Finally some pictures!

Matt and Melissa are still having a hard time posting. So I will be doing their posting for them. I am not nearly as good at it as they are, so you will have to forgive me for that. I am probably not doing it how they want it done. But since they most likely will not see it until they get home...oh well! I figure everybody would just be happy to see some pictures.

Amanda

Friday

Hello All! We are so sorry about the sporadic blog posts. We've actually written something everyday but it's been really difficult to get them to actually post on the blog so we've decided to send them as email and have Amanda post them for us. Today (Saturday) was the first day we didn't have anything scheduled. We are killing time waiting to get Jade's passport from the provincial government. We took a taxi (my first taxi ride ever) about twelve blocks or so away looking for a shop that would make a Chinese name stamp jor us. We thought we'd found a shop that could do it but after waiting for 45 minutes we came back to pick it up and she gave us our money back. She tried to explain why she could't do it but we don't understand Chinese. That tends to be a problem in China. We did get an interesting 45 minute walk out of it. The thing I'm learning about China is that on main roads that tourists and wealthy people hangout in it's super clean - like not even a cigarette in the gutter. Shop owners are constantly cleaning their area of side walk. If you get very far off the beaten path you get into how the normal Chinese live. It's crowded, sometimes clean, sometimes dirty and chaotic. We'll add some pictures to show you all some of the things we saw. We didn't do much this afternoon. Matt's stomach isn't feeling too hot today so we're sticking close to the hotel. He started on an antibiotic so I'm hoping that helps or the rest of this trip could be really long. We saw the sun today which was a first since being in Zhenzhou. The haze ( is it pollution ?) Is so thick the sun doesn't break through. It can be hard to tell which direction your headed or if it might actually be rain clouds. I miss blue skies and sunshine. We did see a Home Depot. I wasn't expecting that. We leave tomorrow afternoon to go into southern China to finish up our appointments with the American consulate. It's been a slow day for news.Besides a stomach ache, we are the lucky ones.Matt and Melissa

More pics

My list

We are having a great time on our trip. We finally get Jade today. (we found out she's called LanLan by her foster family) That should be tramatic for all of us :-) Since we haven't left to do that yet, I thought I'd post a quick list of observations.

1. The women here have a thing for outrageous shoes.

2. The Chinese people love their pets - dogs, pigeons, crickets-which they keep in cages just like in Mulan.

3. The drivers are crazy with a capital C and the pedestrians are even crazier-they have no fear.

4. Jay walking across a five lane road is no problem, because street vendors have taken over at least two of those lanes.

5. Chinese people are as interested in seeing their historical and cultural sights as foreigners.

6. Everything is big-buildings, monuments, crowds- it's all on a grand scale.

7. The younger generation - at least - really believe that Chairman Mao and the communist government made China a better place for the Chinese people.

8. Feng Shue (sp?) is practiced in China and taken very seriously.

9. I think that Chinese people drive nicer cars than Americans.

10. The Chinese people want the world to know they aren't poor and behind the times anymore.

11. I haven't had to use a squatty potty yet but I have found out toilet paper can be really hard to find when you need it. Always carry Kleenex.

12. I haven't seen any soy sauce yet but I have seen Tabasco sauce.

13. A child with red hair in China will be treated like a celebrity. Everybody wants to touch them and have their picture taken with them.

14. Very few phone lines to be seen. EVERYONE has a cell phone. Most are nicer than mine.

15. Apartments are in short supply, but they are building thousands of high-rises that look like dominoes stacked up. Looks like a scene from a Sci-Fi movie. No wonder prices on building supplies are up world-wide.

16. They are tearing down the old cities so they can build the new one a few miles down the road.

That's just a few of our observations so far. I'm sure we'll make a few more.

Matt and Melissa

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.4

Momma, don't let your baby grow up to be an acrobat.

Sorry I didn't write a post yesterday.  Too tired.  I'm normally  a night owl but between jet lag and being super busy I'm asleep by 8:30. Yesterday we saw Tianamen square and the Forbidden City.  We also visited  silk factory.  Tianamen square was big.  The government buildings around it are pretty and big.  We were on a pretty tight schedule so we didn't get very close to anything-just sorta walked past.  The forbidden City was not just big it was huge.  We didn't didn't get to go inside any of those buildings bit we could look inside the rooms.  It's so big that you can't take it all in and there were so many people there.  The only thing I can compare it to is Disneyland during it's busy time. Let's just say you better be moving with the flow of traffic otherwise you aren't going anywhere. 

