Tuesday, November 24, 2009

An update on our LWB babies

**Our Teratoma Yahoo group is not allowing me to post photos. Here are the updates on the two babies with teratomas that you so generously sponsored!**

Ruby is currently in foster care and is doing very well. She is a very good eater. She will be undergoing some exams soon to make sure she does not have cancer (this is a regular exam for teratoma babies). Thank you so much for making a difference in Ruby's life!”

Also a quick update on baby Margaret, she is in Shanghai and will have her teratoma removed tomorrow!
I have been told "She is a quiet little girl and smiles a lot. Her surgery date is set for tomorrow. Please keep Margaret in your thoughts as she undergoes surgery. Thank you so much for your support!"

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Shattered

My heart shattered into a million pieces yesterday.

I found Maggie's "finding ad" that the orphanage placed in the newspaper. And right there next to her, was our sponsored foster kid. Among all the newborns was this toddler, a kid with special needs who was loved by a family for 17 months before they were unable to care for her anymore.
17 months.

Shattered.

How do you heal up your heart that breaks every time it sees a sick kid or an orphan? How do you patch up the cracks when you find out the history and pain of the little ones you love?

I decided that there's only one thing I can do. I have to give those little pieces of my heart away. Give my heart back to the kids.

As I've been looking for my purpose in life, Love Without Boundaries has been popping up here and there. We support them, and sponsor our foster kid, and retweet cute pictures on Twitter, and hit up my Facebook friends for cash, but it never occurred to me that LWB could help me give my "heart pieces" away in a more true and meaningful way. A few weeks ago, I applied for a volunteer position with LWB, and yesterday afternoon brought some great news.

I am now the LWB Foster Care Assistant for XiaoXian, and my heart feels better today.

Monday, May 11, 2009

I Belong To You

When you were placed in my arms on that grey January day two years ago, I finally became what I always wanted to be - a mommy.








I knew from the first moment I saw your face on the computer 6 months earlier that you were meant to be mine, and that I was yours. The stars lined up, it was my fate, God led me to you - it doesn't matter how you phrase it, we were meant to be together. You fit perfectly into our lives and made us into a family.








On Mother's Day, I also have to remember that you had mothers before me, who loved you and cared for you just as much as I do. Your first mother, who loved you more than anything - but had to give you a chance at life and the surgery you so desperately needed. The a-yi's at the orphanage who took you in, fed you and made you healthy enough to go to the hospital, where another group of mothers nursed you back to health. The mothers at Love Without Boundaries who saw a need at your orphanage and started a Foster Care program. And then finally, your foster mother - who took you into her home and loved and cared for you until I came for you.

I am honored to be the last in this long line of mothers, your forever mother.

Know this little one, you are mine and I am yours.
I belong to you.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

My Cute New Laptop


Here's a pic of my new Mini 10. Isn't she a little cutie? The old Nokia that I used to use and a standard size laptop (and a cute kid) are also in the picture.

Mother's Day Gift 2009


This was in Maggie's backpack today. It's so sweet, brought a tear, it did. And look - she can sign her own name!

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

New Pics of Maggie













Here's what we've been up to this April. I'm also posting these on Facebook, but since some of you won't get with the program (Mom), I will also post them here.

We've been dancing and eating and getting spoiled by Angie!

Extra Packing List for China - Things to Consider

Another post for my yahoo group. This is a list I made for the aforementioned friend who traveled last summer.

