actually seen anything like that before.

Then we went back to our room. We checked his diaper and it was about 2 pounds heavier from the fact that he wet it.

We decided to see if he’d let me change his diaper. He fussed a bit more than with Nancy, but it got done.

After the diaper change, we all played on the floor for awhile. Nancy figured out how to make the rice cereal and we had me feed him the food. He seemed really excited to be eating the rice cereal and let me feed him two bowls of it.

As with breakfast, the feeding process resulted in as much food on his face as in his belly.

After the feeding was done, it was time for Kai’s bath. Nancy went to the bathroom to draw the water and she asked me to watch Kai. Well, he can really move once he starts crawling and was in the bathroom in no time. Then he pulled himself up and was trying to reach into the bathtub to touch the water. So, I picked him up and tipped him into the tub so he could reach the water to start splashing.

Nancy asked me if I wanted to get him undressed so we could put him in the tub and I quickly got his stripped down and put him in the tub. He was having a blast. We got just as wet as he did. I still wasn’t able to wash him but I did get to stay in the room.

When he was done, I was allowed to pick him up with the towel. I wrapped him up and played with him a bit buy showing him his reflection in the mirror.

Kai really gets a kick out of seeing his reflection and I was able to get him to start squealing in delight. I walked into the other room with him and got him on the bed so Nancy could slather him down with lotion. Then I picked out his pajamas and helped Nancy get him dressed.

We had decided earlier today that we were going to try and brush his teeth. So, now that he was dressed for bed, we took him into the bathroom and took a stab at it. He obviously knew what a toothbrush was because when Nancy got it out and put toothpaste on it, he opened his mouth up wide. The problem was that I don’t think he liked the flavor because he went nuts as soon as we got a couple teeth brushed and then refused to allow us to continue.

We didn’t push the issue too much. We got most of his teeth brushed before giving up. We’ll try again in the morning and try and find out what type of toothpaste he is probably used to.

Nancy took him to the bed and was holding him while he sucked on a bottle of formula. She had me get his antibiotic drawn and I brought it out to her.

Once again, when he saw the oral syringe of antibiotic, he opened his mouth up wide and sucked it down like a trooper.

He wasn’t too tired at first and was getting real fussy and was pointing at something across the room, but we didn’t know what. After awhile we realized that he was pointing at the stacking cups that were sitting on top of the TV.

I brought them over to him which put him in a good mood. But, it was to be short lived because he quickly drifted off to sleep.

Nancy decided to lay down while I worked on this blog post. I’m going to go hit the showers and then try and lay beside Kai and see if he’ll let me. If not, Nancy will have to once again get kicked all night by the restless sleeper known as Kai.

Tomorrow we are supposed to go on a half-day tour of the Henan Museum which is the 3rd largest museum in all of China. Then, the rest of the day, will be free.

Until Tomorrow…..

Journey to Kai – Day 06 (Registration Day)

2009-11-25T06:54:00.001-06:00

It was another late night. I was working on the previous day’s post until around midnight. Nancy had fallen asleep with Kai around 8PM and she woke up around midnight.

I read her the post I threw up recapping our family day with Kai and then crawled into bed. She was awake now so she decided she wanted to write her version of the day’s events. I was tired so I went to bed. Nancy asked me to lay in bed with Kai until she was ready to go back to bed. That was pretty much the first time he let me get really close to him and that was because he was asleep.

I don’t remember going to my own bed and just woke up there sometime in the middle of the night when Kai woke up. He bolted up screaming and when we turned on the light he pointed to an empty water bottle on the night stand. We knew what he wanted to Nancy asked me to pull a bottle out of the fridge and we gave it to him. He immediately went back to sleep.

The plan was to get up at 6:45AM because we needed to meet the bus promptly at 9AM to go to the Registration Office to do more stuff to finalize the adoption.

We woke up several times during the night. Nancy tells me that calling Kai a restless sleeper was an understatement. This kid was all over the bed.

Because of his restlessness we woke up several times just because he was whining in his sleep.

We woke up at 6AM and decided it was best to just get up and I did my usual scouring of the e-mail, twitter and facebook.

Neither of us showered the previous night so we both had to shower this morning. I went first and then went back to working on the computer. Nancy went after I did and Kai was still asleep.

The amazing thing is that even after all the showering and getting ready, Kai remained asleep. We finally decided to wake him up around 7:30AM. He was not happy about that at all. He proceeded to scream and yell. Other than when I tried to hold him, that is the first time we’ve seen this kind of behavior out of him when in Nancy’s arms.

Nancy got him dressed and we went to the restaurant for our complimentary breakfast.

Not much was different in the food choices today, but we were sat at a table with a bunch of other families from our travel group. People came by to talk to us to see how he was doing. Also, the waitresses were fawning all over him.

The kid cannot even talk yet and he has the girls going gaga over him.

Nancy found it increasingly difficult to try and eat with Kai on her lap with his bottle. So, she asked me to finish my food so I could attempt to feed Kai so she could focus on her plate.

We had ordered Kai some scrambled eggs because we weren’t sure what he could eat and they were soft which should work well with his cleft palate.

I finished my food and went across to the other side of the table so I could sit next to Kai. He remained on Nancy’s lap and I spoon fed him very tiny portions of scrambled eggs. He also liked the steamed buns.

He would let me feed him, but we would not let me hold him in my lap. I continued to feed him while Nancy tried to eat.

By the time we were done, he had pretty much eaten 2/3 of the eggs on the plate.

Nancy had asked me to go get her some Raisin Bran and bring back some of the honey nut Cheerios if they had them. We had brought a tiny bowl with a snap-on lid to put them in if they had them.

Lucky for us, that had those so we could start stockpiling a stash. For you see, if Cheerios are in this province, we haven’t found them yet.

One of the highlights of today was that Josh and Lilly were here from Colorado. They are the founders of CCAI and were here on business so they thought they’d break away and be here today for our special day at the Registration Office. Today is the day we legally take custody of Kai.

After breakfast we went back to the room to gather up the stuff to have with us to leave. This is our first trip away from the room since we got Kai yesterday. So, we had to pack up his backpack full of the things Nancy thought he’d need.

Nancy was going to try and use the ERGObaby Carrier with him today in the front position (it supports front, back and side). Since he’s still latching onto a bottle, we thought it best to have him on the front so we’d know if he dropped the bottle.

I helped Nancy get Kai into his ERGObaby carrier and he didn’t want to be there at first, but once we got all his arms and legs where they should be and repositioned his bottle, he quieted down and enjoyed the ride.

I grabbed the backpack we were using as a diaper bag, my shoulder bag with my camera stuff in it, plus my camera and the two gifts for the notary and registration offical and we headed out the door to the lobby.

Most of the families were already in the lobby and it wasn’t long after we were piling onto the bus.

I must say that I was feeling especially claustrophobic today. It’s weird you could put me in a trunk and shut the lid and I’d be find, but put me in a crowded room and I freak out. A place that this usually happens is the Stretching Room in Disney’s Haunted Mansion or the crowds leaving the Disney theme parks.

With Nancy and Kai in the window seat and I holding all the bags, my camera and the gifts, I couldn’t move to save my life. It’s times like this my anxiety level starts to spike and I get easily agitated.

Fortunately, the ride to the Registration Office wasn’t long. This was, in fact, the same building we went to yesterday to get Kai.

When we went into the lobby, the kids were told they were allowed to play. So, many of the younger ones piled into the little play pen in the back of the room while older kids ran around.

I walked around and took pictures. For the longest time Nancy was sitting on the couch with Kai still in the carrier and working his bottle. We’ve noticed that Kai is a real people watcher. He loves to just sit there and check out the scenery. That will come in handy later for him because his mama and baba love to do that too.

I would keep coming back and take pictures of my son and interact with him being careful not to upset him. After awhile Nancy noticed he was showing interest in the play area so took him in there to play. He quickly grabbed some plastic bowling pins and started using them as clubs. I perceived it as a bit aggressive, but other parents said that was typical boy behavior to turn everything into either a weapon or a drumstick.

He didn’t really like any of the toys that let them get on and ride them, but he seemed to like sitting on the floor playing with some balls and those darn bowling pins. Instead of crawling, many times he’s just scoot on his but using his heels to propel himself. He was actually pretty good at that and could get around fast. It was about as funny to watch as a dog scooting his booty across the carpet (which some people don’t find as funny as I do).

Kai played in there for a good while but eventually it became too crowded and too chaotic and the bigger kids weren’t really being as cognizant of the smaller kids so Nancy moved him back to the couch.

Soon we were told to gather our kids and move to the other room where we’d be meeting with the head government official for the Henan Province.

We were grabbing our backback with Kai’s stuff when were told to leave everything behind and just take our kids.

Sure enough as soon as we got to the other room we realized Kai needed a diaper change, but we couldn’t go back and get it. The Henan Provincial leaders were wanting to get a group photo of all the families and their adopted children.

Then we got a short history of CCAI’s Henan Project. CCAI and CCAA (China Center for Adoption Affairs) got together to create a special arrangement where CCAI would help get the Henan province more ready for adoptions than they already were. From what we were told that one province was much more poor than others and had the lowest adoption rate out of any of China’s provinces. CCAI hoped to turn that around.

Since the signing of the agreement, our group (CCAI Group 1520) was the largest group of families coming through at the same time. It also marks the first time a leader from CCAI was in the same place as top brass from Henan since the agreement was signed.

So, they made a big deal out of us being there. We each had our child’s name called and they had us come up and shake the leader’s hand and got a picture taken with him as they handed us our Adoption Certificate in a fancy leather-bound case similar to the one a high school diploma would come in

After every family had their name called, we went back and gathered our belongings and headed back to the bus. Our gifts for the official had been collected by one of our CCAI guides and handed over to someone earlier in the trip.

For those who aren’t familiar with Chinese customs, it is considered very rude to come to an event or gathering without a gift. Just some small token of your appreciation but one that doesn’t have a lot of thought or emotional attachment to it. These gifts don’t even have to be gender specific. For example, you could bring a gift of a tie to a female recipient. That is because re-gifting is not a party foul in China like it is in the United States. So, if the gift is one that isn’t of use to the recipient, they’ll pass it onto someone who might be able to use it.

These aren’t payments or bribes, this is a cultural norm here. Those are sometimes hard for people to understand where this practice isn’t common.

Our next stop was going to be the notary’s office. Apparently it was close to the hotel. The other thing we were told was that there wasn’t an elevator in this building and that the office was on the 6th floor. I was already mentally prepared for this type of occurrence because we were warned that not all buildings had elevators. That was one of the reasons we brought the ERGObaby carrier.

I helped Nancy get Kai back in the carrier and started the march up the stairs. It was real easy in comparison to the Great Wall of China.

This office complex was really smoky. As we passed by offices, you saw room after room with people smoking cigarettes in them. In fact, there were so many smokers, I bet if you did not smoke you’d be a minority.

When we got to the room we needed to be in, we were greeted witha giant conference table and we were told to find a place to sit. Then we were all given 5 pieces of paper that had our names on them and that was pretty much the extent of English. Everything else was in Chinese characters.

Fortunately, our CCAI guide was able to tell us what each page was saying and where we were to fill out stuff and what to put on the page.

