Playtime

Here's a video today with Lily playing with her favorite toy, stacking cups.

We're in Guangzhou

Well, it's been a few days since we posted last -- sorry for the delays. We flew from Chongqing on Saturday morning, and then have been touring around in Guangzhou on Sunday and Monday. Our usual posting time has been in the afternoon when Lily is taking a nap, but we haven't been in the hotel until the early evening and by then everybody's pretty worn out. Lily has decided that it is no fun to go to sleep at night, so since we got here it takes around an hour to get her to bed.... just when you think she's there and you put her in the crib, she pops her head up and gives you the big smile with her baby lion "raaar" roar.

On Monday we took Lily and one of her friends to the Six Banyan temple for her Buddhist blessing. We had done this for Chloe before we left, and it is very special to have one of the monks do it for us. The temple is one of the most important in Southern China, and was founded 1000 years ago by a monk that brought Buddhism from India to China. Here's a couple of photos from that.

The Buddha statues for Past, Present, and Future.

With the monk who performed Lily's blessing.

Today we're stuck in our hotel room until noon waiting for our paperwork to clear the submission at the American consulate. After that, we're going to a shopping mall nearby that is supposed to have a grocery store in it. We've discovered one of the downsides to staying in a new hotel right downtown is that, unlike Chongqing, all you have available nearby is 7 Eleven stores, which is good for Diet Coke and Chips Ahoy cookies but little else. We need to get some rice cereal and a few other supplies for our 26 hour flight home on Thursday; our day then should start around 4am, since we have a 8:20am flight and we're 45-60 minutes from the airport. Then we fly until 6pm EDT.... can't wait.

Here in Guangzhou we can't see the blog page, just post. We had the same problem in Beijing - I think this is a consequence of Google's agreement with the Chinese government to block access to certain web pages. Other services, such as Yahoo etc, are also having this problem and people with us who are using Hotmail for their email access have also been cut off. It also makes it hard to check formatting after it goes up. But anyway, please continue to post comments if you want, and we'll enjoy reading all of them when we get back in a few days. We'll close with a photo of Lily and two of her friends playing on Sunday night.

Ellie, Lily and Grace. Stacking cups are fun :))

"Let's Get On The Bus"

All aboard the Golden Dragon bus, and off to the zoo to see the Pandas. Today we learned why Chongqing is called "the oven" - waaaaaay too hot and humid, even for Florida. We dripped and dripped and dripped walking around looking at the animals. The big hits were the ostrich (with our guide, don't know why) and the racoon.... yes, they think a racoon is worthy of being exhibited in the zoo.

Then we stopped at the Art Institute in the zoo, which was (literally) cool, and picked up a few things to carry around on the plane and try to keep unfolded or creased. Good luck to me on that.

We're starting to figure Lily out after a couple of days. She won't go to bed, sleeps late, and hates being woke up in the morning -- sounds completely like her sister. She also likes to get into everything, and wants whatever you happen to have, making meals a lot of fun. I can hear Chloe now.... "Daddy, Lily is in my toys!!" Busy, busy, busy - we're thinking an all day trip on a plane next week is going to be a challenge unless we can work out how to keep her occupied.

Here are a few more pix of the zoo today - the one is at the hippo tank where suddenly the girls were popular with a few women and their kids. We also had an elderly gentleman run up and give us thumbs up signs, saying a bunch of other things, as we walked by.

Girls, Girls, Girls.

Dirty Panda.

I can't believe you're taking me to the zoo.

Me and my best friend Grace.

She is officially ours

Yesterday we went to the provincial office to complete our paperwork and get our adoption certificate. The office is in a new place since the last time we were here with Chloe - no more ratty elevator in the back of a convenience store by the river, it's in a new office building next to a big water fountain in downtown.