Consider adding some of these items to your already loooooooooooong list! Then take out half of the clothes you packed (see below) to make room - I am not kidding.
This is a toddler oriented list, it will not work for everyone. This is not an entire packing list (are you nuts?) just some highlights about what worked for us.
  • Sippy cups (2) (just in case the only sippy you have falls into a drainage ditch and your travel partner has to go retrieve it - thanks Craig!)
  • Baby bottle (1 just in case)
  • Ramen (2) You can get 4 meals out of 2 packages of Ramen & buy more there, we figured that if Maggie had Ramen every day for the short time we were there, it wouldn't kill her.
  • Pampers Pocket Bibsters (love these! they sell them at Walgreen's)
  • Big bag of Cheerios (leave the actual box at home)
  • Plastic deodorizer bags for throwing away stinky diapers (must have!)
  • Toys: One touch and feel board book, 1 gallon size bag of toys - no more are needed (we brought Fisher Price Little People and cars), soft snuggly baby blanket, one stuffed animal. That's it - don't go overboard on toys, and DO NOT buy toys in China - we had a battery operated keyboard melt. Melt! Fire Hazard much?
  • Plastic bowl (2) (big enough for an adult to eat soup or oatmeal out of too)
  • Travel/throw away baby forks and spoons, and big ones for Mom and Dad too
  • California Baby Super Sensitive body lotion.
  • California Baby Super Sensitive Shampoo/Body Wash and Conditioner.
  • Nail clipper! 
  • Meds for every ailment you can think of. Take out of box, flatten the box and put the meds and the flat box in a ziploc to save room.
  • Clothes in the size you'll think your kid should be in and clothes one size smaller. Make sure all pants have an adjustable waist &/or belt loops, consider buying a belt here before you leave and make more holes in it to make it smaller.
  • Carter's tight-fitting pj's can double as long-johns if it's cool outside.
  • Small fold-up potty seat (see previous post about potty training) edited to add: The front desk of your hotel may have a kid size chamber pot style potty chair, or you can buy one at Walmart.
  • Pull-ups in addition to diapers
  • Constipation Medicine for baby (very important)
  • Pepto Bismol for the grown-ups (and lots and lots of Tums) Bonus: Sell these to your travel mates who forgot tummy medicine! Help pay for your trip!
  • Many Travel Packs of Puffs Plus - Chinese kleenex is scratchy (can double as t.p.!)
  • Sun Hat and Sun Block (Sunblock with zinc oxide does not irritate sensitive skin)
  • Ergo Sport for carrying a distressed toddler who can't be put down - they're good for up to 44 pounds!
  • Starbucks VIA coffee (regular and decaf) and French Vanilla Coffeemate.
  • Ziploc bags of all sizes - Everything we packed went into a ziploc organized by type to keep things organized (Kitchen items, bathroom items, baby clothes, toys, electronics adapters, etc)
  • Small bottle of dish washing liquid and a dishtowel.
  • Crayons, color book and stickers for the flight home (we did not pull these out until the Tokyo - Portland flight so it was new and interesting)
  • Bring home Chinese money as souvenirs for nieces and nephews (easy to get, small and cheap!)

**start a blog (or caringbridge site), bring a laptop and update the site every day with a post and some pictures, that way you don't have to call or email everybody** If you do want to call home, have your guide arrange to get a phone card for you, some phone cards bought in Beijing will not work in other provinces. Be aware of this and don't trust the guy at the airport to tell you the truth.
**download a VPN before you leave. This will get you around the Great Firewall of China.

Things to buy there:
  • More ramen
  • Peach juice (Maggie would not drink any other juice for months)
  • Snacks
  • Water. Buy a 12 pack of bottled water your first day. You will need it for cooking, drinking and brushing your teeth.

Things we brought but never used:
  • DVD's for Maggie (she had no interest in TV whatsoever)
  • Travel pillow
  • If/when we do it again, we are not going to bring the video camera, we are going to take movies with our small Canon Digital Elph.

Things they will provide for you:
  • Bottled water is usually provided, or you can buy it at the gift shop or grocery store. There will be an electric kettle and tea in your hotel room. Bring food that you can make with hot water (ramen, soup, oatmeal, etc.). If they do provide bottled water, take it and hide it somewhere so the maid brings you more water the next morning!
  • There should also be a fridge in your room, ask your guide to bring you to the grocery store and fill up the fridge with juice and snacks.
Where will you find room for all this stuff?
Only pack enough clothes to get you halfway through your trip and have the hotel do your laundry at the midpoint. It's worth the money - just do it. For an 11 day trip - bring 6 days of clothes. Yes hotel laundry will set you back $50, but you're packing half as much. Totally worth it. Only pack one set of nice clothes, nobody cares if you wear the same outfit to pick up your child, and then the next day for the adoption and then later at the US Consulate. Nobody will notice, and I won't tell. Also - wear capris instead of shorts and bring something to cover your arms/shoulders if you go to a temple.
We packed everything into 2 backpacks for carry-ons and 2 - 25" upright suitcases. We then bought an extra suitcase in Guangzhou to bring home the extra stuff we accumulated while there. Backpacks are crucial for keeping your hands free to take care of baby or hold paperwork, etc. We also used one of the backpacks as a diaper bag when traveling around Hefei and Guangzhou.

That's it. Just some extra stuff that I wish I knew before we left.
Have a great trip!
Any extra thoughts or ideas? Add a comment!