I told Nancy that we really had to be trusting because without the sudden gift of tongues and be able to instantly read and comprehend Mandarin, we had to trust that the person translating was doing so accurately. For as far as we knew, we could be signing over the deed to our house.

After we went through each and every page in detail, CCAI assistants came around and collected our notary fee and translation fee. When converted roughly into US$ we were paying about what you’d pay your mortgage closing company when buying/selling home. In other words, a heck of a lot more than if you went to the bank and asked for a notarization.

After this process was complete we were told to just leave our gift for the notary on the desk and leave. We proceeded to walk down the 6 flights of stairs and onto the bus that was waiting for us on the street.

We were told that the notarizations wouldn’t be complete until Thursday. That information finally explained why we were staying in Zhengzhou so long considering that after this morning’s events we were officially Kai’s parents in the eyes of China law (US Law says we are legally responsible for him, but we aren’t allowed to bring him back to the USA until he has a visa).

On the way back to the hotel a discussion occurred about when the group wanted to take the group shopping trip to get necessities. The majority wanted 3PM but Nancy wanted 3:30PM so we could get Kai down for a nap.

It was also decided that we wouldn’t go to Wal-Mart because we found out that they had only been open since earlier in the year and it was of our CCAI guide’s opinion that the selection wasn’t that great.

Since it was only 12:30PM when we got back to the hotel, we decided along with Robyn and Jason (quickly becoming our go to people to hang out with) that we’d try and find the Chinese restaurant in the Holiday Inn Express.

We really only needed to go out of the hotel and hang a left and it was the next hotel over. This restaurant was serving real Chinese food at affordable prices. The downside was they only had 1 highchair for the entire restaurant.

Nancy and I got beef noodles, steamed pork dumplings, and fried rice for 98 yuan and that roughly converted to US$14.50. The beef noodles were a bit spicy for our liking but I ate a good majority of them.

At this meal, Kai’s reluctance to have anything to do with me was starting to wear thin on us. I tried to hold him and feed him but he just started wailing and it got louder and louder. So much so it was disturbing others in the restaurant. So, I had to give him back to her and she couldn’t really eat because of being one handed at this point and Kai constantly trying to dislodge her food from her plate.

Plus, he was a very squirmy boy. Then near the end, he started throwing a major fit because he was over 2 hours late for his normal nap time. I told Nancy that I wouldn’t be upset if she returned to the room to put him down for a nap. I gave her the room key and sent her on her way.

When we finally got our checks settled the rest of us headed back to the hotel.

When I got up to the room, Kai was still awake and very fussy. It took a bit longer after I got back to see him finally slip off into napland. While he was sleeping we talked about what was needed from the store and I tried to get as much info as I could since I was going to be doing this solo and purchasing items I’ve never even looked for before in a foreign country.

Ultimately, it was decided that I should get some items based off of what others were getting (for example,baby formula).

3 o’clock came early and I headed down to the lobby where the rest of the crew was waiting. When the bus came we all piled onboard and headed to Carrefour. It was a very Wal-Mart like store but we were told selection was better.

The bus couldn't get into the parking lot so we were let off and walked to the store.

Our two CCAI guides were with us to try and aid people in making decisions. I tagged along with Robyn and Jason since they were adopting their second child and had a boy at home so they probably had good opinions on what Kai needed. Robyn was very helpful and tried to make sure I wasn’t steered wrong. In many cases I just bought what she was getting for their daughter since we both had cleft palate kids.

The group had decided that the original plan of 2 hours of shopping was too long (we disagreed but were overruled) so we were given 1.5 hours. Considering you had to go back and forth between the 2nd and 3rd floors to find everything and pretty much all aisles were in Mandarin it was really a challenge to find everything. What was fun though was seeing all those brands that we are familiar with (Coke,Pepsi, Oreos, etc) where their logos are replaced with Chinese characters.

Also, it was cool to see what flavors Chinese like their potato chips in. How many of you are ready to crack into a tin of Pringles Prawn flavored chips, or seaweed flavored.

Another thing that was cool was that the grocery carts had 4 wheel steering. You could perform some complex turns with those cards.

An even further cool thing was that you moved from floor to floor on inclined moving sidewalks. It allowed you to bring your cart to each floor but the floor of the moving sidewalk was designed as such that the wheels of your cart locked into it so you wouldn’t loose control due to gravity.

I was able to eventually find everything on the list that Nancy sent me with and a few additional items for Kai (some different kinds of crackers) and made my way to the checkout counter. One of the first things I found unique was that they charge you for the bags you pack your groceries into and they make you sack your own groceries. If I had known that I would’ve brought our backpack.

All our grocers were 214 Yuan (roughly US$38) and that included a 30 count pack of Pampers, baby formula, rice cereal, some snacks, a pacifier and a Sippy cup.

After making our purchases it was time to find our way back to the bus. That involved going down three stories and then find the door taking us back to the outside. Eventually our CCAI guide caught up with us and helped lead us out of the building.

Once back on the bus, we found out that several families couldn’t find the children’s clothing they were looking for so they needed to go to Wal-Mart. The bus driver had offered to drop off all the families at Wal-Mart, then drop off all the families done with their shopping back at the hotel, then go back to Wal-Mart to bring those people home.

We got off at the hotel because we were done. Robyn, Jason, their daughter, and I made our way back up to our floor. Jason and I were talking about how awesome it would be to get Pizza Hut delivered to our room. He was going to see if he could find a corporate website that would allow us to do that and we’d go in on some pizza together.

I went back to my room and Nancy and Kai were up watching TV. He had been up for a bit and seemed to be in better spirits. I unpacked the groceries onto the spare bed and we decided to try and see what he thought of one of the snacks I brought back. We really had no idea what they were because everything was in Chinese on the packaging but Kai loved them. They looked like cookies in the shape of small sticks and he just munched away on them.

Nancy tried to give him some apple juice in his new Sippy cup but apparently you needed to be able to suck to get liquid out of that and kids with cleft palates can often not suck. So, Nancy performed a bit of surgery on the cup and rendered it no longer “unspillable”. He really liked that cub of apple juice as he tipped that sucker up like he hadn’t drank in days.

Nancy looked at the rice cereal box I got and we discovered there were no English instructions on the box. So, we really have no idea how to cook it. We are going to have to see if one of our CCAI Guides can translate for us.

We all laid on the bed watching TV when a knock on the door came. It was Jason. He couldn’t figure out how to get the ability to order a pizza from Pizza Hut online so they were going to go the Mama Mia downstairs and get one to go. Nancy said that was find and I went with them.

The pizza choices were a bit gourmet for my taste but I found a couple that would be palatable to Nancy and me. We were told it would take about 30 minutes to be ready so we went back to our rooms to wait it out.

When the 30 minute time period lapsed I went back down to Mama Mia and got my pizza. It was really pretty inexpensive and we were hungry.

When I got back to the room, Kai was on the floor playing. Nancy told me he finished the first cup of apple juice and he was already on his second cup.

Nancy tried to eat her pizza but Kai wanted her attention. We once again tried to get him to let me hold him and that didn’t work. Ultimately we both ate cold pizza

Somewhere in the middle of our meal we smelled something rank. It definitely smelled like a messed up diaper. We had been talking earlier about how Kai owed us a bowl movement and it looks like he delivered. Nancy changed the diaper while I supplied the supplies. We tossed the nasty diaper and then went back to eating.

I swear, no sooner than 15 minute went buy and we smelled it again. Nancy was sure it was just the diaper we threw away in the bathroom. I stuck my head in there and told her that her job of bagging it in a plastic bag did it’s job because the smell wasn’t coming from there. So, we knew he must’ve popped again in his diaper.

Nancy said that if he did back-to-back poops then we should just let him get it out of his system and finish eating.

Well, the smell because too much so Nancy decided to change him again. Good thing she did because once she popped that sucker open we saw blow out city. As Nancy joked, the first diaper must’ve been his uncorking because this one was nasty.

She got him cleaned up good and put a diaper on him again. She was planning on giving him a bath after we finished eating but that was too long to just let him go commando.

When we finished our food, she put him on the bed with me while she drew his bath. He cried for a second but I gave him his bottle and he seemed to calm down. Once Nancy dropped him into his bath he was in heaven. He was making a mess splashing water everywhere but he was in heaven.

The bath was quick and I helped dry him off. Since he was already upset about being pulled out of the bath, what is a little more crying by having me hold him.

After the bath, we saw that my mom was on Skype so we talked to her a bit and got to show her Kai. She snagged some pictures of the video chat and she let us go so we could get some rest.

Well, Nancy and Kai got some rest because I had to write this post. I also got to chat with my friends back home because it was the beginning of their day today for them.

Kai did wake up at one point while I was writing this and it took a bit to calm him down. Nancy was saying all afternoon that he felt warm, so she gave him some Children’s Tylenol. We gave him another bottle and let him go back to sleep.

It’s now 12:50AM in China and I’m exhausted. I’m going to worry about the pictures for this post tomorrow and get some rest. At least we don’t have to be anywhere other than for breakfast in the morning.

Family Day-My version

2009-11-23T11:02:00.001-06:00

So after a quick little nap with Kai I am finally ready to add a little of my perspective to today. So far Ray has been doing such a good job that I felt that I had little to contribute. I figured no one really wanted to hear about my melt downs and freak outs (but trust me- they were happening everyday) and to be honest I have been EXHAUSTED every day. If you feel tired reading Ray’s accounts of our activities- try doing them while pregnant!

Today started off emotional for me. I know that is absolutely normal, and the pregnancy hormones really don’t help this part of the trip. At breakfast all of the other families were excited as well and full of anticipation as we all couldn’t stop talking about what was about to happen. We are about to meet OUR CHILDREN! Several of the other mothers tried to reassure me that I was going to do just fine as a first time mother. All I could think about was the possibility of rejection and lots of crying- Kai and me.

Soon it was time to make the trip to the registration office to meet our little ones. Some of the families were able to make small talk to try and pass the time. I couldn’t do anything other than panic. My palms were sweaty, I thought for sure my heart was going to leap right out of my chest, and crying was just a moment (or hard blink) away. The emotional messages that we each made for Kai on video before we left the hotel didn’t help.

I loved the fact that we could see little faces at the door as we pulled into the parking lot. This also meant that there were already crying moms on the bus though as they spotted their little one, and my raw emotions were almost sent over the edge.

We did manage to make it into the building and …..no Kai. I think that Ray and I handled it surprisingly well. Ray just relied on his crutch- photography, and I tried to capture some family firsts on video for others in our group.

EVERYTHING STOPPED the minute I heard them announce Kai’s orphanage and name. Ray and I made our way past all of the commotion to try and spot OUR little man. And there he was! True to Kai fashion he was sporting a girls jacket (but really with as handsome as he is… he pulled the look off without a problem). They tried to hand him off to Ray, and that didn’t go very well. Next it was my turn to try.

OK so far- he came to me and there was no crying. I have to say that I was immediately relieved! I cried (big surprise), but recovered faster than I thought I would be able to. HE IS GORGEOUS! Far more so than any picture can ever depict! I did have a moment when I really was still in disbelief that I was HOLDING MY KAI!

