GREAT NEWS!!!

Our pediatrician has reviewed all of Grace's tests except the lead level which will come in soon and the results were all wonderful! We are so thrilled. It had been a year since Grace's medical report in China so we did not know what to expect. We tested for everything you could imagine and it all looks great. No HIV, Syphilis, she is not a carrier of Hep B or C and has never been exposed to it, no anemia, great blood counts, her bone density is great, nothing wrong with her rib cage, no parasites, ova etc. Lots of other stuff I can't remember. It did not appear from her blood work that she has been properly immunized so we will do them all. We have already started the life-threatening vaccinations. This is great news. Now if you could all join me in the doxology=)

Home almost 3 weeks

In a couple of days have been home 3 weeks with Grace. This week we are doing tons of blood work and a couple other tests. The blood work today was tough on Grace but she gets over it all quickly and doesn't blame me=) I will post next week with results from all of the tests. Grace is really doing well. Rob and I both cannot believe how far she has come in such a short time. We are seeing more and more of her personality as she gets comfortable with us and her surroundings. She truly is a sweetheart. She is falling asleep so much more peacefully and she wakes up happy to see us! She loves all kids but takes awhile to warm up to adults. Our other kids are not shy so this has been a new thing for us. She is bonding well with Mom and Dad so that is the goal at this point. She really is a good kid. She listens well. She is particular about things which can be hard because of the language barrier. She can't always tell us what she wants and how she wants it=) She understands us so well and say words in English but will need surgery and speech therapy to help her with many of the sounds she cannot say. We continue to be overwhelmed with what a blessing she is to all of us.

First Dr. Appointment

We made it though our first week home. Grace had her first appointment with Pia, our pediatrician. Pia was very encouraging and happy with her overall health. she was very happy with the way Gracie seemed to be bonding with me. She says sleep issues will probably last about 6 months. I showed her pictures of her foster home so she had and idea of where she was coming from. It is hard for me to describe her foster home. She slept in a broken crib without a mattress with her foster brother. The crib was beside the kitchen table. The walls and floor concrete. We decided to take every precaution concerning immunizations and run a load of tests. We will get them done in the next couple of weeks. Grace's rib cage protrudes a bit so we are going to x-ray that to see if there was a fracture or something. Of course Pia was horrified as we all were at Grace's teeth. So many of them are rotten. The teeth that you can see when she smiles look o.k. which is nice but boy oh boy don't look too close. Pia says to expect a lot of metal! We meet with the entire cleft team Nov. 3rd so we will wait until then to see their dentist. Grace still has a small hole in her palate that will need to be repaired so they will probably do it all at once. We will update more about the medical stuff when we get tests back. Pray!

The Homecoming

Poor Gracie Mei had never been in a car seat and was pretty traumatized to be strapped in. Aunt Linda picked us up from the airport and heard a lot of crying on the way home! She slept though until we pulled into our drive. I was a complete mess by that point. Rob held Grace and the kids tackled us on the front porch. We all sat there hugging and sobbing. Never again will I be away from them for that long (15 days) until they leave me! Grace came inside and pretty quickly got down and ran around the fireplace to play peek-a-boo. She was laughing with the kids and playing with toys. My parents gave her space which I am sure was hard for the to do! The kids were so excited about her and Cole kept asking when she could come to his school to meet his class. Julia was super ready to have a little sister and Cody kept saying "Hi Gracie Mei". It was all going so much better than I had anticipated.
Sleep would be tough for the next several days. We were trying to get over a 12 hour time difference. Rob continues to be amazing with Grace. She goes to sleep for him much better than she does for me. We had grandparents only visiting which helped Grace not feel anxious. She was not comfortable with commotion other than kid commotion=) She did not quite know how to interact with people she did not know. She wanted to play with them but would throw a toy at them so she would not have to get to close. Or she would just start kind of "acting out" throwing things or flopping herself on the ground when new people were around. She still struggled a great deal with nap time and bed time the first week home although it was improving quite a bit thanks to Rob's hard work. We have a Chinese friend who came over and talked to her again about what was going on. We gave Grace a photo album of all of us and her new home. She loves it. We put a picture of Grace and her foster mother and father in the album then a picture of Rob and I and Grace with her foster mother the day we adopted her and finally a picture of just Rob and I and Grace. This 3 photo story so to speak was an idea I got from a book I had read before we left. I think it is really helping Grace with her grief. She at times takes the adoption day picture out of the book and pretends to rip it up. She never does though but keeps putting it in and out. I am sure that day was so tough for her. She absolutely loves the picture of Rob and I with her in her new house. She kisses it and gets so excited about it. We are surely making a lot of progress in a short time. It is amazing the way kids adapt.