Observations on Adopting a Toddler from China

This post is for my yahoo group CHSFS China WIC. Hi all!
This is just cut and pasted from an email that I sent to a friend who adopted a toddler from China last summer. Take from it what you will, as they say - YMMV (your mileage may vary). I will try to find my packing list that I made up for her too, stay tuned for that post.

.............................


Here's a list of observations, excuse the spelling, grammar, fragments, run-on sentences and what-not:


Sleeping: Slept pretty good and on schedule (8 pm to 7 am with a nap from 1 to 3). Cried in her sleep occasionally but it didn't wake her. We spend many nights in China with her crying and me crying too while I rubbed her back and talked her through it. She did not want to spend one extra second in bed and would stand up to be taken out while still 99% asleep. It took months for her to lose this behavior. To this day she has problems sleeping if she has on overstimulating day. She does well on a schedule that is predictable.


Eating: Only ate rice, noodles, eggs & peach juice while in China. Ate scrambled eggs and diced peaches for breakfast every day for at least 2 months after we brought her home. Would not touch bread, pancakes, waffles, cereal or any "normal" breakfast food. Does not like green food. Does not like melon. Does not like pb&j sandwiches. Likes savory food - bacon, sausage, pepperoni pizza. Loves ramen, wants to eat it every day. Took her months to like mac & cheese. Now her favorite foods all have noodles as a theme - mac & cheese, ramen, spaghetti, ravioli, chicken noodle soup.


She is lactose intolerant and things get "explosive" if she eats yogurt, and only mildly unpleasant if she drinks milk. [updated to add: after 2 years she can now drink milk and eat all dairy] She loves Very Vanilla Soymilk by Silk. I still cook with milk and cheese, she just doesn't sit down and eat or drink a "pure" milk product. It took much coaching to get her to eat little bites (we would tell her xiao chi - (pronounced sheow cheh) "little eat", it's bad Chinese - I know, but she understood what I meant). She was used to being fed and didn't like to eat with her hands. Still doesn't like to have food on her hands and likes a napkin close by for a mid-meal clean-up. If a grain of rice or a noodle fell out of her bowl, she would pick it up and put it back in - she would not waste one bit of food.


When potty training - it took her a long time to be able to leave her meal at the table to run and go xu-xu. More than a few times, she ate while sitting in a puddle (unbeknownst to us), because she didn't want to leave her food. I remember telling her "your food will be here, don't worry, no one will eat it when you're gone". Man, that took a lot of convincing.


We were told that she took a bottle at the orphanage - and went on a mad dash to shop for a bottle, formula and rice cereal to put in the formula. She never drank out of the bottle, hated the formula and was more than content to drink peach juice from a sippy cup and eat noodles. My motto in China was "let's get through today, we'll worry about nutrition when we get home". Ramen and peach juice for every meal? Sure! Please stop crying at mommy.


Potty Training: She was potty trained when we picked her up (meaning that if we held her over the toilet and told her to xu-xu she would). She was deathly afraid of the hotel toilet and I would have to kneel in front of her and bear-hug her to get her to go potty. This was not going to work, I wish I had brought a little fold up potty insert for the toilet. We ended up putting her in diapers and she was not happy! She would scream her head off when she wet herself - like on the plane from Hefei to Guangzhou - sorry fellow travelers! We ended up potty training her at home that summer, but I wish we would have tried harder with the potty while in China.


Behaviors: Would bang her head or kick the side of her bed when she she was asleep. I would rub her back and talk her through it. This tapered off pretty quickly after we came home, but continued when she was sick or upset. (or if she was wound up from a crazy day)

Has nightmares that make her scream and cry in her sleep. We have to sit her up and wake her up to get her out of it. This only happens now on days that she's overstimulated or sick. [another update: after 2 years, this has totally gone away]


Health: We had blood tests done to check the level of immunity she had from her immunizations. They had to draw the blood anyway for the HIV and Hepatitis tests - so might as well do a few more. (I would rather pay for more tests than over-vaccinate a child.) We also did stool samples and discovered that she had Giardia. She was the same size in February as they reported to us in August, so who knows how long she had this bug.


And one last thing about health, her lungs are in pretty tough shape. She hasn't been officially diagnosed with asthma yet, but we have had many problems with her lungs and keeping her oxygenated when she has a cold. She has an inhaled steroid (Flovent) that we give her at the first sniffle to try to ward off any asthma attacks. If the Flovent doesn't keep her healthy, we give her albuterol through a nebulizer to improve her air flow. I don't know how much of her breathing problems are genetic, and how much are related to the fact that her clothing reeked of fuel oil when we picked her up. The air quality in her home province (Anhui) was dismal - as bad as Beijing.