We made our way over to a more secluded area of the room so that we could have a little family time to get to know each other. I had to take the top layer coat off so that I could see his hands. Those tiny little fingers were the most precious fingers that I had ever seen in my entire life! I could tell that he was happy to see them again too because he started to become more animated once the coat came off.

The bear that we brought was fun for about 2 seconds. The winner of the day was cheerios! This was a great bonding activity for Ray and Kai and was thrilling to witness. Kai (who has WAY more than 4 teeth) LOVED taking the cheerios from Ray’s hand. Whenever the hand went empty he would point back to the container to tell Daddy- more please.

When Ray got up to sign paperwork, the cheerio dispensing role went to me. Now Kai decided that it was time to share, and he started feeding ME cheerios. I bawled! It had been a total of about 20 minutes with him and already he was seeing me as someone that he wanted to share his precious cheerios with!

At that moment I knew that I was going to be OK. This little guy really is as happy as the little one in the pictures! I will never know how I got to be so very blessed in my life and will never be able to express my gratitude for all of my blessings.

The rest of the day I kept waiting for the other side. When was I going to get the screaming kiddo that I had worried sick about? When was he going to get tired of this new lady that just happened to have food all of the time? I have to say……I am still waiting.

When we got back to the room we played with stacking cups for an hour. He smiled and interacted with family over Skype. We crawled and walked the hall in the room. The mirror provided tons of entertainment! He explored almost every inch of this room. And somehow we avoided a melt down. The closest that we got was when we tried to put him in the carrier to go sign paperwork, and even that was quickly resolved once out of the carrier. Bath time was a blast with splashing and laughing. Then another bottle was all it took to get him out for the night.

I have discovered that the description of a “restless sleeper” doesn’t even begin to describe his sleep so far. He has been all over that bed. While we attempted to cuddle I got pushed, nudged, and kicked. He has been on his back and each side at least 4 times each within a 4 hour period. This should make things fun when we get back home. Regardless- he is a beautiful little angel asleep or awake and I wouldn’t take back a single bit of our first day together!

I survived!

Journey to Kai – Day 05 (Family Day)

2009-11-23T08:24:00.001-06:00

Nancy had been getting a bit annoyed with me because I was writing the blog posts for this trip and not posting them to the blog because I was wanted to put the pictures in the posts. She wanted to get the info out there and said that people don’t care that there aren’t any pictures. My response was that people want the pictures, that the pictures are all part of the package that comes with a Ray Harkness trip report…haha. Well, she just didn’t want too much distance between the day we got Kai and the day stuff started hitting the blog.

As she put it, there are fans back home that want to hear about “gotcha day” (I prefer family day) and don’t want to wait.

Well, I stayed up to 1AM writing the previous day’s post and got all other posts prior to that released.

We decided that we were going to get up at 7:30AM so we could hit the breakfast buffet and meet the bus at 9:40AM to the Registration Office to meet the kids.

Well, I thought going to bed at 1AM would mean that I would’ve slept straight through until the alarm clock went off. But, that wasn’t to be. I woke up at 3AM, then 5AM, then 7AM. So, I just stayed up. It turns out that Nancy was having just as much of a restless night as I was.

I couldn’t blame it on the heat of the room this time. I had left the window open until I went to bed at 1AM, so it was plenty cool in the room and stayed that way all night.

I was suffering from a mixture of anxiousness, nervousness, excitement and fear. It was almost like that feeling you get before going on a Disney vacation but much more intensified.

I jumped on the computer and checked the e-mail, twitter, and facebook and then tried to continue on with the posts that hadn’t been posted.

I didn’t have much time because we needed to go to breakfast.

We went downstairs to the restaurant. This breakfast buffet was much different than the one we had in the Grand Hotel Beijing. This buffet was almost like dinner at breakfast. Most of the food items we usually associate with dinner (fried rice, noodles, dumplings, etc).

They did have some of the steamed buns I just absolutely love but haven’t had since leaving Singapore. I told Nancy that we just must figure out how to make them at home.

I really didn’t eat much because there wasn’t really anything that appealed to me. I had a little fried rice, a croissant, and a few steamed buns. They were low on orange juice so I only got a couple classes before they were completely out.

After breakfast we had an hour to kill before the time to meet in the lobby. So, I came back and continued to work on the posts that were left to be released. There were two of them left. The final day in Beijing and our travel day to Zhengzhou.

In addition to the blogging, we attempted to record a message for Kai on our video camera.

Nancy did an awesome job, but I couldn’t get mine done because I couldn’t stop crying after a couple sentences. This was just too much for me. Nancy would also be crying behind the camera and that would just make it harder for me to maintain my composure.

I almost had enough time to get the post out for our final day in Beijing but it was time to gather our paperwork, gifts for the officials and head to the lobby.

In fact, we got a call from Yisha wanted to know where we were. So, I managed to cut it a bit close. It takes a lot of work to keep everyone back home informed…haha

We rushed downstairs and met up with the group. We had a lot of stuff today because Nancy wanted us to be prepared for anything. I was starting to feel overwhelmed. I was feeling claustrophobic on the bus and I knew it was just going to get worse once the new additions to everyone’s families came. Plus, I had no idea what to expect. We just knew we were driving to a building and in the building would be our son.

After what felt like an eternity and after what appeared to be a couple heated exchanges between our CCAI guide and the bus driver, we made it to the registration office where our kids would be meeting is. We could see some older kids looking out the glass door when we walked in.

We were informed exactly which kids were already waiting inside and it didn’t take long before everyone was off the bus and piling inside the building.

When I crossed the threshold it was mass chaos. Inside was parents meeting kids and kids not knowing what to think. You had people associated with their care in China there also. Many of them were crying and sad because they knew they wouldn’t see their precious charge again.

Lots of pictures and video were being taken. I know I was firing away at every family wil a child trying to capture as many “ahhh” moments as I could for these families.

Kai wasn’t there yet so I thought I could keep my mind off of the wait by helping capture moments for other people.

I have not included any of those photos on this recap out of respect to the privacy of the other families who at this time haven’t told me one way or another if they care.

I don’t know how long it was before we heard the CCAI guide shouting out the name of our son’s orphanage (Louhe) and then his Chinese name (Hu Jian Lun). That meant that he was coming through the doors at any minute. The first two kids that came through were obviously girls and then we saw a third kid who had a hood over his head and was facing away from us. We knew it was Kai despite the fact he was sporting a girl’s jacket.

I ran over and reached out my arms to take him and he wanted nothing to do with that. He pushed off and started to cry, I brought Nancy in and let her take him. Kai was very willing to let Nancy put him into her arms. Not a peep out of him. We walked around with him and other people came over to see our son. Eventually we decided to go sit down on the couch.

There was a couch in one of the back corners and we parked ourselves there. Kai was still not letting me come near him and would give me that look Coco gives people when they invade her personal space and she doesn’t know who you are. All Kai would’ve had to do was snarl at me and the look would’ve been complete.

Nancy thought it might work out well for me to try and feed him some Cheerios (the international baby food).

Nancy had purchased a travel sized pack of Cheerios that came in an hourglass shaped plastic container with two flip top lids.

So, I would pour some out in my hand and he would let me feed it to him. I found out when I took the first Cheerio and he saw it he opened up his mouth wide like a baby bird wanting some food.

After awhile he started reaching for them and I decided to see what he’d do if I let him. He was able to grab a Cheerio out of my hand and feed himself. We just kept doing this for awhile. It was a small breakthrough because we were able to see how good his fine motor skills were doing.

I did have to leave Nancy alone for a bit as I filled out and signed the guardianship paperwork. Then I went back and relieved Nancy so she could sign the paperwork.

Nancy informed me that while I was gone dealing with the paperwork, Kai was offering Nancy Cheerios to eat.

When Nancy left to go deal with signing the paperwork. I had Kai in my lap and found that as long as he could see Nancy, he was fine. I asked someone to take a picture with my camera while he was on my lap so I pointed at the camera and was trying to get him to look in the direction.

I was shocked when I saw Kai mimic me by pointing in the same direction. I thought it might be coincidence so I waited a bit and pointed again and he did the same thing.

Even when Nancy would point he would point.

The room was starting to quiet down, but there were still a couple kids who were not happy about how much their life was changing on them. If only they knew what was waiting for them at their new home. Well, I say that but even as an adult who can comprehend the pros and cons of change, I still don’t like it even when it’s for the best.

After all the babies had been introduced to their families and all the guardianship forms had been filled out it was time to get our family picture taken that will go with the Adoption Certificate. It took a few times to get our picture taken in an acceptable fashion because Nancy had given Kai a bottle and he absolutely refused to put it down. But, they needed an unobstructed view of his face in the picture.

Eventually we found a configuration that worked and got our picture taken. This is probably going to show up on the blog and facebook at some time(we don’t have it yet) but we’ll also not look at nice and formal as you might suspect. I’d say that most people in the room were a bit on the frumpy side. We were told very clearly that the government doesn’t care how you look so we pretty much went for comfort. As most will see from the pictures I always seemed to have bed head. No matter how much I tried to brush it away, it kept coming back and that was due to the fact that every time I removed my fleece pullover, it would put more static buildup in my hair.

After all the pictures were taken, it was time to go back to the hotel. There were people who came to the registration office with us who actually were meeting their children at the hotel.

As we were waiting for the bus to pull around, I noticed a water feature across the parking lot. So, Nancy said I could go over there to take some pictures. Well, some of the families saw it too and thought it would make a good photo location. So, I attempted to take some pictures with my camera as well as theirs. I was rather surprised how well some of them came out.

As I suspected, it was a lot more crowded on the bus on the way back home than it was going.

I actually sat across the aisle from Nancy. It was so I could shoot video and photos of Nancy and Kai but also so I could maintain some comfort. Nancy and I both have broad shoulders for our frames and it robs us of space in those narrow chairs on the bus.

It felt like it took forever to get back to the hotel. We didn’t have anything to do until 4PM when I had to go to the conference rooms and sign some more registration paperwork that was going to be processed the next day.

So, we went up to the room. The first thing Nancy wanted to do was get Kai out of the clothes he was in. He had so many layers of clothes on that he looked like the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man. It took some finagling to get him disrobed. In fact, after the first layer got off Kai was doing his darndest to help Nancy get the rest off. You could tell that he was used to the process of getting dressed and undressed. He know what to do and when to do it. Once he was stripped down to his diaper Nancy had taken off 5 layers of clothes.

This is pretty common for Chinese babies. In fact, if we don’t layer him up when we leave the hotel we will get chastised by Chinese mothers on the street. They believe the kids should be kept extremely bundled up, even in the hotter months. But it was our understanding that where Kai had been living he wasn’t used to wearing all these layer. Plus, he was dripping in sweat. It really seemed like he felt more comfortable once he was out of all those clothes.

Nancy put him in one of the Geranimals outfits we brought from home and put him in a new diaper.

Next, we fired up Skype. Sure enough Nancy’s sister Julie was on and we called her. She was so happy to see Kai and Nancy. At this time it was something like 9PM PST. They talked for a good while until Nancy’s other sister Michelle realized that we were online and started initiating a call. Julie graciously ended her call so Nancy could talk with Michelle.