Today we went to the jade factory, the Great Wall of China and the acrobatic show.  We bought some jade for Jade.  A little piece that we probably won't give her until she's quite a bit older.  It's super sweet.  I kinda wish it was mine. :-)   The Great Wall was so impressive.  I thought I might die climbing it.  My legs were shaking and my heart was beating so fast. The view was amazing.  I feel like between Matt and I, we have to e xperience China for Jade.   Who knows when or even if she will get to come back.  We need to be able to tell her about it.  So I went farther on the wall than I really wanted to.  It really was awesome and that's not an exaggeration.  We also made a quick stop at the birds nest stadium.  Apparently the big question here is what to do with it now that the Olympics are long over.  I guess they haven't come up with any good ideas.  The acrobatic show was really great. The performers could do amazing things with their bodies.  I'm sure they were all elite gymnasts at one point.  As I watched them perform the different parts of the show, I thought to myself - I bet their mothers cannot stand to watch the show.  To dangerous.  One of the girls did get dropped.l. I wanted to give her a hug and make sure she was alright.  That is the story behind the title of this post.   I'm to tired to write more but I know what I'm gonna write about so check back soon. 

Melissa

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.4

Great Wall, Jade factory, and Acrobat show

Sorry about the lack of pictures. We've been trying, but due to China/Google disputes, it has been very difficult to send things out. We will send more posts once we have a better work around.

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.4

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.4

Melissa and Matt's wild ride

At long last the flight is done. We took a shuttle to the terminal and all I can say is "Wow!" That is one big building. I didn't realize this, but we were the last ones to arrive. We were met by a young man named Ming who shuttles us off to a mini van and we jump in and head into the city. The driver doesn't speak any English, but for his lack of conversation he makes up for with driving gusto. He loves to gives the van two second bursts of speed, followed by a couple seconds of coasting. This constant lurching makes me feel like we are in a washing machine before the spin cycle. Melissa is really  tired and snoozes for a while; I guess the rocking back and forth of the van is soothing...or she is exhausted. As we make our way into the city, I am struck by how large it is. Modern, too.

Now I have driven in some wild places. In Serbia, for an example, I have riden on a bus with no seats and just my toes on the bottom step and hanging on for dear life out the door while the bus rambled through the streets and eventually broke down in the middle of the freeway. In Croatia, sidewalks are considered the slow lane. This is a different story. I have to give our driver some credit. He took it as a personal challenge to wedge that van into places a skateboard shouldn't fit and I'm fairly certain he thinks blinkers are for pansies.

Our guide, George, meets us at the hotel, gets us checked in and tells us to be ready by 9:00 for our tour tomorrow. I am looking forward to all the amazing things we will see. Speaking of amazing, I turn on the TV and find a basket ball game. I see Aaron Brooks playing for a Chinese team and think to myself, "Didn't the Suns trade Dragic and a draft pick for that guy?" Hmmm...I digress.

As I type this at almost 3:00 am, I remind myself to not get too caught up in the hustle and bustle. I really want to absorb the soul and personality of this place. We will have a big influence over Jade's perception of her birthplace and I want to have a personal connection to this great culture.

I can't help but think that WE are the Luky Ones.

Matt

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.4

Are we there yet?

Matthew and I are currently cruising at 34,000 ft, 583 MPH, -60 degrees somewhere close to Siberia.  We've already been traveling for about twelve hours, seven of those hours have been on this plan ride to Beijing.  It turns out that the in flight movies on a Chinese airline are Chinese movies.  Who would've thought?  Since I don't understand the movies, I've been people watching. (Actually, I'm only about 6 feet away from the wall that has the movie screen on it, so I'm not seeing much. I can see Matt and he looks pretty good. :-)  Who else have I seen?  There's a man standing in the very back of the plane where there is a little bit of room by the bathrooms.  He's been doing yoga and other interesting stretches on and off for the past seven hours.  I wouldn't be surprised to see downward facing dog or salute to the sun the next time I go for a walk around the cabin. I really think he's trying to get the stewardesses attention with all of his yoga moves.  Matt and I are realizing that we needed to bring more movies and music with us.  Maybe a card game too.  16 hours of flying leaves you with a lot of free time. 

