September 19, 2006 It’s Official … No Turning Back Now
Today we held our official meetings with the Guangzhou civil affairs office where in addition to our demographic information were asked on two separate occasions two very important questions. Do you want to accept this child? Will you promise never to neglect or abandon this child? Of course the answers were straight forward and honest, yet they could not contain the full measure of our response as parents to the wonderful child. So now whether Aliyah likes it or not she has us for the long haul.
Please keep Aliyah in your thoughts and prayers. This was not the easiest day for our daughter. She woke up just once in the night (about 4:00am) and Liz was able to hold her and comfort her and Aliyah went right back to sleep. She then went on to sleep to almost 8:00am which is almost two hours past what we were told to expect. Our little one was sure worn out from the prior day. She had a good start to the day but quickly became fussy and was squirming all about.
After some while she was worn out again and took a long (2.5 hour) nap. She woke with just enough time to get her a bottle (read description of bottle below) and head over to the Guangzhou civil affairs office.
In addition to the formalities we had a chance to meet the orphanage director of the Yangxi orphanage where Aliyah had lived. It was wonderful to see the director interact with the girls again. You could see the joy in her face as she greeted and spoke to the children. We had a chance to ask her questions about each of the children and find out what they liked, what they may be afraid of who were their special friends at the orphanage. You will see a picture of Aliyah and two of her best friends. Even though they are very young when we brought them together they had a unique way of being together with looks and touches. I hope we can keep this connection somehow with the other families. After some time the orphanage director noticed Aliyah not being herself and asked that we check her temperature we did and she was running a very slight fever. By the end of the process at the civil affairs office the orphanage director bid farewell to the children and said though sad to see the girls go, she felt happy to meet the families they would join.
Next we did some provisioning (i.e. grocery shopping) and Aliyah became less and less content. We just wanted to get her back to the Hotel to give her some medicine for the fever. The medicine did the trick and we had some good quality “floor time” with her as she enjoyed some of her toys especially a small partially inflated beach ball. Just wiggle the ball when she holds it and we could get all kind of chatter and laughter from her. She went to sleep well, and likes us to hold her and walk her as she gets tired just before she falls asleep. Hopefully the fever is just from teething and she will be past these teeth in a few days.
Tomorrow we have free time until 2:00pm at which time it is possible we may have an appointment to get a passport for Aliyah at the police station. This will give us some time to begin to explore Guangzhou. It looks to be a very interesting city.
“The Bottle” as described by a man who has made few … let me put it another way, no bottles before yesterday. The reason I want to describe making up a bottle is that it is hard to believe that this bottle would be considered normal by anyone in North America. First the directions from the orphanage say 8 scoops formula, 8 scoops of rice cereal, and 8 oz of HOT water. My first reaction was this seems like a lot of dissolving to me. I knew there was no way this could be done in the bottle alone so I began with a small bowl to pour the scoops of rice cereal and formula. I started with hot water in the bottle and then began adding the cereal and formula scoop by scoop and shaking the bottle. Things looked bad, very bad at the start but eventually after a lot of shaking things dissolved to form a rather thick shake-like liquid that would not pour through a standard bottle nipple. It was recommended we cross cut the hole with scissors to let the mixture flow out so I made the cross cut. The mixture was still quite warm but we were told this was all normal. Aliyah is a good little eater and will enjoy her bottle quickly. The heat makes her head sweat a little but from the look of things she enjoys the experience. I have now refined the process and find it easier to get the dissolving done in a small Tupperware bowl from which I fill the bottle. As in most things you just learn from experience.