After Michelle, it was time to talk to Nancy’s mom. At this point Nancy was telling me that she had to eat. Since I had no idea what to get her, I walked down to Jason and Robyn’s room to see what they were doing for food. They were in the process of giving their new daughter a bath but suggested the room service food because they found it not only reasonably priced, but of reasonable quality.

I walked back to the room expecting to see Nancy still talking to her mother. But, that wasn’t the case, she was on the floor playing with Kai.

While she was playing with Kai, I was trying to get some more posts up on the blog.

After awhile, Nancy asked me to stop doing that and try more bonding with Kai. I tried to play with him and hold him and it just didn’t seem to work. He did let me put him in my lap for a bit.

Nancy was having no trouble getting him to laugh and laugh and laugh. We also discovered that he can pull himself up and walk with assistance. That means he’ll be walking on his own soon and our house will never been the same.

Kai is still non-verbal so he is unable to give us any real clues to what he wants. So, that will add some challenge but I’m sure it’ll come. It has prompted us to discuss how vigorously we are going to adhere to our “No TV/movies Before 3” policy. In his case, he needs to be exposed to as much English as possible and TV and movies are a good way to do that.

4 o’clock came quick and I went up to the 4th floor to take care of the paperwork. By the time I got up there at 3:59PM, no one was there. Fearing I was in the wrong place, I went back to our floor and checked to see if Jason had left yet. Well, it turns out that his wife was going to fill out the paperwork. So, we went back up to the 4th floor and sure enough, this time the room was much more populated.

Yisha and her assistants proceeded to tell us how to fill out the paperwork. We needed the help since it was entirely composed of Chinese Characters and since I don’t read Mandarin there was no way to know what they were wanting us to provide on these forms.

The conference room was about 80 degrees and it was making it hard to concentrate. But, I had to concentrate because if any information was wrong, I might have a delay at the US Consulate.

After filling out the paperwork and signing it, we had to seal our signature with our thumb print that had been pressed into a red ink pad. The thumb print was to be applied directly over the signature.

After that, I had to go back to the room and get Nancy so that she could sign all the same forms that I just did.

Kai apparently had been wearing her out with all the playing. We thought we’d give our new ErgoBaby carrier a go and I put it on. As soon as Kai was put into it though he started screaming bloody murder. So, we didn’t keep him in it. So, Nancy carried him up to the 4th floor. He remained a perfect angel as long as Nancy was holding him.

The room was now much hotter than when I was in it and now a good bit more kids were there. The older ones were running around and being their age. The younger ones were mainly “seen but not heard”

I showed Nancy where to sign and then we just needed to wait for them to get to us with the red ink pad so she could stamp her signatures with her thumbprint.

By the time we were done with all this, it as 6:30PM China Time. We came back to the room and decided to give Kai his first bath. Our tub doesn’t really want to hold water, so Nancy was having to figure out a way to keep enough in there to give him a bath.

When Nancy got his diaper off it was soaking wet. So, it may have been that he was so fussy in the ERGO Baby Carrier because he needed to be changed. Also, we know he is getting tired because he had no desire to take a nap. We suspected that his sleep schedule got jacked up with the transport from Beijing.

I also forgot to mention that all the orphanages were given a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) to fill out in regards to the children. Well, our child was coming from a Foster Facility in Beijing and didn’t arrive to his orphanage until late on Friday and they didn’t have time to get that list of questions sent to the Foster Facility so they could answer the questions.

So, while everyone else had info about feeding and sleep schedules, favorite foods and activities, etc, we had nothing. So we were kind of winging it.

We were told that we might have these answers before we catch our flight to Guangzhou

Kai really seemed to like taking a bath. He did the typically baby thing and splashed and splashed and splashed.

We made the bath quick and got him out and dried off. He didn’t seem to like the drying off part or the “mommy rubbing him down with lotion” part as much as he liked the splashing around in the tub.

We also got to put him in his first set of pajamas. It turns out that he is still wearing 6-9 month clothes even though he is 18 months old. So, the clothes we brought are going to work swimmingly.

Nancy had decided she wanted to try a different approach with the bottle by cross-cutting the nipple. That is an often used method for cleft palate kids. Kai originally seemed really excited when he saw this giant bottle of formula, but I guess the liquid came out too quickly with the new nipple and he was not having anything to do with that.

So, Nancy had me move it to his other bottle and he was happy as a clam. It did become apparent that he was getting tired because his eyes were getting heavy. Then he’d jolt awake and aggressively chew on his bottle (he has to chew on the nipple to get liquid out since he cannot suck due to his cleft palate). Eventually he went limp because he passed out.

Nancy had me build a bunker out of pillows on the bed so she could put Kai on the bed. She was planning on shaving him sleep in the bed with her.

I think I forgot to mention that we have 2 beds that are somewhere between a twin and full sized mattress and we both cannot sleep in the same bed. So Kai and Nancy are going to be in one bed and I’ll be in the other.

Nancy stayed up a bit talking to me. To be honest, I’m having some confidence issues and not sure I’m going to be able to do a good job at this parenthood thing. Nancy seems to just know what to do (or at least try) and I don’t have a clue. Even when she asks me to play with my son, I just don’t know what to do. The concept of play seems like such a foreign one to me. I love my son but I don’t have the slightest idea on how to interact with him or take care of his basic needs.

Nancy was trying to reassure me that it’ll all be fine and once Kai starts to bond better my confidence will go up. Right now it’s hard because he doesn’t like me or want me around.

After Kai had been asleep a bit, it dawned on me he could roll off the bed even with Nancy in it. The bed Kai was in was open on both sides while the other bed only has a small gap between it and the wall. A gap that could be plugged with a pillow. So we decided to move him (and Nancy) to the other bed.

After moving him, Nancy decided she didn’t have any more energy left, so she went to bed. I stayed up to continue to work on this post.

I got an opportunity to talk to some friends via Twitter and Facebook and got some pictures uploaded to Facebook of today’s events. But, now it’s 9:17PM and I’m tired. I think I’m going to take a shower and hit the rack.

Tomorrow is a busy day with official registration and notarizations….and another trip to Wal-Mart!

See ya tomorrow.

Journey to Kai – Day 04 (Travel to Zhengzhou)

2009-11-23T05:42:00.001-06:00

Well, it was another night I was staying up until 11PM working on writing my blog posts and another night of night sweats because the room was insanely hot.

Some of the other families told us there was a thermostat control in the console between the beds and I cranked it as low as it would go (15 degrees Celsius) and after a few hours it seemed a bit cooler than it had been previously. It wasn’t anywhere near 15 degrees Celsius but thought it would be better.

Well, I was still waking up every couple hours.

Well, today we were flying out to Zhengzhou which is the provincial capital of Henan. Henan is where Kai was born and where the orphanage that is responsible for him is located. So, all the families adopting Henan children need to be in that city.

We were needing to have our bags outside our room at 7:20AM and then down at the lobby by 7:50AM so that we could get on the bus taking us to the Beijing Airport.

Based on these times, we decided that we needed to get up at 6AM so that we could get some breakfast.

With the frequent waking up and tossing and turning, it wasn’t that hard to get up at 6AM. We got dressed and headed down to the 2nd floor where the breakfast buffet was located.

It was odd seeing the hotel at that time of the morning. All the lights were off except those in the restaurant. Once again the buffet had sometime new on the line. Today it was pancakes and it just so happened Nancy was craving pancakes today. We both had our usual 4-5 glasses of Orange Juice.

There was a lot more talk amongst the families today than previous mornings. I guess being trapped on the bus together for all those hours yesterday has allowed us to bond a bit more.

After finishing our breakfast, Nancy and I went back to the room to put our bags outside so they could be picked up by the bellperson.

Nancy pretty much had the bags packed and ready to go, but we had time to make some last minute shuffling. So, we once again re-weighed everything and had some wiggle room. So, I was able to displace the clothes from my backback to the luggage and get my snowboarding jacket in a checked bag so I didn’t have to lug it through the airport.

We got our bags out with plenty of time and then I finished getting all the electronics into my backpack. Once the bellperson had gotten our checked bags loaded up, we headed down to the lobby to meet the group.

We were one of the first families down to the lobby and it didn’t take long before more had joined us. It was good to see that we weren’t the only ones with not only two rolling bags but also backpacks. I was worried that domestic travel in China might not allow for two carry-on bags.

Nancy gave Sindy our red envelope with her tip. We decided we were going to follow the advice given to Nancy online that a customary tip was between US$4-5 per person per day and then increase based on any exceptional work on the guide’s part. So, for us that was US$10 per day for a total of $30 which roughly came out to ¥200.

Well as the crowd of families started to gather, I noticed that people were at the desk doing what appeared like checking out. That was a novel concept to me because in all my traveling for business, I rarely ever had to check out of a hotel. But, I was hearing that we had to do this even if we didn’t have any expenses.

So, I got myself in line. As would have it, the language barrier did have a knack of slowing down the line since, in some cases, questions were needed to be asked about charges on the bill.

Before I could get to the front of the line, Sindy wanted to take a group photo with all of us with the bus driver. So, I stepped out of line so I could be a part of the photo which took a tad longer than expected because the batteries in the camera died. Fortunately, they weren’t the rechargeable kind and just needed some AA’s and someone had some extras. We got our picture taken and I jumped back in line.

As luck would have it, since I didn’t have any expenses it just required that I sign something and be on with my life.

Nancy was already out on the bus and told me that our rolling carryon luggage was under the bus in the luggage hold. It didn’t take long for everyone to pile onboard so we could be on our way. It was a bit more cramped because we all had our backpacks on the bus this time.

On our way to the airport, Sindy collected all our passports. This was so she could get us all checked in and get our boarding passes at the same time.

Nancy wanted me to dig out some money to tip the bus driver and wanted me to give him a nicer tip than suggested because this guy knew how to move that bus and get us where we needed to go. So we gave him ¥100 (~US$14.80).

We were going out to Zhengzhou from a different airport terminal than we came into. It seemed like it took a relatively quick time to get to the airport in comparison to how long it took to get into Beijing when we originally landed.

When we got to the airport, we all piled off and our luggage was brought out from under the bus. It was then when Nancy gave him his tip and gave him a hearty thank you. He didn’t speak much English so we told him thank you in Mandarin.

We took our rolling bags and went into the airport terminal. Inside, our checked luggage was waiting for us.

At this point the organized chaos began. We were to take our checked luggage and line up at the “Group Checkin” counter. Then, one-by-one one representative from each family will approach the counter with all the luggage and present a single boarding pass. Then all the luggage would be checked against that one boarding pass. Now, China has some pretty strict weight limits for checked bags, but it appears that they averaged the weight for the entire group.

Once everyone was checked in, we moved onto airport security. At this point Sindy said goodbye to us. There were a lot of hugs as we parted ways.

The line for security was non-existent, but their diligence was noteworthy. I did like the fact that they didn’t require you to take off your shoes. But for the convenience I lost all of it when they had to pass my backpack full of electronics through the XRay machine 4 times. Each time they took more out of it. By the time it went through the last time, all it’s contents had been removed by a security agent and put in a large plastic bin after being carefully scrutinized. I was very apologetic and so was the agent. After the 3rd time, he pointed to the XRay image and told me that they couldn’t see everything in the bag.