Speaking of size: She was much smaller than we expected her be (and skinny) - I don't know if this was because of the Giardia or if her height and weight numbers were exagerrated in August to make her appear healthier on her referral paperwork. She was only 33" tall and weighed 22 pounds when we picked her up (she was just shy of her 2nd birthday). I expected a size 2T kid, and she was an 18-24 month kid. My nephew Sam (age 6) met us at the airport and was rubbing her back - he said "why is she so bumpy?", he'd never met a kid with vertebra sticking out of their back before.


Physical Strength/Abilities: She could walk, but at the level of a kid who doesn't quite have the hang of it yet. She was doing what we affectionately call the "chimp walk", where she would hold her arms up like a monkey for balance. She grew out of this very quickly, I think she just needed more practice being up and about. Also her muscles were very weak. She couldn't sit herself up using just her stomach muscles, she would roll over and use her arms to help herself up. She had no concept as to how to pull herself up onto furniture or how to climb the stairs.


Baths: Uncomfortable in the water. Does not like water in her face at all - would scream so loud I had to tell the neighbors "don't mind us - kid doesn't like to have her hair washed!" It took 4-5 months to get her comfortable enough in the water to lay back in the tub to rinse the shampoo out, until then we just did the best we could. (btw - she's fine now)


Toys: Would hide toys under her leg when she was playing on the floor or in the tub. She would also gather all of her tub toys into her lap and even sit on some to keep them away from...I don't know who. She also had no interest in the TV (except the Chinese Price is Right), and didn't want to watch any of the videos we brought for her.


Miscellaneous: This just popped into my head - the skin on her legs was like sandpaper (it was the middle of winter when we were there) so I would massage her with Aveeno cream every night before bed. She still craves this kind of close contact - a back rub, a belly rub, a foot rub...etc. Also, her toenails and fingernails were in tough shape. We gave her a mani-pedi her first night. Her toenails were scary long! She has very sensitive skin and we now only use California Baby products. The Johnson and Johnson stuff made her break out in an awful rash.


And one last thing - all of the turmoil about leaving the orphanage and moving in with us at the hotel resulted in no poop for 3 days! She was a miserable little thing, she would cry and cry. I would hold her and walk her and her little legs would try to walk up my stomach, she was so uncomfortable. I would have paid $100 for some children's laxative drops.

If I think of more, I will send you another email. This should be enough information to go on for now!

Take care,

Mary


p.s. Chinese diapers are horrible and we couldn't find Pampers until we got to Guangzhou. Bring enough US diapers/pullups to last until Guangzhou if you can fit them in your suitcase.

...............................

One final note - no matter how bad it gets, remember that this is a once in a lifetime experience. Enjoy yourself. I wish we had taken more time to just relax and soak it all in.


Also - take what the orphanage director tells you about your child's eating/sleeping habits with a grain of salt. We found out later that our daughter was in foster care before she came to us, the orphanage had not had her in their care for months and that was probably why there was a discrepancy in what the director told us about what she would eat (a bottle) and what she actually wanted (real food!). I do not in any way want to imply that the director was incompetent or being deceitful - please don't take it that way. She just had outdated information.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

I've Been Busy!












Sorry for the lack of updates here. I've been doing some sewing and decorating and facebooking. That's a time killer right there!

You can find me on FB by searching for me using my first name, maiden name and/or married name. (I don't have our last name attached to this blog, so I'm not typing it out)

I've posted pics of what I've been sewing. I made a water bottle holder for Maggie's Klean Kanteen. It's insulated and has an adjustable strap, It's so cute I'm going to make one for myself too! I've also made a cape for Josie's 3rd birthday this weekend. (it's a surprise, don't tell!) She's got a princess thing going on, so this will do her nicely. I have also made Maggie a Word Girl cape and hat, she's adorable in it - if I must say so myself.

The other thing I finally took care of this week was to get pictures up on our huge blank living room wall. We got rid of our wall-size entertainment center over a year ago, and I've been staring at this blank wall since then, trying to think of something cool to put up there. I really wanted a huge stretched canvas print of one of our photos of the Great Wall, but I didn't want to spend $400. I finally decided on some prints of interesting architectural details from our China trip. I converted them to sepia tone, and then printed them out on our home printer. The frames are from Ikea for $13 each. I could have bought cheaper frames, but these are nice and chunky and match the woodwork perfectly.