We talked to the auntie and doctor who came with the girls in from Qianjiang the day before (gotcha day), a 6 hour trip by bus, but unfortunately the orphanage Director was unable to make the trip. We had brought pictures of some of the nannies and the orphanage (which were about 18 months old), hoping that one of them might have had either Chloe's auntie or one of Lily's, but no luck. The doctor was working at the orphanage while Chloe was there, however. We also found out that Chloe's auntie, Lu Ping, isn't there anymore. We also sent a photo collage of Chloe we had brought with us back with the orphanage representative, Mr. Cheng, with our heartfelt thanks for taking care of both of our girls until we finally met them.

Putting my fingerprint on the paperwork.

Me and the auntie

Today is a free day - after lunch we're going shopping at the children's store, where the staff all wear blue denim overalls and red plaid shirts (nice!). Tomorrow it's off to the Chongqing zoo to see the panda bears.

G O T C H A !

It took 21 months, but this afternoon our family has become complete.

We met Lily in the hotel lobby, after getting up in Beijing at 4:30 to catch a flight down to Chongqing so we could be at the hotel before noon. The babies arrived at 4pm, which was good because it allowed us to relax, get some lunch, and get cleaned up for the big moment.

We thought that Lily might be like her sister, but she's anything but..... she's sitting, crawling, getting into everything and proceeded to steal Daddy's cookies that he was snacking on after eating the entire bag of Gerber apple puffs. So much for having an easy time of managing this child -- we have to watch her every minute to be sure she doesn't get into things. Lily has 6 teeth, and is big into doing things you do - raspberries and clapping her hands were the accomplishments of the day, and she giggles and laughs and generally finds herself amusing over all of it.

Tomorrow (Monday) we go to complete the official paperwork accepting her from the Chinese government, and then it's off to play tourist for the rest of the week until we get her passport on Friday.

Here are some other photos from this afternoon, as well as a YouTube video clip we uploaded for everyone to enjoy and meet our daughter - you may have to wait until YT posts it. More to come soon.

PS Donna - you can click on the images and make them lots bigger :)

Day 1 in Beijing

Our first day in Beijing was long, and hot - no water anywhere in sight, but if you drink anything then the girls have to use the public bathroom.... and that's not good. We started at the Temple of Heaven, then part of the old Beijing city (Hutong), and finally watched the **very** cool Beijing Theater Acrobats; they made some of Cirque du Soleil look tame by comparison. After dinner tonight we went to the "supermarket" to load up on diet Coke and water for tomorrow; to understand how crowded it was, take WalMart on Thanksgiving Friday @ 8am and multiply x5. Next time it's 7-11 for us.

Tomorrow we do the big tour day - Forbidden City, Great Wall, and Tiananenmen Square, and then up early on Sunday morning to catch the plane to Chongqing and meet Lily after lunch. We got updated measurements today: she's 27.5in tall and 18.7lb. Now if she only comes with hair!

Too late tonight to pull pictures off the memory card, but you can see pix of Beijing lots of places. Maybe tomorrow we'll put up a few.

Down to the wire

It's 4 days before we leave and time to start packing. OK, everyone else has been doing this for weeks now, but we're experienced China travellers and we're not planning on bringing all the stuff we did last time. The three duffle bags came down last night, and we'll start putting things together today/tomorrow. Clothes, antibiotics, all our paperwork, and electronics - see, a short list :) We'll just purchase whatever else we need overseas. We still need to put together the Qianjiang photo collages to bring, asking the orphanage Director if we happen to already have photos of any of the aunties who took care of Chloe (while she was there) or Lily; Sunday is getting to be an ever-busier day for me.

Chloe had a great time at Disney last w/e, even though Daddy forgot to bring her blue flower swimsuit ring; she made do with the "wife jakit" that the Boardwalk pool had instead, and pretty much jumped in and swam all over for several hours over a couple days with or without our consent it seemed. How we're ever going to leave this little girl on Tuesday night and go away for two weeks escapes me; I hope she does better than we're likely to.... and given her learning progress rate lately, she'll probably be doing long division and writing a followup to Harry Potter 7 when we get back.

We'll post as often as we can, including movies and pix of Lily so let's hope that she does a few cute things along the way. And maybe by the time we get home, she won't be in time-out anymore -- Chloe's been saying this a lot lately talking about her little sister, but it's not quite clear why baby Lily is spending so much time there.