Once i was cleared then I had to pack everything back and hope I didn’t leave anything behind. My backpack and a specific way to pack it or you have things jabbing you in the back and become quite unbalanced, so I had to quickly get it back to homeostasis.

Once I did that, I quickly shuffled out the security area where a very worried Nancy was standing. She was starting to get concerned something had happened to me.

At this point it was about 5 minutes from when our plane was supposed to start boarding and sure enough, I had to go to the bathroom. But, we didn’t have time.

So we rushed our way to the gate and got in line to board. I was sure with China’s scrutiny of checked bags we’d get some guff for Nancy’s carry-on, but they didn’t even look twice at it.

We got on the plane and I wasn’t too concerned about overhead storage because it seemed like every unit was empty. Well, until you got to the section of the plane occupied by us CCAI families. Then they were stuffed. But, we found two slots for our bags.

Oddly enough, it seemed like all families were separated from each other based on their boarding passes. Nancy and I were on the same row but each had a window. Other people were several rows apart. Well, someone was nice enough to switch seats so that we could sit together. There was actually quite a bit of musical chairs so family could sit together if they wanted to.

Shortly after that, we were on our way. I must say that the China Southern airline had quite a detailed security video for us to watch. I’ve never seen so much detail provided on how to disembark the plane in the event of a water landing. Good thing we weren’t going over water.

I wasn’t sure how long the flight was so I didn’t feel like digging out my iPod. Nancy decided to read her Dan Brown book. The gentleman sitting in the aisle seat had an old USA Today from the previous Wednesday and he shared it with me. Reading the newspaper pretty much took the entire flight time.

One of the funny things observed on the plane was that they had a video about H1N1 on it with singing pigs in traditional Chinese clothing talking about the perils of “swine flu”. I doubt anything like that would get past the pork lobbyists.

Also what was different was as soon as the plane landed people started getting up and pulling their luggage down from the overhead bins. In fact, so many people did this that a flight attendant had to get up and start yelling at them to sit down (well I assume that’s what he was saying but it was in Mandarin so I couldn’t know for sure).

The plane emptied quickly and there wasn’t a bathroom to be found until we got to baggage claim.

I let Nancy go in first and she was in there for awhile. When she finally got out I took care of my business and we headed to our carousel to get our bags.

I asked her what took so long and she told me out of all the bathroom stalls, only one of them had a “western toilet”. As one would expect, that had a line waiting for it from all of us western people invading this airport.

It didn’t take long for our bags to come out and we made our way out of the baggage claim area.

Another thing that was different was that there was only one way out of the baggage claim area and you had to show your baggage claim tickets to them to get out. They took those claim tickets and compared them to the ones on the bags you had and tore off the ticket if it matched.

Once we were out, we met up with our CCAI guide who was waiting on the other side. It turned out we had 2 in this city. That wasn’t a surprise considering what was going on here (the actual adoption).

After everyone was with us and Yisha (our CCAI Guide) was able to tick off every families name off her list, her assistant, Rita, showed us to the bus. It was a nice little walk to where the bus was waiting for us. By the way, have I mentioned my calves were ripping sore from yesterday’s hike up the Great Wall?

We handed our bags to the bus driver who loaded all of them onto the bus. Then we found seats inside. This bus was much, much larger than the one we were used to being carted around in Beijing. It was going to need to be bigger since the next day every family was going to have 1 more member.

We were told that it was going to be a 45 minute ride to our hotel and along the way we were given lanyards with our names in Mandarin along with our child’s name in Mandarin. Also we were given an itinerary for the time we were here. On this itinerary was an itemization of each fee we needed to pay in RMB (Chinese Currency) so that we could figure out how many US$ to convert. Apparently banks are open on Sunday and we were going there later to get this money. I guess having 13 families come to the desk to convert that much US$ would cause them issue.

Yisha informed us that Josh and Lily, the founders of CCAI, were going to be in Zhengzhou at the Registration Office the next day when we meet our children. That was exciting news to hear. They are such wonderful people and for those of us who don’t live near Denver it will be nice to finally meet them.

Yisha went over the itinerary in great detail and was very informative. For me, this made me feel a lot better, but it didn’t help quell Nancy’s sense of being overwhelmed.

It was funny, but one of the wives of a family we’ve been clicking with told Nancy on the ride to the airport this morning that she had woke up the previous night with a fear that Nancy had never changed a diaper before and asked her that. Nancy assured her that she had because it’s part of her responsibilities as a nurse in an ER. Now, me on the other hand, that is a different story. I’ve hardly ever held a baby before.

Zhengzhou was a totally different city than Beijing and it was quite apparent on our drive into town. Also, our driver was no where near as aggressive as the one in Beijing. You could see a lot of development here too.

When we got to the hotel, we were told to just go into the lobby. The plan was to provide one single tip for the bus driver and the bell persons since we were going to need to use them alot and it would be simpler if we just tipped them once. We would discuss the tip at the bank when we were converting our US$.

As we mingled in the lobby, Yisha went and got all our room keys. She called out the names and handed out the keys. We were excited when we found out we were only a couple doors down with the couple who was really close in age with us (plus they love Disney). We’ve been hanging out with them a lot on this trip.

Now, things changed when we got into the room. As soon as you opened the door a huge wall of heat hit you in the face. Now mind you, it was probably only 58 degrees outside. You only needed your fleece pullover to feel comfortable.

We turned on the A/C and put it on full blast and I kept the door open for awhile. Also, we were getting afternoon sun exposure so I closed the blinds and curtains.

After awhile, Nancy decided she needed the door closed and as soon as she did, I could’ve sworn the temperature spiked.

I went outside and Jason, the husband in the other family was out there. He told me he spoke to someone from housekeeping and they told him that A/C and Heat were both heat. So we had been really heating up the room when we meant to cool it off. We were told to just shot the unit off.

I don’t deal with heat well when I’m dressed for cold. So I was getting very agitated very easy. We were still waiting for our luggage to arrive. The bell people were going room to room asking people to pick their bags off the cart. They knew how many bags were going to each room.

Eventually they got to us and all our bags where there.

At this point, we had already fired up the computer and checked our e-mail. When we saw that it was still at an hour on the west coast that someone might be up, we fired up Skype. Unfortunately, noone was up. I decided to try and see if I could actually text someone from my Google Voice account. So, I looked up Nancy’s sister Julie’s mobile number and fired off a message to see if she got it. Sure enough, a few moments later she was skyping us. She was so, very excited to be talking to Nancy. Nancy and her sister talk all the time and I’m sure they were going through DDTs to have gone so long without speaking. In fact, Julie was the first person we were audibly speaking to since we left (we had e-mailed people but this was the first time speaking).

I was amazed that with Nancy’s pregnancy and the intense heat she was able to talk to Julie as long as she did. I’d say it was a good 30 minutes. Then Nancy’s mom who also lives on the west coast found out we were online and she wanted to talk. So, Nancy hung up with Julie and called her mom. It was another long talk in the heat. I guess I was more cognizant because I wanted to get out of the heat.

Well, as all these conversations were going on, our room phone kept ringing. Apparently, at the front desk they had our room number listed as being assigned to another family. So, we kept getting phone calls for this family.

After the second time I informed them that I’d be seeing them in 45 minutes for a trip to the bank. I told them I’d pass on the message. I was told it was kind of urgent. By the time Nancy got off the phone this family member had called to more times and this time informed me why it was so urgent. We immediately tried to track down their room. Nancy was able to get the front desk to tell us where the family really was and we went to their room and delivered the message. I know that if the role was reversed and someone was needing to speak to me from back home that I’d want someone to come find me.

We met up with Jason and Robin (the family down the hall) and then went to the lobby to meet up with everyone to go to the bank. For some reason I thought the bank was right across the street but it wasn’t

We walked a few blocks then had to wait until a crossing officer told us we could go. This is when things got weird. You saw people from all sides of the street just pour into the street and go in all kinds of directions. Not just crossing the street from one side to the other, but also diagonally across the entire intersection. It was rather amazing how noone got injured.

When we got to the bank, we were told that in Zhengzhou you have to fill out a form to convert currency which you didn’t have to do in Beijing. So, the plan was to fill out one form to cover all families. In order to do this all of it had to be against one passport. A member of the group volunteered their passport. Then, Rita went around and asked how much each family was going to convert to RMB. We were going to convert $1140. We only needed $960 to handle the adoption expenses but Nancy wanted some spending cash for Wal-Mart….yes there is a wal-mart here.

Now we had to wait, and wait and wait and then wait some more. The chairs in this bank were very uncomfortable. In fact, it seemed like there was a medal rod running right under the seat like you were laying on a pull-out couch and how that rod always just hits you in the most uncomfortable spot.

Eventually we were told to have one member of each family line up with their cash. Then you approached a window when your room number was called and hand the cash to a bank teller. They analyzed each bill and then counted the money, then told you to get in a new line.

Once everyone had done this then we waited, waited, waited again and then waited some more.

Then they called us back again by room number. This time we were given a scrap of paper with the amount of RMB they were giving us and a stack of bills. We walked with Rita to the side where they had a bill counter. All the 100’s were counted then she showed us how the remaining portion of our total was derived with the bills they gave us. Their money is not what you are used to in the US. They gave me a coin with a 5 on it. It isn’t a nickel but the equivalent of 50 pennies. I had small bills with a 1 on them and they weren’t ¥1 but ¥0.10. Odd

After I had my money I went back to the seats where all the wives were chatting away. It turns out everyone was going to go to Wal-Mart. But, Nancy, me, Jason and Robin were going back to the hotel first. Apparently, some of the other families had figured out how to open the window and we were going to do that so we could vent some of that heat out and get some brisk Zhengzhou air into ours.

Since everyone had to walk in the direction to Wal-Mart to get back to the hotel we just stayed with the pack. This is when we got to experience the diagonal crossing of the street. Quite nerve racking.

When we got to the hotel (we are staying at the Crowne Plaza) we went in while everyone else continued on to Wal-Mart. It was just another 2-3 blocks further.

It turned out that Rita was going back to the hotel too. When we walked into the lobby she told us to wait. She produced this huge bag full of panda plushies. She told us that CCAI was giving each family a plushie and they had the CCAI logo embroidered on them.

We made our way to our room and it didn’t take long to find the one section of window that opens. It only slides open about 3-4” but that was enough to get cold air into the room.

Next, we decided to split up our money and put them in envelopes labeled for what each expense was.

When we completed that, we went to Robin and Jason’s room to meet up with them to go to Wal-Mart. It turns out that the people across the hallway were in our group as well but they didn’t start out in Beijing. They came straight to Zhengzhou. They asked to come with us to Wal-Mart and we welcomed the company.

Jason and Robin brought their stroller along with them because it would make it easier to bring bottled water back to the room. I don’t know if I ever would’ve thought of that. I guess that is one of those “outside the box” type things parents think of.

It was much less stressful walking the 2-3 blocks to Wal-Mart than it was to get anywhere in Beijing.

It wasn’t easy to miss Wal-Mart because it had a huge sign in front of it.

Apparently it had several stories and we went up the moving ramp to the floor for groceries.