More on Guangzhou

There were so many adoptive families at the White Swan. There was a play room for the children. Gracie Mei is so playful so we were there quite a bit. It was so interesting talking to the other families. I think all the kids had some kind of special need. Lots of families back for the second time to adopt. Their older adopted child along with. There was such a range of experiences. Some people reported that their children had been so well taken care of and their province and orphanage were beautiful and well maintained. Others had stories of children extremely malnourished with major parasites. There were children who were 3 and looked like they were 1 and children who were 8 who looked like they were 5. There were older children being adopted who surprisingly had no formal education. Could not write their name or add 1 +1 in Chinese. There were 4 year olds who could not stand up from a seated position. You could see major positive changes in just 4 or 5 days though. Major miracles all around. Overall it was just amazing to think about all of the children there entering into families where they would be loved and where their needs would be well met.
Gracie Mei was getting more and more comfortable with us and her surroundings. I missed the kids so much and wanted so much to go home but I just could hardly handle the thought that Grace would have to go through yet another huge change. Up to this point I am sure she thought we would always live in a 5 star hotel with a huge breakfast buffet! lol! I worried about how it would all go with the kids at home. Grace was doing well with other kids at the White Swan but she really did not trust adults. She would shake her head no at people and if they would get too close she would act like she was going to hit them. We noticed that she acted this way pretty much only to white people. Oh, she had a lot to learn. When we would be in an unfamiliar situation with crowds around us etc. Grace would many times hit or scratch us. We could tell she didn't mean to be mean but was just very unsure of what was going on around her and of course unable to express her fear appropriately.
We flew to Beijing and then New Jersey on Thursday. It took us over 26 hours from door to door. Grace did amazingly well. We flew during the night and she slept for 8 hours and then again for an hour or so. Not bad for a 13 hour flight!

Guangzhou

We would stay in Guangzhou for about 6 days. It was great to be reunited with the families in our agency and see them with their children! We stayed at the White Swan Hotel where just about every family who is adopting stays at the end of there trip to finish their paperwork and swear in at the US consulate. It was very touching to see all of the families there with their newly adopted children. They all have very different stories. China is so big and diverse. Grace was doing better each day but I would have to work very hard to earn her trust after being so sick and unavailable. It took a lot of effort the first day to get her to let me hold her hand and to eat with me present. We made good progress but took a step back the next morning. By the end of the second day though she was calling me Mama and letting me hold her. She was still a Daddy's girl though and will probably be for life! The next several days we would send Daddy away for long periods of time so I could bond with her. If Rob was around she wanted nothing but him. Can't say I blame her=) It dawned on me though that Rob would be going to work Friday of that week so although Rob would have liked us all to be together he agreed to disappear for some Mommy only moments. We had such a great time together going to the pool and eating and playing. She was so attached to her shoes and would not take them off even to go to bed so I took her to buy squeaky shoes. They are popular in China. Shoes that squeak. They are annoying but boy she threw off those old shoes and squeaked right out of the store in those squeaky shoes! Grace's nap and bedtimes were still very hard. She was getting comfortable in Province but then we had to leave for Guangzhou and she had to adjust to yet another new place. She was doing great during the day though. Our guides throughout the trip were so great about talking to Grace for us in Chinese. They would explain to her what was going on and tell her that it was ok to cry but to let us hold her. Grace was at first always looking for her foster mom but the guides would tell her that she was far away and that she would not see her again. They would tell her that we loved her and would always be good to her and never leave her. This was hard for Grace and she didn't want to hear it but it helped so much. She was more and more calm and less on hyper alert. In Guangzhou we took her to a park and learned that she had never been down a sliding board. It was so wonderful to teach her how to do it and see her squeal in delight and do it over and over again! This has been the most difficult and most rewarding thing I have ever done. More on Guangzhou soon!

