July

This is the first in my "Back in Orbit" series, after the busiest summer ever. As for June... well I don't even remember June. There was a June this year, right? If it weren't for the pictures I'd forget everything.

Now, back to July...

Back in Arkansas, we had two big parties at our house every year, the first of which was the annual 4th of July "McSplosion". The fireworks laws in Arkansas are much looser than here in Virginia, which nicely complemented the pyromanic tendencies of yours truly and his youngest son. In fact, when Calvin was told that Virginia didn't allow mortors and rockets, his response was immediate: "That's it. We're moving back to Arkansas"

This year we were in search of a new family tradition for Independence Day. And it needed to be one that (dare I say it) will rival the McSplosion party in the hearts and memories of Calvin and Hobbes. So, along with half a million others, we hit the road for our nation's Capitol.

... and here is a picture of Calvin and me with Bei-Bei for her first Metro ride on our way in.

The Air and Space Museum is a required stop for every trip to DC

Bei-Bei heads up the steps of the Museum of Natural History

Once the rain stopped, we had a great view aside the Washington Monument.

The day was a hit, although the kids were a little freaked out by the crowd in the Metro afterwards. Next year I think we will stay the night.

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A couple weeks later, Grandma R came for her first visit since our move...

...and of course we had to go to the beach. We do love the beach.

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And we love the water, too, you know. So... about that pool... No commitment yet, but the land does need to be cleared.

'nuf said.

Hot enough for ya?

Try 100 degrees hot. That's what we got today. K-Mom and the boys are really missing the pool at our Bentonville house, so she went to Sam's Club and bought something to hold us over until we get an in-ground built here (no timeline on that one).Grandma D. Looks on while K-Mom, Calvin, and Bei-Bei wave for the camera. Hobbs shows off his gills.

Bei-Bei unsure of the "big tub". Calvin... not so much.


Calvin shows Bei-Bei how to do it.


Hobbs and Bei-Bei share a happy (and cool) moment.

Hey! I'm walkin' here!

Here is our Bei-Bei, taking some of her first steps today. Hard to believe.

Harder to believe is all that’s happened since last I blogged… we celebrated Bei-Bei’s first Easter, she got a bunch of teeth, we moved to Virginia, we unpacked, and unpacked, and unpacked. We had a garage sale (which sucked) and then donated that stuff to Diversity Thrift so that we could continue to unpack, unpack, and unpack. I must give credit to K-Mom for doing most of the heavy lifting with the unpacking (except the actual “heavy lifting”).

One challenge is that our previous house in Bentonville was a builder’s home and loaded with all the built-ins you could imagine, which we had loaded with “stuff”. We never had to get rid of anything… there was always a place for it. Now we have more stuff than places.

Another big project is the Garage. The Bentonville house had three bays, about 30’ deep, an 18’ double door, and a 9’ single… 1,200 square feet (imagine Tim Allen grunting here). The new house has two and a half bays, a 16’ double and an 8’ single… 600 square feet. More stuff without a space, yes, but we have a finishable attic (now crammed with “stuff”) and a basement. The basement, for the most part, is filled with Grandma D’s “stuff” as she waits for her house to sell in Pea Ridge, AR so she can begin looking for her own place here in Richmond.

In the meantime, W-Corp is going through a restructuring that involves lay-offs and changes in strategy that isn’t making life at the office quite what the brochure made it out to be. No worries, though… this is the nature and cycle of things.

Last weekend, Memorial Day weekend, was our first non-unpacking weekend since we got here (which is not to say we are done with that… but, hey, it’s a holiday). Our niece, Madison, who lives with her dad in Raleigh spent the weekend with us.

Saturday we spent the day at King’s Dominion amusement park, which is about 20 miles from our house. Sunday we hung out at the house and went to see the new Indiana Jones movie. Then on Monday we braved the crowds at Virginia Beach. I’ll close this post with some pictures from our day at the beach.

First is a sequence of Hobbs' showing off his most excellent boogie boarding skills...

Yep. He's under there.

Here is Calvin, happiest near one of his two primary elements (the other being fire).

SPF 150 works just fine for Grandma D and me...

Cousin Madison takes a break from the waves...

And finally, this shot of K-Mom introducing Bei-Bei to her first wave.

Montage

After receiving a couple of very nice photo essays from my cousin, Booty, I’m inspired to post one of my own. Here’s a sampling of photos from the last few weeks.

From the Land of 10,000 Smiles: Last weekend we had a visit from our friends from Howard Lake, Minnesota. Even though it is a 12-hour drive for them, it is still shorter than a drive to Virginia would be. It was a good visit, hanging out, playing cards with the Bowmans, and eating home-cooked meals.




Home Stretch: My routine, for the most part, is working alternate weeks from my old office in Bentonville and my new one in Richmond. This week I will be in Richmond and I expect the house will be very close to finished. Here is a picture from two weeks ago after the cabinets had been put in (compare to the picture from the same vantage in my "salt mine" post).




