Adoption Day

3:00 a.m. here...I still appear to be on Pacific time. Also, both children insist on sleeping with me, which makes for very little actual sleeping :-)

Things are going well. We returned to the civil affairs office yesterday to finalize Kai's adoption. It was hectic there--many, many families are in Nanjing completing adoptions, which is nice, but totally overwhelming as well.












Below are some pictures from our hotel window. John actually opened the window to take these pictures, which prompted endless questioning about why adults are allowed to do things that children are not allowed to do.






We have been hanging out with another family from the U.S. a little bit. Cheri is here by herself adopting her sixth (and supposedly final) child. She and her family live in New York, and she arrived in province a mere 12 hours before meeting her son. He is a handful, too. I have no idea how she manages to fix her hair and put on make up every day.












The boy with his stacking cups...the girl with her iPad.


Thankfully, although I am not sleeping much at all, Kai, Nora and John are sleeping great. Kai is also an insanely good eater. He does exactly what Nora did when we first met her--he sees food being opened and he stands under me and moves his tongue around. In fact, I have discovered that this is his "sign" for "feed me."

He is a stubborn boy. He wants me to hold him pretty much all the time, and if I don't pick him up, he throws whatever he is holding on the floor, sticks out his lower lip, and cries. We are working on "please" (which he has almost mastered) when he wants to be picked up.

At night, he experiments with his toys to put himself to sleep. For example, he lies on his back and puts a cup on his belly and watches it roll off. Then, eventually he scoots up against me and falls asleep. Sometimes he scratches the back of his neck as he is falling asleep. I had to cut his nails yesterday, as he makes marks when he does this, poor little guy.

I have discovered that McDonalds in China tastes nothing like McDonalds in the U.S., but that Starbucks in China is excellent. Unfortunately, Starbucks doesn't open until 10:00 a.m.

[I want to give everyone plenty of time to process the absurdity of that]

Also, I am constantly being cutoff in line by old Chinese women. If I tarry at the grocery check out, a Chinese grandma is sure to take advantage.

On the plus side, you can get an enormous bowl of delicious stir fried noodles with veggies and indescribably yummy spices for $2.00 at the fancy grocery store under our hotel (what is it with the Chinese and their subterranean groceries?). And diet coke is something like $.80 a bottle. I suspect that we could survive on about $10.00 dollars per day for the four of us (in combination with the ridiculous breakfast buffet in the hotel, of which we take embarrassing advantage).

Thanks for checking in on us! We are off to the orphanage for two days.


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Location:Qianzhang Alley,Nanjing,China