When the airplane took off from Phoenix this morning it made me sad and scared.  We were flying off to an unknown country to get a little girl that doesn't know we are coming.  I suppose if you can get cold feet before you marry somebody that you should know better than anybody, you should be allowed at least 5 minutes of cold feet for an adoption.  Right? (Just for the record I didn't have even 1 minute of cold feet before marrying Matt and I only had cold adoption feet for 5 minutes - maybe less :-) )  Now I'm ready for the plane ride to be over and the good part to start.  Hey, Matt!  Are we there yet? 

I'm still thinking we are the lucky ones.

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.4

Small world

We just found out that Jade has a foster sister living in the Pittsburgh area! The mother of this little girl had Jade's name, searched for and found a post that Melissa created many months ago (mainly as a journal for herself) with the name Dang Yu Lan. She had pieced together the puzzle that her little girl and ours were foster sisters. Seems like more than a coincidence to me. Their little girl was excited to see Jade and the foster grandparents' pictures. We are excited to share our experiences with this family. We'll keep you posted!

We are the Lucky Ones.

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.4

Travel Plans at last!

I hope Melissa doesn't mind that I put our story down in our first post. I agree with most of what she said. :) We have been anxiously waiting since early August 2011 when we signed a Letter of Acceptance and sent it to the Chinese government to hear when we could go get our Jade. We had a number of things to renew as part of our adoption requirements, but Melissa is tenacious about getting this stuff all done. Good thing, too. We have been waiting and thought we might travel at the end of December/early January, but as these things often do, we had to wait longer than expected. We finally received official word on March 5th that we would be leaving on March 22nd and meet with our group on March 23rd in Beijing. As far as we can tell, there will be about 10 families going with us and some of them will be going with us to Zhengzhou to meet their children as well.

We will be in China about 13 days and traveling one day on each end of the trip; so will be gone just over two weeks. We are excited about learning more about the culture and know we are going to have some interesting and exciting experiences as we go through this adoption process. Best of all, we are bringing home a beautiful little girl that we will cherish and will make our little family complete.

And baby makes Seven!

To what exactly am I referring to - seven and baby in the same title? Well, I'll tell you. After starting our international adoption from China more than 5 years ago, we're finally getting a baby girl! How did this happen? Well, let me tell you how it happened. I'll start with a short version of what prompted our decision back in 2007 to start an international adoption in the first place and then I'll move on to what's happening now with the adoption. In July 2006 I was doing a search for something (I couldn't tell you what) on the internet and ran across information about adoption from China. I read about the experiences of families that had already adopted or were in the process of adopting from China. Most of the babies available were girls and there were lots of healthy babies and people seemed to be getting fairly young babies - sometimes as young as 6 months. Vanessa at the time was about 6 months old and I really and truly wanted her to have sister. I also liked the idea that we could be a family for a little girl that needed one. I wasn't sure what Matt's reaction would be to this idea. I was expecting some resistance from him. Vanessa was so young and here I was talking about adopting another little girl. I had actually sent away for the application from the adoption agency and it came with an informational DVD but he didn't know about any of this. I asked him if he would watch the informational DVD from the adoption agency with me. We watched the 10 minute DVD and when it was over I asked him what he thought and he said maybe, let's talk about it. We talked and eventually agreed to do it but to wait until January before we started any of the paperwork. By February of 2007, our initial application to adopt had been approved and we started working on dossier paperwork that would eventually be sent to China where it would be kept by them until we adopted. Needless to say, to do a complete dossier is a long and complicated process. Even though the agency had broken everything down, it was so huge it took me a few weeks to feel ready to even start it but once I did, as long as I followed the directions I got it done. I worked on the dossier until August, when it was all approved and sent to China were it was logged in in September of 2007. We assumed that we'd wait 18 - 24 months to be matched with a baby. We'll you know what they say about assuming. We were wrong. Very, very wrong. The amount of time it was taking to be matched with a baby was growing so fast. We stayed hopeful. Our original home study and immigration paperwork was getting ready to expire so we went through the process of getting it renewed. Time passed and it was all getting ready to expire again. This time we let it expire. It was too expensive to keep everything current and the wait time was sooo long. During this time I got pregnant and then had a miscarriage at about 20 weeks. A little boy we named Joshua. About 4 months later I got pregnant again. This time the pregnancy was healthy, and we had a baby girl thatwe named Aimee. I think part of us had given up on the adoption ever happening. I don't remember exactly when, but I did suggest to Matt at one point that maybe we should switch from the traditional program ( no known special needs) to the waiting child program (special needs). You can specify what medical needs you are willing to consider but with Sam's heart problems our heart wasn't in and the discussion didn't go very far. I would've been okay with it but it's not something only one person can be up for. You have to be in it together. We really stopped thinking much about the adoption. It was definitely on the back burner. Then in July 2011, our social worker called out the blue and told us she was cleaning out her family files and she wanted to know what we wanted to do. I told her we were completely discouraged by the wait times and she suggested that we look into the waiting child program. I told her we would think about it and call her back. I told Matt what Terri (our social worker) had said. I was totally up for it. Matt had a harder time. I think he had long ago given up on the adoption and he was okay with the 4 great kids that we had. I got on our adoption agency's website and looked at the files of the waiting children that they had up. I thought we could consider a boy with a cleft lip/cleft palate. It seemed like there were lots of kids that matched that description - alot that were just around a year old. Matt said no, that if we did it we would get a girl, even if it meant waiting longer.