Ringing in the Rat: Something I’ve failed to mention in past posts was the Chinese New Year celebration we attended at the Jones Family Center in Springdale. This was put together by a group of families who have, or are planning to adopt from China. After being at home for only a couple of weeks it was great to re-live our experiences with others who have done it in years past. (See if you can spot Hobbs in this picture.)

Scrub-a-Dub: No story for this one, just a cute picture of Bei-Bei in the tub. Nothing smells like a clean baby.

From Arizona With Love

My mom , Grandma R, came for a visit to see Bei-Bei for the first time this weekend. We met at the airport on Valentines Day night…, I was inbound from Richmond, she from Phoenix. Both of our flights were on time and we landed within ten minutes of each other (a good omen?)... I love it when a plan comes together.

Bei-Bei continues to grow and fill our lives with love and all things good and happy. She sees therapists (speech, physical, and occupational) four times a week and has gained about a pound each week since coming home. K-Mom continues to work to get her to accept food… any food other than the bottle. Tonight we had a somewhat successful try at applesauce, which included a fun “rub the food in your hair” game. (The pictures you see in this post were taken shortly after the bath that ensued.)

There is also progress every day in the crawling and pulling up departments. This was an especially productive long weekend because endless rain kept the boys, Calvin (9) and Hobbes (12), inside and crawling around with the rest of us.

Grandma D, K-Mom’s mom and rabid NASCAR fan, was sick with the flu this weekend so she was unable to join us for an impromptu Daytona 500/Northern Trust Open get-together with our friends the Bowmans. TV Golf, racing, beer, and dirty diapers... now that's a weekend!

It is rough for Grandma R to get around these days because of a bad knee, so outings were limited to baby clothes shopping with K-Mom and a big lunch with Hobbes and me at the original AQ Chicken. I will take her to the airport tomorrow before work and she will return to Arizona and have her second knee replacement surgery next week.

Back to the Salt Mines

My first two weeks back to work were spent more away than at home with travel to Richmond and back, then to Madison (NJ), then Richmond again, and then home on Valentine's Day night.

Some of the air travel luck from Houston must have been still on my skin as not only was my connecting flight from Charlotte to Richmond cancelled, but so was the next one. I ended up flying to Newport News and driving the rest of the way. Last week I enjoyed an 8-hour long 3-hour flight to Newark. The delay was on both ends and due to snowy weather but, in case you haven't heard, Newark sucks with or without snow. Dante Alighieri probably had something like the Newark airport in mind when he was describing the eighth circle of hell.

The good news is the house is much more on schedule than I am with most of my projects at work. All the drywall is up and the exterior is nearly done. I took these photos at dawn after a Cracker Barrel breakfast one morning about two weeks ago. Gotta love breakfast at the Cracker Barrel.


I went by again late one night last week and they had put in the door frames and sprayed a first coat of paint.

Pictures!

I’ve been catching a lot of flack for being lax with the pictures, so here you go.



This first one I took this morning after Bei-Bei had her bath. She has been pretty sick these last few days with a runny and stuffy nose, making it hard to breath while eating and sleeping. Last night was her best night since we’ve been home thanks to good ol’ American drugs and a vaporizer. She went to bed at 8 p.m., woke up briefly at 3:00 and slept through until breakfast at 5:30.



This photo was taken after our group photo at the White Swan, just before our first meeting with the U.S. Consulate. Bei-Bei had let us put her feet on the floor for the first time a couple of days before this picture but had never tried to take any steps… until this. Since we had the camera we were able to capture her “first step” to share with you here.



We took this picture on one of the famous red couches at the White Swan. You may not have heard of them, but in the Chinese adoption world the red couches are famous because nearly every family adopting from China takes a picture in them. We liked this picture so much that we had a granite etching done of it at one of the local shops.

What a long strange trip it's been

It has been a rough few days.

While applying for the children’s Chinese passport (as mentioned at the end of my last post), it was discovered that one of the children had some Chickenpox blisters. That child had to be quarantined and all of the children had to have immunizations and more physical exams. At one point, the passports of the families and the visas of the children were flagged to bar entry into the United States. Thanks to some hard work by the American Consulate negotiating with the CDC in Atlanta on our behalf, we were able to leave China as scheduled. It did cost us two days of worry, going to meetings, waiting for calls, and physical exams, so our plans for souvenir shopping and visits to the pearl and electronics markets on those days had to be curtailed.

Just because we managed to leave China on schedule doesn’t mean we got home as planned. We flew from the world’s best airport in Hong Kong to America’s sorriest, Newark, and stayed overnight at the Marriott there. The next morning, we flew to Houston and connected to a 17-hour flight from there to NW Arkansas Regional (XNA). Yes, friends, on this particular day it took us longer to get from Houston to Bentonville than it took us to get from Newark to Hong Kong two weeks earlier. Because of fog we ended up circling XNA on four different occasions, with diverted landings for fuel in Tulsa, Houston (which included “sleeping” in the airport), and Oklahoma City before making it home to, as the song says, “patch our bones”. The whole family went to bed the afternoon we returned, slept for about 12 hours, got up around 3 a.m. to eat, feed, change, and then slept some more.