In case anyone cares, from left to right top then bottom they are: Chang School roof detail, Guangzhou; Tower of the Fragrance of the Buddha at the Summer Palace, Beijing; Forbidden City roof detail, Beijing; Forbidden City door detail; Summer Palace courtyard; and Summer Palace walkway.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Look How Big I Am!



Miss Maggie had her 4 year checkup this morning - she is doing great! And she's so big! She is now 40 inches tall and 32 pounds!

She's as big as the other 4 year olds if she stands on her toes!

Last year (pink qi pao picture) she was 37 inches tall and 28 pounds, and in 2007 (tinkerbell picture) she was only 33 inches tall and 22 pounds.

So - in 2 years we have put 7 inches and 10 pounds on this kid! She's in the 15th percentile! W00T!

Love's Journey 2

Love Without Boundaries has put their Love's Journey 2 book on clearance for only $25. We bought this book last fall and I absolutely love going through the pictures and reading the adoption stories. I also think it's good for Maggie to see pictures of other little girls and boys from China living with their American families. It's tough sometimes to be different, and this book is full of little kids with families just like hers.
Anyway - great book, great cause. All proceeds benefit LWB.

(side note: shipping to MN is $7.10, other destinations may vary)
Updated to add: This is a large coffee-table size book. it is about 9" x 12" and is 280 pages long.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Just Posting a Pic


I want this picture over on my sidebar, so I'm uploading it here first. I want to put a link to the Love Without Boundaries blog permanently on this site. I go over there a couple times a week to check up on the babies. It reminds me to hug mine a little tighter.

Friday, February 20, 2009

The Strep Test

Last Friday, Maggie woke up from her nap at Grandma's house with a puffed up right eye, welts forming on her tummy and general feelings of yuckiness. Earlier that day, she had the fever that was being passed around Grandma's house. So, a visit to Dakota Peds was arranged, and it was determined that she needed a strep test. So, I held her tight while the nurse stuck Q-tips down her throat and then I shared a few tears with Maggie. Poor thing. Well, the rapid strep came back negative, but her culture the next day came back positive. Crap. How do you explain to a kid that she's going to miss ice-skating lessons (the most coolest hour of her entire week)?

Here goes:
"Sweetie, do you remember when the nurse put the Q-tips in your throat to see what kind of sick you are? The Q-tips were going to tell us if you're just a little bit sick, or special sick where you have to skip skating and go on pink medicine? Well, this morning the Q-tip said that you're special sick, so you can't go to skating today. I'm really sorry about that honey."


Her response?
"Mommy, Q-tips don't talk!"



Next time I'm going straight to how they culture streptococcus pyogenes in the lab. She's obviously too smart for the "talking Q-tip".

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Biding Her Time


At what point does the cat just kill us all in our sleep?

Maggie's 4th Birthday

Maggie turned 4 on Monday! Yay!

She got everything she wanted for her Birthday and so much more...like strep, and a respiratory infection and hives and a 104 degree temp and a reaction to amoxicillin and...

Sunday was a nice day in between the strep diagnosis and the respiratory virus - so the party went off without a hitch. We made a trip to Urgent Care that morning to get her on a new antibiotic and she was good to go!

The pictures from her Birthday Party are now online in a Picasa album (click on this sentence to go there).

Friday, January 30, 2009

Smiley Faces









(click on picture to make big)

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Today is the Day We Officially Stopped Waiting for Maggie

Two years ago today, we woke up to a cold, gray morning in a very foreign city in a getting to be not so foreign country. The sounds of fireworks had kept us up late the night before (January 28th is a very auspicious day to get married - even though it was a Sunday night). We ate breakfast at the rotating restaurant at the top of the Hefei Holiday Inn and prepared to meet our daughter.

Would she cry? Would she like us? Would she be the crabby kid we saw in her referral pictures? Oh my God we're going to be parents! Us? I can't believe they're letting us do this. Holy Shit.

