Day 3

I must start where I left off last time. So we met the babies in a hotel conference room on Sunday at 5pm. It was mass confusion, nine families receiving their new children and tons of cameras and camcorders recording the event. Dale was closer to the guide and the orphanage director and they handed Lily to him, after a few photos I suggested we go to a quieter corner of the room. Shortly after we sat down she promptly threw up milk, in fact it was basically projectile vomiting, even Dale undies were soaked. Poor Lily her clothing was drenched also. CAM swung into action as I tried to find napkins/towels. CAM spoke to the guide and said we had to leave because Lily was not feeling well. Either they overfed her or she had car sickness and of course probably the stress of the whole event. She would have had a car drive of 3.5 hours to arrive in Nanchang. So we had to break two important rules after receiving your child, we had to change her clothing and we had to bath her right away, it is recommended that you take both of things very slowly, we had to jump right in...she loved the rubber duckies in her bath.

Today was a full morning of paper work then a quieter afternoon. The traffic is absolutely insane, bikes, buses, cars, mopeds and rickshaws all competing for space, basically breaking every North American driving rule. Pedestrians do not have the right of way in China. Some streets are seriously scary as you try to cross them and no one wears helmets on their bikes. Sometimes there are three people on a scooter, really unbelievable.

Lily was very withdrawn and stoic when we first met her but her eyes were very thoughtful and intellgent following our every move. She is coming out of her shell a bit, at dinner tonight she actually laughed out loud at BaBa's games. I can now fully understand spittingwooden nickels blog post when she said they barely had time to eat. So far everything is overscheduled and in buildings with no central airconditioning all on about 3 hours sleep a night, jet lag is hard on a body when your main concern is looking after a little one. She is very curious about everything. She slept like a log last night, not so much tonight, she is resisting sleep.

She is smaller than we imagined, the 12 month clothing is too large. She is wear things labelled 6 to 12 months. Our travel group really is terrific, there are some folks from the maritimes, one couple from NS, one from NB and two couples from Newfoundland finding their accents comforting being so far from home.