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!)