Hefei - Capital of Grace's province

We flew into Hefei in the Anhui Province on Sunday night and we would be able to meet Grace on Monday morning. I was getting very nervous. Typically you go the Civil Affairs building and the orphanage director would bring the child there and hand them to their new parents. It is such an abrupt change for the child. Since Grace has been in foster care for at least a year and a half she would not even know the orphanage director. Everyone was saying that the foster mom would not come and that we would not get to meet her. We pleaded with our guide to try to find out more information for us and sent emails home asking everyone to pray that somehow it would be possible for the foster mom to be present and for Grace to have time to warm up to us. We left for the Civil Affairs building and a few minutes after arriving they said that Grace was there. We watched her walk down the hall holding her foster mother's hand. What a powerful moment. Grace is almost 3 so 2 white strangers taking her from the only life she knew was going to be very difficult. We were able to get her to interact with us a little bit but she was very reluctant even to be near us. Her records had indicated that she was shy and not fond of strangers so we were not surprised. We would find out later that they had not prepared Grace at all for the adoption. We had sent pictures of us but they did not show them to her. They said she was too young to understand. Peeling her away from her foster mom was too much for me to handle so I asked our guide if by chance the foster mom could come to our hotel with us. The director agreed and said he would pick her up later that day! Wow! I couldn't believe it. We did our paperwork and left for the hotel. At the hotel we played outside for a long time and had a chance to ask the foster mom every question we could think of about Grace. Grace called me Mama for the first time there. We all had lunch together at the hotel and Grace would feed me and let me feed her. She ate a lot and her foster mom kept trying to make her eat more and more. We then went to our hotel room and tried to get Grace to sleep. We tried again to persuade the foster mother to say goodbye even if it would be hard and we would have to take Grace from her screaming but the foster mother refused. She insisted on sneaking out. Grace wouldn't sleep but let me take her to the bathroom. We washed our hands afterward and then started playing in the sink. She love to unscrew lids and dump the little containers of things in the sink. Like any 3 year old would! We had stacking cups in there and we played with them and put our feet in the sink and then took a long bath. All out of site of the foster mom. During this time the foster mom snuck out. Grace was very tired after the bath an nearly fell asleep squatting on the bathroom floor stacking the cups. Then she stood up with them to walk out of the bathroom and slipped and banged her head on the door. So the inevitable started. Poor thing just cried and cried until she was exhausted. She would not let us near her for a long time but then came to me and said Mama with her arms reaching up for me to hold her. This would be one of many sessions of deep grieving. We were prepared for this but it certainly did not make it easy. Things were about to get harder! After Grace fell asleep that night I started throwing up. There was a wonderful doctor there who had also adopted from Grace's city. He had lots of great meds for me but I quickly got behind on fluids and could not recover. During the next 4 days Rob took care of Grace and I was in bed. He was amazing with her. She was shut down a lot of the time but we would see glimpses of the Grace we had met on the first day. Nap time and bed time were extremely difficult and poor Rob had to deal with it all. I was so glad that Rob recovered so quickly from being sick before the trip. To think he might not have even been there! Both Rob's parents and I continue to comment about how amazing Rob was during this terribly difficult time. Thursday night I took a turn for the worst and we were supposed to be flying out on Friday. I was determined to get out of there and I knew there was no way I could get on a plane as I had not eaten or had much to drink in 4 days so we made the tough decision to go to the hospital. Our dear guide, Snow, took Kirk and Rob and I to the hospital in a taxi in the middle of the night. We went to the best hospital in the capital and I can't begin to tell you how filthy it was. A bug crawled under my arm when they were taking my blood. There was filth and bandages and Qtips on the floor and walls. People would just spit on the floor and parents would hold kids over the trash cans to go to the bathroom. The bathroom floor had a 1/2 inch of liquid them. Hopefully water? No toilets but holes in the ground. Rob headed back to the hotel in case Grace woke up and we ended up being there 8 hours. The medicine knocked me out but Kirk couldn't sleep in the chair so he was up all night. I got three bags of something through IV and felt great by the time we left. It all cost 44$. Unbelievable. Glad we got out of there without getting anything serious. We flew out the next day to Guangzhou.

Beijing - More details

We met our guide Lisa at the airport and the other families who are adopting from our agency. Then headed to the King Wing Hotel. The hotel was awesome. Huge rooms and great food. We saw Tienemen Square and The Forbidden City. Beijing is a great city. It was really clean and not as crowded as we thought it would be. Blue skies! The next day we saw the Summer Palace and climbed the Great Wall. It was a steep climb and the wall is 6000 miles long so it is hard to feel any sense of accomplishment. Funny. It was very crowded with people of all ages climbing very steep stairs. We ate at some great Chinese restaurants. The menus were very interesting with everything from intestines to chicken grissle to things that looked like slugs. We managed to order some things we could recognize. Our guide Lisa was so great. We asked her a million questions about Chinese culture and adoption. We visited an orphanage run by our adoption agency. It is an orphanage for kids who cannot be adopted. They do not have parents but have other living relatives. They were brought to the orphanage becuase they were living in extreme poverty or their exteneded families were just not able to take care of them. It was such a neat visit. The tears were flowing! The kids danced and sang and read from Psalms. Rob lead everyone in Amazing Grace. It was so amazing to get to experience all of this in a Communist country. We were anxious the whole time to get to Grace but it was hard leaving Beijing. It was so comfortable there. The other families would all go to different provinces to meet their children and then after days we would all meet again Guangzhou in Southern China.