For our efforts baby Bei now has a head cold complete with ear infection. Today, we took her to the doctor today for her fourth physical exam in two weeks. But of course, the American version is much more thorough, including a plethora of lab tests and follow up physical and speech therapy (the speech therapy is for her oral issues as she still won’t allow anything but the bottle in her mouth). The pediatrician puts her physical age at about 10 months although the Chinese authorities have her at 14 months. The doc says it is common for babies in orphanages to lose a month’s worth of development for each 3 months they are institutionalized, so that does match the Chinese story. We should know for sure as her development “catches up” over the next few months.

I have no pictures to share at the moment as we are still disorganized in mind and household. I have a hundred stories to tell and I will post them when I can. For now, we will work on getting our lives back in order and ridding ourselves of scabies (ewww!)

Gotcha!

First (and most important) things first… our baby is with us and she is happy and reasonably healthy.

The pictures above are from Monday, which some call “Gotcha Day”, which is the day you meet your baby for the first time. These photos were taken within seconds of Bei being placed in our arms for the first time.

The timing of this process seems to change at random. We were expecting to meet our baby on Tuesday but we were told when we arrived in Hong Kong on Sunday night that we would have her on Monday. We were running late by the time we got to Guangzhou because of the bus ride from Hong Kong (a story for another time) so we had 45 minutes to unpack, settle, feed the family, and gather what we needed to take with us to the Department of Civil Affairs of Guangdong Province. Anyplace that was quick to eat didn’t accept Hong Kong dollars or American dollars and … well… another story for another time. Let’s just say when we met Bei there was no shortage of emotion, anxiety, fatigue, or hunger. Yet when we met each other it all washed away.

Because of the advice we’ve gotten and the books we’ve read, we were prepared for rejection or some manifestation of an attachment issue, but we experienced no such problem. She was happy to be held and comfortable and loving with the boys and us. We took turns holding her, talking to her, and making her smile. After a while she fell asleep in my arms and stayed asleep until it was time to go. She laid contently in the lap of her youngest big brother on the roller-coaster/bus ride back to the hotel.

Our baby is tiny. Supposedly 14 months old, I don’t think she weighs more than 15 pounds. Unlike some of the other babies of her age in our group, she doesn’t really crawl very well and cannot stand, even with assistance. She is so small that we gave her a bath in the bathroom sink of our hotel room.

We are having some trouble getting her to eat. The first day she rejected any form of food we offered her and we finally got her to drink 4 ounces of Chinese formula yesterday morning. Our guide suggested we give her some “Children’s tea” yesterday afternoon, which she did drink, but repeated attempts with Chinese formula, American formula, baby food, Chinese congee (rice porridge), American rice cereal, noodles, and even just water to keep her hydrated failed miserably. This morning she drank about 6 ounces of Chinese formula, but immediately spit up a good portion of it.

One of the fathers in our group had heard that some orphanages will give babies something to constipate them before a long bus ride on Gotcha Day so the nannies don’t have to deal with changing poopy diapers while they are on the road. I really think this is the case based on what I’ve heard from some of the other families and the fact that Bei’s orphanage in Huazhou is seven hours away by bus. She drank a little over 2 ounces of Children’s tea after breakfast and we treated her with some glycerin we had brought from the states and that has made things better on both ends. As I’ve typed this last paragraph she has drank four ounces of Chinese formula.

This afternoon we will take the bus to the Guangdong Provincial Public Security Department to get Bei’s Chinese Passport.

The shortest distance between two points

It’s go time.

We spent the day packing, running some last-minute errands, and a saying a few farewells. I must say that K-Mom did most of the heavy lifting here… my role is clearly a support function.

One of the reasons we chose our adoption agency is because of the “travel group” set-up they have. Our travel group consists of about a dozen families, some with kids already, some without, and for one family in our group this is their second adoption from China. We will fly together, stay in the hotels together, meet our daughters together, and finish the adoption process together. We hope to make some long-term connections within our travel group so our families can stay in touch for years to come. Already K-Mom has been in frequent contact with some of the mommies regarding luggage-packing strategies.

So it’s a great set-up as far as we are concerned, but the agency is east coast based which means so are the families in our travel group. Because weekend flight schedules are limited here in Arkansas, we have to fly to Newark tomorrow in order to meet up with our travel group. On Saturday we leave for Hong Kong.

Which brings me to a question we often get asked about our trip halfway around the world: “…Do you head west, or do you head east?” The answer is: Neither. We head north. Just about due north. And that's because the fastest way to the other side of this big blue marble is over the top. It's my understanding that we will pass inside of a couple hundred miles of the north pole. In total, our flight from Newark to Hong Kong will be about 8,100 miles in sixteen hours. Yikes.

We get to Hong Kong Sunday evening, and will spend the night there. Monday a bus will take our travel group to Guangzhou and on Tuesday, “Gotcha Day”, we will have our baby at last. We are so, so, very excited.

I will do my best to keep you posted over these next few weeks. Blogspot is one of many websites blocked by the Chinese government, but I have a plan. And if that plan doesn’t work then I have a back-up plan as my dear cousin, Ms. Booty Homemaker, has agreed to post any emails I lob over the Party’s firewall.