When I was looking again at the files, a new file was on the website, without a picture, but info about her. It said she had a malformed lower limb - we thought maybe a club foot. That was something we could do. The next morning there were pictures up. She was adorable and her foot did kind of look like it was a club foot. I showed it to Matt and he agreed that I should request the complete file. So I did, and they emailed it to me. We would have about 7 days to decide. During that time we needed to find a pediatric orthopedic surgeon to look at her. I did a little searching and found a doctor at Phoenix Children's Hospital named Dr. Lee Segal. I called he office and left a message with his nurse practitioner and sort of explained the situation on the message but I didn't get a quick response from them, so I tried making an appointment through the normal appointment schedulers. The first appointment wasn't for about 6 weeks. I was starting to get desperate. We tried several other people that we thought might know an orthopedic - any orthopedic to look at her file. Nothing! I just felt like I couldn't make a decision without talking to a doctor. Finally, Dr, Segal's office called back and Matt talked to his nurse and explained the situation. She said she's talk to the doctor and she'd see if she could get us a consultation. She did for a few days later. We asked how much the appointment would cost since we wouldn't be able to bill it to our insurance. She said it would be very expensive. Again she said she'd see what she could do. We went to the appointment and after looking at pictures of her and her leg for about 2 seconds, he said she has fibular hememilia. More severe than club feet. She's actually missing part of her fiba bone and two toes on her foot. It's a lengthy process to fix with no guarantees that the procedures will correct her foot although they could lengthen the bone in her leg out. He said that the other option is amputation. I lost it when he said that. He said, that the kids that have the amputation "fly" afterwards with the prosthetic. It was hard to hear, but we needed to. He said the prosthetic wouldn't slow her down. She'd be able to do anything. He didn't charge us anything for the visit. We felt like getting to meet with him and get the info we needed and to have no charge on top of that, was a miracle, an answer to prayer - literally. Once we had a chance to process the info he gave us, I felt like she was still the right baby for us. Matt came to the same conclusion and we told the adoption agency we'd like to adopt her. Her name is Dang Yu Lan or Jade Orchid in English. Her birthday in July 18, 2010. She is in Nanyang, Henan province in China. We found out she's in a foster family that is sponsored by our adoption agency and has been almost from the beginning. We now sponsor her foster care. We sent her a care package. We are working on getting our paperwork current. Our home study update is finished, now it's all about our US immigration paperwork. Slow and expensive. We don't expect to travel until Feb/March of 2012. We are really excited. It's agonizing to know that she's there, getting older by the day and we are stuck here doing paperwork. If I didn't have four other kids to keep me busy, I'd go crazy. I feel like she's the baby for us. It's strange to think that this process we started so long ago was for a baby that literally wouldn't be born for years! I know that there will be challenges but we're good parents and my guess is, is that she'll make us better parents. I'm literally praying that the miracle of quick paperwork processing will happen so we can go and get her but when it comes right down to it, I'm trusting in my Heavlenly Father's plan for her and for us. It's all good! I really feel that. I'm impatient for her to be here with us but I'm at peace about it. Does that make sense? We are waiting for baby to make seven!