Our capable guide Linda met us to take Bryan and me and our traveling partners, Craig and Gwen, to the government office. I don't have a lot of memories of the trip over, lots of traffic and a long drive to the other side of town and we parked in the back. There were lots of other anxious parents waiting in a large group in the lobby for the elevator. We decided to take the "even floor" elevator up to a floor above where we needed to be and then walked down a flight, to the 7th floor (I think).
We then made ourselves comfortable in a large room that had many long tables and we waited. It took maybe 15 minutes and the babies started trickling in. Little crying babies, so we knew they weren't ours. So I'm talking to Bryan, Craig and Gwen, when Linda nonchalantly says "there's Xiao Mao". What? I don't know if I was expecting fanfare or what, but I was so surprised to be sitting there chatting away and then boom - hey, by the way - here's your kid. And there she was, in real life and so beautiful. Damn, just such a gorgeous kid - all bundled up in 3 layers of clothing, holding onto a little cardboard label with a picture of a teddy bear on it that her ayi must have given to her to play with. She was staring at me, and her ayi was showing her the photo book we had sent to her and telling her in Chinese "Look, it's your Mama! Look, it's your Baba!" And I was just staring right back at this little stranger, thinking "Oh my God, she's real! She actually exists in real life and not just on paper!" Linda then says "Do you want to hold her?" Are you kidding me? I've been waiting my entire life to hold her! So her ayi passes her over to me, and even though she was a big package in all of that clothing, she was such a light package. And she's still looking at me, just getting a feel for it all. And her ayi gives her some hard candy to hold onto. And then sometime in there, Craig and Gwen met their daughter too, but to tell you the truth - I wasn't paying attention to them at all!
Then there was much paperwork to be done by our guide and the orphanage director. So, we head out into the hallway to get away from all the chaos, because by this time everyone in that room had met their babies and a lot of those babies were not happy about it! There were about 30 families meeting their babies that morning, plus travel guides, plus orphanage directors, plus nannies (ayis), plus government officials, plus babies. It got very cramped and loud in there very fast.
So, Maggie and I hung out in the hallway and Bryan looked on and took pictures of me crying. I think we tried to have Bryan hold her once, but that didn't work well at all. I have no idea how long we were out there, but we were eventually called back into the room. Maybe we signed some paperwork? I hope we signed some paperwork! Then we had a chance to talk to the ayi and orphanage director about Maggie's sleep schedule and feeding. I remember hanging out in that room for a little bit and meeting Craig and Gwen's daughter Julia Lu.

And - that's it! The day we stopped Waiting for Maggie.

If you want to read the posts that we wrote on that day, you can find them here and here.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

What Can I Say?

What do you say to the people who send you baby pictures of your beautiful daughter? How do you express thanks for eight more small glimpses into her life before you came along? There are no words I can think of right now. And the pictures. Oh, my heart. I just look at that sweet sad face and I wish I could just go and tell her "hey sweetie, it's ok - it will all work out alright, give me two months and I will come and get you." And I feel so blessed right now too. Compared to other adoptive families, we have so many pictures of Maggie. These eight from Love Without Boundaries, twelve from her referral, and another fifteen or so that were taken at the orphanage during late 2006. But still, thirty-some pictures to sum up two years of life? A friend asked how we deal with all the small tragedies and my honest answer is we don't deal in tragedy. We celebrate all the small victories, like eight more pictures of our precious little girl. Thank you LWB.

So, where did these pictures come from?

I mentioned Love Without Boundaries in our Christmas letter. I wrote about all the good work they did for Maggie's orphanage. But what you didn't hear then (because I only found out recently myself) is that they provided foster care for her during the winter of 2006-2007 just before we went to pick her up.
In December, I had sent them an inquiry regarding the work they had done at her orphanage in the summer of 2006, with a "hey, if my kid is in the background of any of those pictures, can you let me know?" And they reply with, "we have foster care reports and pictures of your daughter." What?
So, we have been waiting, and trying to be patient and then today, Connie from LWB sent me the pictures you can see in the gallery here. (there's also a link under "Galleries" over there on the left) And then the tears started, because I do that a lot lately. And then, I share them with you. I will update later with info from the foster reports. It is mostly just a brief glimpse into her daily schedule and what she likes to eat. Surprise! Noodles are on the list!

Time to go for now. I need to go hug my kid.

p.s. Some of the pics are labeled "Maya" because LWB gives the kids in their program English names.

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Plaino' (Plano?) Isn't That in Texas?

Mommy, I want a plaino' cup.
Not a cup with water in it.
Not a cup with milk in it.
Not a cup with juice in it.
Just a cup.
Plaino.

And why do you need this plaino' cup?

'Cause, if I put it on my head - I WIN!!!

(how can you argue with that? she got her cup)