It wasn’t easy to find anything. Nothing about Wal-Mart looked like a Wal-Mart in the United States other than the uniforms of their employees and the use of the Wal-Mart logo. It took time to find the water. Some people picked up some snacks as well.

We wandered over to the baby goods and some pondering was done about diapers but it was ultimately decided that we should wait until we had our kids so we don’t accidentally get the wrong sizes.

When we walked up to the register Jason remembered he forgot to buy the belt he so desperately needed to keep his pants from falling down. We all lost some weight in Beijing do to all the walking around.

So, I didn’t think it was smart to have him go off by himself I went along. If we got separated, I would’ve wanted someone with me rather than find my way back by myself.

So we wandered around menswear looking for belts. We easily found women’s belts but couldn’t find men’s belts. I eventually spied them and they weren’t not in a very conspicuous location. Next it was the chore of finding one that fits. I calculated his size in centimeters but most of the belts didn’t even tell you a size. So he was picking them up and wrapping them around to see if they fit.

We finally found one for him and made our way back to the checkout counter. They had already checked out and were waiting on the other side. I could see that Nancy was giving me a look that husbands don’t like to get and asked her what did I do. It was at that point, I realized I left her without money. Fortunately,one of the other families paid for the water and I owed them ¥11. Fortunately, I had that in my wallet and paid them back.

Once Jason got checked out the more challenging task arose…how to find a way out. Most if not all signage was in Mandarin. We occasionally would find a sign, in English, with the Wal-Mart logo on it saying Exit with an arrow. At some point those signs stopped. Every time we thought we found a way down we dead ended in the store front of another store and we couldn’t traipse through their store to get out so we looked for an escalator or more signs telling us where to go.

Eventually we found our way out. It did involve walking down two escalators that had been turned off with a stroller full of 3 cases of water. Oh by the way, did I mention my calves were ripping sore from hiking the Great Wall yesterday?

The walk back to the hotel was a bit more interesting that the walk to Wal-Mart. Apparently, the sidewalks are used as roads as well. So, not only did we need to make sure we didn’t get hit by a car when crossing the street, but you had to make sure you didn’t get hit by a car while walking on the sidewalk.

Also, the sidewalks were used as motorways for motorized bicycles and mopeds.

We eventually made our way back, and decided that we were going to try the Italian restaurant in the hotel.

We each went to our rooms and dropped off the water and met back in the hallway. The restaurant was supposedly on the 2nd floor.

We went down to the second floor but couldn’t find it. Robin spotted a couple doors with no signage on them and thought they might be a way into the restaurant. She poked her head in but said it wasn’t. All she saw was something about coffee.

So we went to the ground floor to ask someone when I saw a sign pointing up another set of stairs to the restaurant.

We went up the stairs. By the way, did I mention my calves were ripping sore from climbing up the Great Wall of China yesterday?

It turned out that those doors Robin looked through would’ve gotten us to where we wanted to go. She just couldn’t see the sign for Mama Mia from where she was looking because we could see those doors when we walked into Mama Mia. She just couldn’t see it because the sign was perpendicular to her point of view.

The food was good at Mama Mia but the service was extremely slow. It did allow us to talk alot but it did take away from potential blogging time.

We ate our food and the bill came. It was ~¥276 for Nancy and I to get two pasta dishes, 2 sodas and a bottle of water. That is approximately US$40. Not bad for “ethnic” food in China.

We went back to our room and wished each other a good night. I fired up the computer again so that I could start blogging and decided to see if any family was on Skype. It was 7:30AM Central Time so I doubted it. But sure enough my mom was on. We spoke for awhile and talked about what was going on. As we were ending that call, Nancy’s dad initiated a Skype call. I couldn’t pick it up because I was still talking to my parents but once I was done we called him back.

We talked with him for a bit and he was assuring us everything was fine with our house. He’s been watching it for us and making it looked lived in. I think he’s been enjoying the use of our large 63” HDTV. He’s working a short contract in OKC and the room they have him in only gives him a tiny 13” TV. So I’m glad he’s getting to enjoy his football games in luxury…haha.

After we ended our calls, I started working on blog posts. I apparently couldn’t make people in Nancy’s support group wait any longer for updates since they hadn’t heard anything on this blog since the Day 01 post. So, I made a point to find pictures and place them on the post and get it out the door.

Then, I started working on this post. I’m going to get the netbook in the process of offloading today’s pictures, shower and then hit the bed.

It’s 12:39AM China Time now and I need to get up in 7 hours. In about 12 hours, we’ll have Kai!

Until Tomorrow

Journey to Kai – Day 03 (Touring Day II)

2009-11-23T04:16:00.001-06:00

By the time I got the previous day’s post written and got the computer pulling the 420+ pictures off the camera it was about 11PM. I thought for sure that I’d finally get some sleep.

Well, that wasn’t to happen. I was wide awake at 1AM. I have come to the conclusion that I’m not falling victim to jet lag, but to the insane heat of the room. It is so hot in this room that it sucks all the moisture out of me and my lips are dry and my mouth is like I have been sucking on cotton.

After a similar routine as the previous night were I tossed and turned and Nancy needing to get up around 4AM to eat a snack (Kylee wasn’t going to wait for breakfast), we got up around 7AM again and I checked the email and facebook accounts.

We made our way down to breakfast around 7:45AM and got the same table as we had the previous morning. Today there was some different options on the buffet. I got the omelet again, but there were some steamed buns with pork and steamed yeast rolls available today that I took advantage of.

Once again, I probably drank a good 5-6 glasses of orange juice.

After breakfast, we went back to the room and gathered our bags for the day of touring. Nancy was better prepared today in case she ran into a “squatty potty” again. Apparently, you cannot trust that there will be toilet paper at the restrooms in China.

We made our way down to the lobby and today we were the first to arrive. Sindy was already there, but no one else was.

It didn’t take long before the other families started to trickle down to the join us.

Today, I took a different approach in my dress. I put on my long sleeve thermal top under my short sleeve shirt with my fleece pullover. Under my jeans I have my long johns. My goal was to not put on my snowboarding jacket. While warm, it’s a tad too large for me (I picked it up on sale many years ago) and it’s extremely bulky and I hate wearing it with my camera and shoulder bag all wrapped around me.

When the group was all there, we piled onto the bus.

We were told that it was going to take over an hour to get to the Great Wall of China. This was going to be quite a challenge to endure since the bus seats were so narrow that Nancy and I were practically sitting on each other’s laps.

About 30 minutes into the drive we found out that the road to the Great Wall was closed due to a bad wreck. Since we were going to the Jade Factory before the Great Wall anyway, we continued onto that location, then the plan was to go get lunch, then go to the Great Wall. Originally, we were going to do lunch after the Great Wall.

The Jade Factory was as we expected. It was another thinly veiled sales pitch for another government owned and operated industry. There is a lot of tie ins to the Summer Olympics at these places we have gone to. At the Jade Factory we were informed that they were the ones that produced the gold, silver and bronze medals awarded at the 2008 Beijing Summer Games.

We had no intention of buying any Jade products, but I must say it was impressive walking around there very large and spectacular show room. The intricate details in the jade sculptures they had on display was amazing. I really enjoyed walking around looking for jade sculptures to take pictures. The lighting was once again very challenging (fluorescent shop lighting with halogen spots) so it became an excellent exercise in proper exposure compensation.

In my opinion, one of the most impressive sculptures was of a ship made entirely out of jade that had to be a good 10 feet long and 10 feet tall. It was so big that I couldn’t find a location to stand to get a decent photo of it without some other showcase item obscuring the shot.

Several of us got tired of walking around the Jade factory rather quickly so we went back to the lobby and talked for a bit. Then when enough people had gathered we went back to the bus and waited for the remainder of the group to arrive.

At this point my sciatica was really acting up. All this hard concrete surfacing with little motion is crippling me. There were times I wanted to cry, but I needed to not become one of those people who complained too much. With all the kids with us, that was an all too common occurrence. I know people in glass houses shouldnot throw stones (or people about to move into glass houses), but I wanted to provide the details of what we experienced. Let’s face it, Jade Factories, silk factories and touring old relics are not the most fascinating uses of time for many kids. Having been one of those kids in the mid-80’s I know I drove my parents nuts with all the complaining and soon I’ll be one of those parents dragging their kids places and telling them, “You are going to go whether you like it or not” (with our luck it’s going to be in regards to Disney vacations). But we did have some kids who were amazing balls of energy and were always happy to be everywhere. I was actually wondering if some of them were finely engineered audio-animatronics because no kids can be that friendly and happy all day long.

After this we drove to the location where we were going to have lunch. The restaurant was on a floor above a tourist shop which was another “factory tour” of how cloisonné products are made and then a giant store selling the products.

Weren’t there for the tour so we just walked through the store to get to the restaurant.

This restaurant was another “American Chinese” style establishment. They only gave you one tiny glass of beer, soda, or bottled water and then you had to pay for more. These glasses were insanely tiny

The food was ok and once again I mainly filled up on white rice. One of the people at our table has a shellfish allergy so we felt sorry for her because every restaurant we entered could be one where there wouldn’t be food for her to eat since food from the water is a major part of the Chinese diet.

After lunch we made our way to the Great Wall. It was rather cool as you were driving up this mountain road that you started to see the Great Wall come into view. You were staring at something that can dated back several thousand years.

I was still trying to avoid my snowboarding jacket but I tied it around my waste. Nancy was dead set on conquering this wall but I think all of our attitudes changed real quick once we got to the first part of the wall.

This thing was more like the Great Wall of Shame because it quickly put me and many of us in our place. I am in OK cardiovascular shape but the fact that many of the steps had a rise to them that went up to my knee it meant that in order to scale this wall, I was having to really lift my legs. It was like some kind of insane torture you’d find in my gym. As we were going up, I laughed and told Nancy that I bet our friends James and Diana would find some really torturous training exercises that could revolve around the steps up the Great Wall.

Nancy had to stop frequently to catch her breath, but she had a highly valid excuse in the fact that she was also bringing Kylee up The Wall with her. After we had been going for about 15 minutes she had decided that she wasn’t going to make it up the rest of the way with everyone else and she just wanted to make it to the first landing. I was there with her the whole way and encouraging her, but at the same time trying to make sure she didn’t push herself too hard.

When we made it to the first landing, it was really aggravating my fear of heights to turn around and look. The way down was steep and you become quite aware on what you just conquered.

One of the members of another family took a couple pictures of Nancy and me with the mountains as the backdrop and then Nancy gave me the OK to go on ahead without her. Another mom was not going forward and was going to stay there and then go down once her husband and daughter came back. Now mind you this lady’s daughter was about 4 or 5 and she zoomed past us like a mountain lion. It was rather impressive to see because she was too short to climb the stairs like the rest of us so she used her feet and hands to climb the stairs and her poor dad was having to do his best to keep up with her. If for any reason other than to make sure she didn’t get underfoot of someone who was trying to come down the Wall.

I picked up the pace a bit because I had figured that we could only go up for an hour before we had to turn around and come back down so we could get to the bus by our designated time of 3:10PM. We were only given about an 1.5 hours total to scale the Wall.

