Here's Anna!

Whoo hoo! We have access to Blogger and we have a new little girl!

To catch up let's start with today! We left the hotel around 9:30. Here is our whole group. No one in the group is adopting their first child and everyone is adopting a special needs child.



We were going to the Registration Office. On the bus we were told the Orphanage Director from Pingdingshan was going to be late. Very late. So we figured we would take pictures of everyone else's babies while we waited for ours. The babies all arrive on the same morning from orphanages all around Henan. We were probably there about 10 minutes when the first baby arrived. Anna! Needless to say, we were not prepared. As it happened, she never went back to the orphanage and her nannies came with her half way across China to deliver her to us. With care like that, of course you are going to love your nannies! She cried and cried and cried when she was taken out of their arms.



After about an hour and a half she started to relax. Other babies came in. Here is Jack, he has had open heart surgery.



And Joshua. He is two years old and weighs only 15 pounds. A little Southern cooking will fatten him up in no time.



Little Tori is with new daddy, Heath, and is 15months old with a repaired unilateral cleft lip.



This little guy is Larry. He came in last and screamed about as much as Anna.



Little Allison didn't make it to the Registration Office. So she was delivered to the hotel a few hours later. I have pics of her I'll download later.

Anna brightened up quite a bit after awhile. She even laughed at Daddy's jumping. She fell asleep on the bus back and is still asleep now.











Yesterday we left our hotel in Beijing and took a plane to Zhengzhou, the capitol of Henan province.



For dinner, we took a walk to McDonald's with another family. Here is the amount of people that you see at a bus stop ready to get on the bus.



Mopeds are everywhere and we see a least four car and/or moped and/or bus accidents a day. They drive CRAZY!!!! There is NO right of way for pedestrians.



We went into this giant park with a jumbo screen and walked around. Kids were playing in the fountain, even though it wasn't turned on.





There were street vendors with all kinds of things to buy to eat. These were tiny little fried eggs, about the size of a quarter. Robin's eggs?



This is Jenny, Heath, Delaney and Presley. Jenny's mom, Betty, was also with us. The Chinese are enthralled with the little girls. It seems like they have never seen Caucasian children. Pointing and staring are common and wanting to take pictures with them happens everywhere they go. The Chinese people don't look strange to me because I spent most of my life in Southern California where there is a very large Asian population. But here, with everything regulated by the government, the people seemed to have try little exposure to the outside world.



And speaking of that, one of our fellow adopters helped me break through the Chinese fire wall by setting up a VPN account. Thanks, Steven! He also loaned me a wire so I could get the Internet in my room instead of having to go down to the lobby for wifi.

We have 24 hour guardianship of Anna and then tomorrow we officially adopt her!