Aliyah woke up hungry and much more important over some of her grief from being away from the orphanage. She is starting to realize that we are not going away and are not so bad for her. It’s still early but she appears to be responding to the medicine we have given her. With all this good stuff in place we had a chance to see what Aliyah is really like.
Playful, curious, vocal are key operating words for our little one. Today we saw her crawl on all fours when she wanted to get at the camera. She has already in the few days with us increased her leg strength and will play at a coffee table if given assistance standing. She seems to already have the concept of using furniture to push herself up … watch out when she gets home. There is a lot more child proofing we will need to do. She can be quite the chatter box while playing giving all sorts of vocalization in the intensity of her play.
We all took a walk (Aliyah in stroller) into some very interesting neighborhoods a short distance from the hotel. It was interesting to see how people live in this big city of 7 or 8 million. As I said previously the street level is almost always a shop with the upper floors being housing. Often set one building behind those on street a larger apartment buildings, usually with an AC unit on the side of each apartment and often with laundry and plants on the patio. The general face of the local population is young and well dressed. The older generation does not appear as well-off. In one interesting corner we saw a man with a big straw hat cleaning the street with a broom made of twigs, a man sleeping in his rickshaw, a group of older men playing an intense game of cards on a piece of newspaper spread on the sidewalk, school children in their uniforms (heading to the 7-Eleven for a snack), a delivery van driving on the sidewalk, and a well dressed lady shading herself with an umbrella. Interestingly we were the ones that stood out two Caucasians with a Chinese baby in stroller. We do attract some attention.
We only had a little to take care of today. Review our adoption documents that were translated and notarized. Basically they say Yang Xi Zi Yue (Aliyah) was abandoned, found, and sent to the Yang Xi orphanage; that we accept her as our adopted daughter and this process has been done in accordance with the law of the land. Then we took her down for her Visa Photo.
Only one parenting scare today. Aliyah woke from her afternoon nap in intense pain and crying (this was right before the Visa photo). We were almost as scared and shaken as she was and nothing we could do would calm her down. Constipation can do that to you, but we now have the all clear signal.
As I finish the day’s journal I want to thank you all for your thoughts and prayers for Aliyah. I will also add that I am polishing off a bottle of vanilla Coke with the coolest electric alien guy on the bottle. It appears that Lenovo is sponsoring Coke or vice versa as there is a laptop with a Coke logo on it. Add to this the Chinese characters on the bottle and you’ve got something interesting to look at.