It didn’t take long before I met up with others from the group. Many of which were just the husbands who wanted to conquer the Wall just like myself.

It was hard to take pictures because there was snow and ice on the stairs plus the steps were steep and there were so many people going up and down that you became a nuisance if you stopped all the time to take pictures. Trust me, there were some people on the stairs doing that and it was making it hard to get anywhere.

When we got to the 45 minute mark we ran into the dad and daughter who were on their way back. I turned around and used the zoom lens to see that Nancy was still down there talking to his wife. His daughter was absolutely adorable. They had made it quite a way further up and she was still full of energy and was talking without any kind of shortness of breathe (and talking a mile a minute). Oh, the joys of being in single digits.

When we hit the 1 hour mark we were at the point where you could buy the “I conquered the Great Wall” shirts. I didn’t buy one but apparently, if you’ve done this part of the wall, it’s a well known marker to know how far you’ve gotten.

Then the fun part of going down began. If you thought the burn in your quadriceps was bad on the trip up, the throbbing knees, painful glutes and burning calves got you on the way back down.

To top it off, if you stopped your legs just started shaking. At least with the ascent you just had to focus on the step in front of you. On the way down, you not only have to make sure you don’t trip and thereby tumble a long way down, but you need to control your descent. Gravity will try to take over and unless you are really agile, I doubt you can fly down those stairs like you do normal stairs. The steps alternated between really high to really short and that made for some jarring stair work.

Ultimately we made it down and still beat the 3:10PM requested time. Nancy was waiting for me on the bus. After seeing how bad the descent was, I was sure she would be cussing me out for leaving her there to do that without me (she was with other people and not alone), but she said it was no where near as hard as going up.

Apparently,on the way up, she had to raise her knees so high, they were bumping into your pregnant belly.

Once everyone was on the bus, we were going to head back. There was supposed to be a Tea Ceremony portion of this tour where they introduced us to different Chinese Teas and show us how to properly serve and drink tea, but we really lost time due to traffic and the closed highway.

Many of us were exhausted and you could see the kids were really losing their energy. The bus was much more quiet compared to the frenetic energy amongst all the children in the morning. Many of the kids of like age groups have really bonded and grouped together to help each other survive these boring trips that adults seem to like to take.

There was a portion of our trip back that required us to go down a dirt road because the main road was closed because it was all torn up for repaving. That was fun because not only was it bumpy, but the driver still was as aggressive as he was on pavement.

Speaking of aggressive, driving in China is a blood sport. I swear NASCAR needs to come to China and recruit drivers. These people maneuver vehicles in manners I’ve only seen on a racetrack. It’s amazing we haven’t seen more accidents than we have and there is no right of way for pedestrians. You just hear the driver lay on their horn and hope they people get out of the way.

Games of chicken are common where cars will be on the wrong side of the road for stretches of time because they want to zoom past people that were getting in their way. I think they just view the road as a way to get them where they want to go and there are no laws governing how they use it.

I swear our driver would’ve popped the car onto two wheels just to maneuver around an obstacle.

Also, pedestrians don’t have the right of way, so you need to be aware of your surroundings or get run over. Plus, bicycles occupy just as much of the road as cars and are just as aggressive with their space as the

At one point our bus driver had to pull over because his horn stopped working. This appeared to not be the first time he’s had this problem because he opens up the glove box and pulls out some fuses and fixes the problem quick.

I think many of us thought we were going straight to dinner because we were told that today was going to be an early day. This was due to the fact that we had to get up early the next day to fly to Zhengzhou. Well, apparently, the HuTong Tour was still on. By the time we got there, it was dark and it was cold.

We rode rickshaws to get around. At this point, I was checking out. It was too dark for me to get any decent pictures and I really didn’t care about this stuff. The HuTong area of Beijing was the oldest and original part of Beijing. So there was a lot of history to be seen. But, I really just wanted to get back to the room.

I think the HuTong tour would’ve been much better in the daytime. I can tell you one thing, you don’t need a motor to see aggressive driving. The rickshaw drivers were just as crazy with navigating their human powered vehicles as the drivers of motored vehicles are. They’d cut each other off and even take on cars.

As part of the tour we got to see a HuTong home that was actually occupied by someone who helped house athletes for the Summer Games. Then we were shown how you could tell a lot about the family who lived in a home based on how their doorway was constructed and what embellishments in contained. These details didn’t tell you anything about who currently lived there, but it did about the original owners many eons ago.

After that, we were shown the waterfront which house 96 bars which they were very proud of. I’d have to say that if it was so cold that the river had ice in it, that you could pop off some really good pictures here with a tripod setup.

After this, we got back on the rickshaws and finished the tour. This was the first part of the tour where it was customary to tip. We made sure to do so since the rickshaw drivers worked hard to move us around.

We had to walk aways in regular pedestrian traffic (and dodge cars) to get back to our bus who was going to take us to dinner. About half the group had decided they didn’t want to partake of the group dinner this evening so they were hailed taxis and Sindy told the drivers where to take them (it’s helpful if you have your address written in Chinese or a person fluent in Mandarin tell them).

We didn’t have to drive far to get to the dinner location. I swore we could’ve walked but considering how our legs felt, I don’t think that would’ve been a good idea.

The dinner location was definitely local. There wasn’t a single tourist looking person in the place (if you didn’t count us).

Nancy had been mentioning earlier in the day that she wanted some noodles and that’s exactly what we got tonight

But first, she had to conquer the “squatty potty” again. She apparently had to go to the bathroom halfway to the HuTong tour from the Great Wall and had been holding it for hours. She said at this point she had to go so badly she would’ve squatted in a back alley and relieved herself so the fear or the nasty “squatters” wasn’t as intimidating when you have to go that bad.

Dinner was fabulous and it wasn’t as crowded this time with fewer families involved.

We had some great conversation and that was just as important as the quality of the food. There as a lot of talk about what to expect going forward.

After dinner we piled back on the bus and details were given about what to do tomorrow. The hotel will be collecting our checked bags for us and a representative from CCAI will be taking them to the airport for us. Apparently, on domestic China travel there is 20KG limit per person for checked luggage. That roughly equates to 44lbs each. It doesn’t matter how many bags you check just that they all must add to 20kg. Also, Sindy was going to collect all our passports so that she could get us all checked in at the same time.

We all made our way up to the our rooms and went our separate ways. Nancy quickly jumped in the shower while I went back downstairs.

I wanted to use my nicer camera and see if I could get a better shot of the elaborate entrance to the hotel. While I was down there, I decided to wander over to the Raffles Hotel next door to see what I could get of their modest Christmas display. As I made my way back into my hotel, I tried to take some pictures of the lobby since I wasn’t having to compete with daylight outside which often makes shots more challenging.

I made it back up to the room just as Nancy was finishing her shower. She packed the bags up that were going to be checked because she had a plan on how she wanted it done. Also, we were told you cannot bring any liquids on the plane so all the liquids will have to be checked.

When we checked in coming over the one bag we checked (which actually had another bag inside) was 50lbs. But when we split the contents among the two bags, the smaller bag inside turned out to be 10kg and the other exactly 20kg. So it must mean that the bigger Samsonite bag (which is fairly empty at this time) was a pretty heavy bag.

Well, Nancy tried to stay away by reading her Dan Brown book but didn’t succeed so she went to bed as I wrote this post.

We’ll be getting up at 6AM so here’s hoping we sleep better tonight.

Until tomorrow

Journey to Kai – Day 02 (Touring Day)

2009-11-22T09:08:00.002-06:00

Well, I went to bed sometime around 9PM the previous night having forced myself to stay away until I was about to die from exhaustion (the trip report had to get written).

But, luck would have it that I woke up wide awake around 1AM. It took a really long time to fall back to sleep. Some complicating factors were that the room is insanely hot and I have no way to control the temperature. China, in general has socialized heat. Everyone gets heat at the same time and has the same thermostatic temperature. Hotels, typically are immune but apparently this one still has a community thermostat. So, everyone’s rooms are the same temperature and from what I’ve been told, Chinese love it to be hot.

So, I’m very dehydrated on top of sleeping in a hot room.

I kept waking up about every 1 to 2 hours but eventually I made it to the 7AM alarm. We had to meet Sindy in the lobby at 9AM so we figured we needed to be down eating breakfast no later than 7:45AM in order to get enough time.

We lounged around a bit, but finally we got out of bed. I fired up the laptop to see if anyone had responded to our e-mails from the previous night since everyone we wrote would’ve still been asleep. Sure enough everyone replied. We also got some Facebook updates and activity on my Twitter account.

We both had showered the previous night so we just got dressed and headed down to breakfast. We got breakfast for free and it was a typical buffet type setup. The thing I’m having a hard time getting used to is the size of glasses to drink out of here. Once again the glasses were only slightly larger than a shot glass. So, I had to go and get 4 or 5 refills of orange juice to equal one glass I’d normally get at home.

I did try the omelet station and found that they like their omelets runny. I made due and scarfed it down. Nancy seemed to stick to breakfast breads and some bacon. She did try the oatmeal but it was the consistency of soup.

We both did get some of the dragonfuit which our friend Diana introduced us to back in Oklahoma City and it was tasty.

This was the first time we actually got to start meeting some of the other families. I’m going to have to apologize but I’m terrible with names so it’ll take a bit before I can remember them. There was another family, like us, who was coming to adopt their first child. There was another couple who was about our age who had to wait until they were 30 to submit their paperwork (just like Nancy). Most of the other families had much more established families with either another child adopted from China or had several “bio kids” already.

After eating breakfast we ran up to the room real quick to move stuff out of our bags so that we could replace them with what we needed for a day away from the hotel.

I had packed the shoulder bag Nancy bought me at Disneyland in June and put my camera related items in there, plus my gloves and my knit cap. I was going to try and wear my Grumpy baseball cap as long as possible. Nancy and I both were layering. I was wearing my fleece and snowboarding jacket and Nancy was wearing a sweater and her ski jacket.

We met everyone in the lobby at 9AM as requested. This literally was the first time we were all in the same physical location at the same time. There were a lot of people. Roll was taken and then we all piled onto the bus. It was here that Sindy collected the money for the tour. The cost was ¥505 which totals ¥1010 for both of us. This roughly converts to US$149.44 for 2 full days of touring. Even if they took us to all tourist trap locations (which they are) that’s still a good price and that includes lunch both days.

The first place we went was the Forbidden City. I’m sure glad we were on a small tour bus because I think I’d have died of a heart attack if I was much closer to the action on the road by being in a car. I’ve decided that most stop lights aren’t honored and the biggest vehicle has the right of way. The horn is used liberally and loudly. Also the lanes seem to be mainly a guideline not a rule.

Once we finally got to where they were going to drop us off for the Forbidden City, we were reminded that we do not have to buy anything from anyone and then we were let out. As soon as feet hit pavement, we were surrounded by street vendors trying to sell us everything from “soldier hats”, gloves, ear muffs, postcards, etc. They were shameless. They’d throw the product in your face, try to get it in your hand, even walk next to you chattering non stop. No was not taken as an answer.

Now, I had run into this similar situation in the years of living in Singapore and traveling to various locations in and around there. The trick we had been taught was to first never make eye contact if can avoid it. That usually will avoid them tracking onto you in the first place.

