Cheezer and Louzer

Last weekend we visited the Anderson Farms with friends. It’s about an hour’s drive from where we live, up North and east of us. The farms are open year-round but they’re especially busy in October since they have a pumpkin patch and a corn maze. City folks like us love that sort of thing, apparently, since it was really crowded.

We took a wagon ride out to the punkin’ patch, picked one for the boy and then rode back. We walked through the corn maze then and got lost numerous times. The kids did finally get us out though.  All in all, it was nice visiting the “plains” part of Colorado for the first time. The views from up there were great, with the flat plains to the East and the Rockies always visible on the horizon to the West.

The full photo album is here.

The boy's pumpkin choice

Our little missy's favorite

Lost in the corn

…and I feel fine.

Hi again. This time I’ve got three videos to share with you all from our recent adoption trip to China. For more info on the trip itself, see my previous post.

The first video is just a few scenes we captured before the adoption. It features Hong Kong Harbor and the view from our hotel room in Nanning. It’s pretty boring, so skip this unless you just want to see what these places look like.

The second video is the Adoption Day. This one gets me all teary every time I watch it. Kim and Sean are SO happy but the baby is SO sad and distraught:

Lastly, some post-adoption scenes, as we spent time in Nanning and Guangzhou while our paperwork was finalized:

You can see she’s doing better by the time we shot these and she’s just starting to walk there.

We’re back from China and wow!!! What an amazing trip! There’s no possible way I can write down all of the cool things that happened so I’m just going to summarize here. Buy us dinner or a beer sometime and we’ll have lots of stories we can tell you. The trip broke down into three parts: Pre-Adoption in Hong Kong, Adoption fun in Nanning and Post-Adoption time in Guangzhou.

Hong Kong Harbor

Our agency had our tour group families meet up in Hong Kong so we could get to know each other as we adjusted to the local time and got over the jet lag. There were 8 families including us and everyone was really nice. We had folks from California, Idaho, Texas, New Jersey (with a 4 y/.o old boy for our son to play with), North Carolina and Georgia. The day after we arrived we did a tour with our great guide, Matthew. He took us up to Victoria Peak for great views of the island harbors. Then we visited a jewelry workshop and store. Then on to a ride on sampans in the harbor and lastly a visit to the Stanley street markets. The best parts were the views from the Peak and the boat ride.

Happy Mommy!

We flew on Sunday then to Nanning, in the southern Guangxi province. We stayed at the Wharton International Hotel – very nice place. We ate at the Chinese place in the basement about a million times, I think. Everyone there was wonderful and most spoke English very well. We went to the Lottery Hotel (nice name, yes?) on Monday afternoon to meet our little girls. I remember total chaos, lots of smiling parents and crying girls. Our daughter just stared at us mostly, total blank slate. This is common and turned out to be short-lived. The first 24 hours we spent with her are called the Harmonious Period, by the Chinese adoption officials. We’re not officially her parents till the next day, when we return to the other hotel and get interviewed by the official. They ask if our first night went OK and if we want to keep her. “Of course”, we said!

Walking with the family

We spent the next few days getting to know each other, hanging around the hotel because it got really rainy and then seeing a few sites, including the Nanning Zoo. We had a wonderful walk in the park the afternoon the weather finally turned nice again, with the other families. That was a highlight.

Kristen Jianmei turned out to be a great baby. She eats well, sleeps well (for the most-part), loves to laugh and play with her big brother (“ge-ge”). She loves to ride in the stroller and go with Daddy in the Baby Bjorn carrier. Compared to the other families in our group, I think we had a pretty easy job of getting started, family-wise. On her third morning with us, she woke up smiling and was mostly happy from that point on. She drinks formula in the morning and right before bed and eats fruits, eggs, cheese and cheerio’s throughout the day. We were told she is from the second largest ethnic minority in China, the Zhuang people. Her province is actually called the Guangxi Autonomous Region, because most of the people there are Zhuang (related more to the Vietnamese than the majority Han people in China).

Guangzhou, Guangdong province, China

On Saturday we flew to Guangzhou (population 13 million, in Guangdong) for the final part of the trip. Pretty much all Americans adopting Chinese kids end up at the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou because that’s the only place to get a Visa from the US Consulate. The hotel is 5-star all the way, with great breakfast buffets every morning and about ten other restaurants to eat at too. The hotel is on Shamian Island, a former British enclave. The rest of the island is a mix of run-down homes, very crass tourist stores and good restaurants. We completed a new stack of forms one day and then they were turned in to the Consulate the next. We all went as a group to the Consulate that afternoon and took an oath with about 40 families to always care for and never abuse our new daughters and sons.

Our last day was just for another tour – a Buddhist temple, a very old traditional Chinese home and another “Arts & Crafts” shopping mall. We liked visiting the temple best. I just spent the time at the old Chen House feeding Cheerio’s to our baby girl. The mall was just that, but we still managed to buy a few things there.

The flights home were brutal but it’s over now. We spent about 25 hours traveling from the White Swan, to Hong Kong, to San Fran and then back home but it was all worth it. We’re in the process now of getting re-adjusted to Denver time and getting baby girl used to her room and our food and so on.

There will be more words as I think of them but that’s it for now.

The Hong Kong photo album is here.

Click here for the Nanning pictures.

Go to this link for the Guangzhou pictures.