If that doesn’t work,then you continue to avoid eye contact, look straight in the direction you are going and keep saying no and just keep walking. If possible pretend like they don’t exist. This last method seemed to work for me best. This is hard to do when you’ve been programmed your whole life that the moral and righteous person is polite to everyone. But, in this case, polite will most likely pry money from your wallet or at the least get you very bothered.

We made our way to the entrance into the Forbidden City and waited for Sindy to purchase our tickets. Then we moved as a group into the grounds. We all had to have our bags scanned by an X-Ray machine to get in. The first place we went was the gardens. Mind you, it was down right cold. I eventually had to put one glove on. I couldn’t put my right-hand glove on as well because I couldn’t operate the shutter release on my camera with a glove on. So, one hand froze while the other stayed toasty.

It was so easy to get separated from the group because we weren’t the only tour group there. In fact, as tour groups went, we were downright small. An for me and one other we were always getting cut off from the group. I was shooting with my Nikon D300 and he was sporting a Canon 50D (which people tell me is the equivalent to my camera). We were always having to run to catch up to the group.

On the positive side we were able to really point out good shots for each other to take.

After the gardens we moved on to the actual structure itself. It really is hard to describe in words what we encountered. To say this place was huge would not do it justice because I haven’t really seen anything in the United States that compares.

It took us several hours to walk through the entire place and that was keeping a quick pace. There were too many pictures I couldn’t take because the group was moving faster than I could keep up. Plus, as far as pictures go, the sun was really at an odd angle do to the time of the year. So there were many shots I couldn’t get because they would’ve come out too weirdly shadowed or just silhouettes because the sun was behind the building.

The amount of people that were touring the Forbidden City was insane. Everywhere you looked there were tour groups and some of them were pretty large. Fortunately, being that we were all Caucasians, we kind of stood out in a crowd so it was a bit easier finding our group amongst the thousands of people there.

There were so many people that it was practically impossible to look inside the buildings that housed the Emperor and his family unless you liked being crushed to death by a throng of people all with the same desire. I know people have this stereotype that Chinese people are short, but at 5’3” I was still way to short to even see over the other people’s heads. We often gave up without putting up much of a fight.

There were many side buildings that look like during more peak times (hard to believe it could be more crowded) could be opened up to allow the crowds to meander amongst them.

On our way out of the Forbidden City there were some Army personnel there for show. We were told it was alright to take pictures of them, but it was not OK to take pictures of any of the police or military that we encountered while out and about.

Once we were done at the Forbidden City, we took an underground pathway that took us the Tian’amen Square. This was an experience as well. You also had to go through security here too. Most of us Americans were waved on through but many locals were getting bags X-Rayed and wanded. Plus, there was an incredible population of beggars and street vendors here too. At this point, it became pretty clear that the street vendors were going to be ever present.

When we came up on the other side of the street, we were at Tian’anmen Square. We gathered as a group for a group photo. This was mainly for our guide, Sindy’s,memories, but we would be able to purchase a government issued souvenir guide that contained the group photo for ¥100 (~ USD$14.80).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m fully aware that there is some deliberate touristy stuff being thrown at us. The adoption trips really help their economy in that we all are subjected to these trips. I have been really enjoying what we were seeing so I don’t see it a ripoff like a trip to see the “World’s Largest Ball of Aluminum Foil” and we are under no obligation to buy any souvenirs. We said we wanted the book. If anything, the book is constructed as such that it could be used for scrapbooking purposes.

Just like the Forbidden City, Tian’anmen Square was too large to describe. It is just a giant open bricked space. There is nothing fancy about it other than it gives a great view of the Forbidden City. Chairman Mao’s tomb borders one of the edges of Tian’anmen and at that time we were there, we were told there was a 2 hour way to get in to see him (his body is actually in the building). The street vendors here were really trying to get us to by the English Translation of “Mao’s words” (aka the little red book).

After Tian’anmen we had to do a lot of walking to get back to our bus. In the process we got to see the original front “gate” to the city. This wasn’t your typical gate. It was a huge wall with a huge building on top of it. We were reminded that all these buildings we were seeing were the original buildings. That meant we were seeing stuff that was around when Columbus sailed across the Atlantic.

After boarding onto the bus, we were transported to a “tourist” restaurant for lunch. It was quite obvious this restaurant was geared toward tourists because of all the trinkets they were selling as you walked in.

The food was your typical “American Chinese” as someone called it. I wasn’t too impressed. But, I’ve been spoiled in that we know how to get “Chinese Chinese” food in Oklahoma City. I ate a lot of rice because it was cooked the way I love it…..sticky.

After lunch, we were to go tour the Silk Factory. On the way their Sindy told us that because it was so cold, she took us through the Forbidden City a tad faster than usual and cut off about 45 minutes. So, she wanted to know if we wanted to stay an extra 45 minutes at the Silk Factory or go to the Olympic Village. It was pretty unanimous that we wanted to go the Olympic Village.

There wasn’t anything impressive about the Silk Factory. We got a tour that basically told us how silk is made, but at the end, it became very apparent that it was a giant presentation to hopefully get us to buy their silk duvets and other silk clothing products. Because after the tour was done, we were dumped in a giant show room of products with big boards telling us the prices of things plus the current exchange rates. This facility was the government run silk factory. Nancy had been informed by friends that there were cheaper places to buy silk in Guangzhou that are of equal quality so we decided to wait. There were a few items we liked though but decided to hold off.

As I said earlier, I don’t fault China for trying to get some tourist dollars out of us. Any country would do the same. Since I’ve never been a foreign tourist in my home country, I’m sure the same is done to people in the United States as well.

After the Silk Factory, we made our way to the Olympic Village. At times, this seemed like a perilous journey but we eventually made our way there.

As soon as we got off the bus here, we were bombarded with street vendors selling gold replicas of the Bird’s Nest, fake Olympic Gold Medals, and laser etched cubes with holograms of the Water Cube (where Phelps broke the gold medal record) and the Bird’s Nest.

We powered on through and made our way to the tourist’s entrance to the Olympic Village. In order to gain access, you once again had to get your bag x-rayed and get wanded with a medal detector.

At this time, the sun was really low and the temperature was dropping fast. We got some good pictures (I think) of the Bird’s Nest. We also took a really long walk to try and get a good picture of the Water Cube (which in my opinion looks like a building wrapped in a giant sheet of bubble wrap). At this point, we saw someone from the group waving to us to come on. Apparently, several of the kids in the group weren’t happy with the cold temps and wanted to go so people headed back to the bus. Apparently, those of us who liked taking pictures were the stragglers so we had to make haste to get back.

Once on the bus we were told that all the apartments buildings that were built to house people for the Olympics now remain unoccupied as the government tries to decide if they were going to rent them out or just flat out sell them.

There was also a cool set of buildings that were designed to look like a dragon where one tower was shaped in such a way to look like the head, a couple were the body, and final building the tail.

After the Olympic Village, it was time to go see an Acrobatic Show at the Beijing Theater. It was really close to the Olympic Village and took no time to get there. This was probably the first time we got off a bus and wasn’t mobbed by vendors.

It appears this building not only housed stage productions but also movies because there were movie posters for such American blockbusters as 2012 as well as Chinese-produced movies with names I couldn’t read because I cannot read Mandarin.

The theater was very old. It was reminiscent of a high school auditorium built in the 70’s. Everything was dusty and worn. You could even see the dust on the stage. It was at this point, I’d like to point out that it is impossible to escape the cigarette smoke. Even if a place is marked as non-smoking, somehow and for some reason, you still smell cigarette smoke. I’m allergic to dust and cigarette smoke triggers that allergy. So, I was a bit miserable in this show.

Now having said that, the show was amazing. I’d say that the performers ranged in ages from 6 to mid-20’s. Their talent was amazing and they performed a lot of the acrobatic feats you see in similar style shows that are performed by “Chinese acrobats”. Examples are the stacking chairs where the person keeps adding chair on top of chair while they climb up to each height, the spinning plates, and martial arts displays. The portion of the show that put a smile on my face was when one of the acrobats performed to the theme from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. I doubt many people would recognize it, but being that we are Disney fanatics it was quite apparent to us.

Also, one of our group was called up on stage to participate in one of the elements of the show. The person was asked to get inside a giant urn and one of the female acrobats turned it with her feet while she lay on her back.

Also, at the acrobatic show, Nancy got her first exposure to the “squatty potty”. She wasn’t too thrilled with the encounter.

After the Acrobatic Show, we went to dinner. Earlier in the day we decided that we’d do a group dinner both nights and that dinner would be at a local establishment of Sindy’s choosing so that we could see what food at a place not frequented by tourists tastes like. The place she was going to take us to tonight sold Peking Duck.

The cost for the 2 dinners was going to be ¥60 per adult (~US$8.88).

I was amazed at this bus driver’s skill because this restaurant wasn’t in a location suited for tour busses. In fact, he got a talking to by the police to move the bus because we were kind of block traffic.

We were on the second floor where some private dining space existed for large groups. Our ¥60 per adult bought 3 tables worth of food served family style. This, unfortunately meant that all of us had to cram ourselves around 3 tables and with me being left-handed meant that Nancy and I were often locking chopsticks.

The food at this meal was far better than the food at lunch. In addition to the duck, we had some other various dishes. I’d tell you what they were but I don’t know. I can tell you one thing, they were all a tad on the spicy side. Once again, I mainly ate rice, but I did try almost everything on the table.

One notable difference in this restaurant was the temperature. It was a bit chilly here. In fact, some people never took their winter coats off. It made the cramped quarters a bit more cozy when you had all that extra bulk.

After dinner we all piled back on the bus to go to the hotel. This felt like a really long drive. Now that the sun was firmly down the jet lag was once again kicking in. I was having a hard time staying awake and knowing I had to come back and finish yesterday’s trip report and write today’s didn’t help. Don’t get me wrong, I love writing these up. I want everyone to feel as if they are with us. But when you are tired you start asking yourself, “Will anyone care if I don’t do it?” But, I know people will care, especially Nancy would takes great pride in these write-ups (plus it helps her scrapbooking).

By the time we got back to the hotel, pretty much every kid on the bus was out cold. Many parents were carrying in their precious cargo.

I did feel sorry for many of the kids. Having once been a child (teenager) who was dragged on these kind of tours by their parents I know how boring and torturous these events can feel like. Plus, add in the temperatures that hovered around freezing and you had the recipe for total meltdown. That never really happened but I was sure once the fatigue set in someone was going to snap. That didn’t happen either. They just went to sleep.

It was also cool to see how several of the like-aged kids started hanging out with each other. That is often the best way for kids to survive these boring tours (they become less boring when you get older). What really surprised me was how many kids had cameras and really wanted to take pictures. A few of them had some really nice high-end point and shoots and were firing away as badly as those of us with the more expensive equipment was doing.

Well, that is the extent of Day 02. Nancy is fast asleep on the bed as I work on this and I’m wrapping it up now. I hear the Sandman knocking on the door and I still need to shower, pull the pictures of my Compact Flash cards and get my batteries charging (not mine but the camera).

I’ll chat with you guys on the next installment of this adventure.