Susan responded like a real trouper. She didn't let things get in her way, like not knowing the age or size of the child, or even the sex (boy children are a possibility, although a rare one!). She shopped with a vengeance. And any time she threatened to slow down, based on the uncertainties listed above, her mother took up the slack. We soon had a full closet, and it was time to get busy getting furniture so more clothes could be bought.
At first I had the bright idea that I would do some creative stencilling on her new dresser and set about finding out how the characters for the name Amy were drawn. When a Chinese friend showed me how to do the characters, she said, "My handwriting is so poor! This would be much nicer if an artist did them." Well, my handwriting in English is bad enough - who knows what Chinese characters would lose in the translation if I decided to paint them freehand or create the stencils. Besides, we had bought the unfinished dresser and desk for Amy's room and the amount of work required to finish them was more than a coordination-challenged person like me could expect to do.
After interminable decades of waiting that was actually about eight weeks, Susan came home from work to find a message on the machine from Cheryl asking us to call. Susan called back and Cheryl was out. So I got a call from Susan and we speculated with no information whatsoever for a half an hour. Then we waited for a couple of hours, jumping every time the phone rang.
Eventually Cheryl called back and told us we had been matched to a little girl named Yan Yuan Yuan who had been born January 4, 1995 in Nanping. Was she healthy? "We don't know." Was she in an orphanage or foster care? "We don't know." Will we have a picture soon? "We don't know." So, basically, we were given just enough information to tell us absolutely nothing except how old she was. We now had to wait for further information. After two more weeks, during which we may have called Cheryl once or twice, we were told to come to Cheryl's office to look at her picture and give our yea or nay on whether we would accept the referral. We managed to stay at the speed limit - at least until we got into the car.
After the obligatory wait in the office, Cheryl showed us our daughter. At least we think it was - all we saw was this copy of a picture. Our first question was, are we going to see a better picture than this? Cheryl told us that we would get the actual picture if we approved the match. Our second was, what is that she's in? As far as we could figure out, it was a rowboat that had been converted for use by the children.
We also got a medical report of sorts, which was sketchy at best. At five months she was listed at 4.5 kg, which is almost exactly ten pounds. Nevertheless, the document listed her as being "relatively fat"! If this was fat, I wonder what they'd think of the average American baby. It told of her eating schedule, which was at 7:30 AM, 11:30 AM and 6 PM for milk and 9 AM and 3 PM for rice cereal mixed with egg, meat, fish or vegtable. It also said she went to sleep at 8:30 PM, but then turned around and said she had more rice cereal at 11 PM. We should have known by that that she never slept very many hours in a row. The report also said that she was "quite active, has quick reflex and strong hand." I envisioned her playing racquetball in the crib. It wrapped up with some very disturbing news - "She ate paralytic candy before." Our poor baby! After we calmed down, I realized that they must be talking about receiving a polio vaccine on a sugar cube. (When I showed the Chinese version of the report to my Chinese friend, she confirmed that's what they were trying to say.)
Now we had to accept or reject the referral. Hmmm... well of course we were going to accept! It would have taken a catastrophic problem for us to waver even a nanosecond. Cheryl called Holt and told them of our acceptance, and found out that we would get the actual picture later that week. We couldn't wait. We went out and got enough copies of the copy for immediate family and made the rounds of parents that night. While they were excited, they couldn't get as worked up over a grainy photo and a two-month-old medical report as we could.
That Friday we got the actual picture which you can see here. We believe that the plastic between her legs is part of her diaper, which is usually rags stuffed in the split crotch of the pants. It doesn't look that comfortable - it may be the cause of the expression on her face.
Seeing the picture made us want to go get her immediately. She looks so thin, uncomfortable and so alone. To know that it had already been two months since the picture had been taken and that it would be two to three more months before we would travel was almost more than we could bear. She so obviously needed hugs, kisses, food, more hugs and more food.
We now had to wait for travel approval. When we started the process they had told us that we would travel 4-6 weeks after our referral. They now told us the situation had changed and it would take 8-10 weeks. Needless to say, we were disappointed. Since it was now mid-August, we had hoped to be in China by the end of September. This would have been a good birthday present for Susan, whose birthday is September 23rd. It now looked like mid- to late-October at the earliest. We just prayed that nothing went wrong and we were into the Christmas season or later before traveling.
In the meantime, we finally announced to our friends the plans for adoption. I spent several days at work explaining over and over again what little we knew about what we would encounter when we traveled. My boss had already agreed that I could take three weeks without using any vacation time (due to the sixty and seventy-hour weeks I had pulled for more than six months in a row) but I still had to walk on eggshells when describing how long I would need for the trip. All our friends were thrilled. We got very little of the "Why aren't you adopting an American child?" questions, and when we did get those questions from our friends we knew it wasn't asked with an "America - love it or leave it" subtext. Questions asked out of genuine curiosity were answered as straightly and directly as possible, going over our particular mindset at the time and the situation surrounding the adoption of healthy infants or toddlers in America. Neither I nor the person I was talking with ever went away offended at the questions or the answers.
In the meantime, I tried to learn more about where our daughter was from. To say your daughter is from China is like saying she's from the US - it's totally different to be be from upstate New York, rural Mississippi, or San Francisco. China is such a large country and there is so little movement, still, from province to province that it's like going to separate countries. So I pored over guidebooks that listed Fujian province or Fuzhou, its capital - and found little or nothing about what actual daily life is like there. We asked Holt, but they had very little information themselves, since the first group of parents from Holt to travel to Fuzhou had yet to travel! We were to be in the second group, when we got approval. We would be "flying blind" - not the last time on this journey that that phrase would cross my mind!
On a Friday afternoon in late September I came home from work and asked Susan if there had been any word, not expecting much and getting less. Not a minute later the phone rang and I answered it, sure that I was going to be hanging up on another solicitor. To my surprise, it was Holt. They were calling to tell me we had been approved for travel and would be expected in Hong Kong on Sunday, October 23rd. We would be sent the itinerary shortly, and we should book round-trip tickets to Hong Kong for two of us, and a one-way ticket from Hong Kong for our daughter. How strange and wonderful that sounded! Susan had been asked to book plane tickets for her boss before, and this was really no different, since your child, by her mere presence, can be more demanding than any boss ever was.
Holt had suggested we use Azumano Travel; many of their clients had used them and they were familiar with the uncertainty of adoption travel. Since we weren't the types to have our very own travel agent, we decided that we'd try them. They did a fine job for us, but I'm sure there are many other agents who would be able to help in this situation. I called them immediately after hanging up from Holt. We were quoted several different fares and available dates for several airlines, but we decided to go with Delta since all my business frequent flyer miles were with them and it made sense to add these to them.
So now we were getting down to the last few weeks. Our next problem was to decide what and how to pack for our trip. We knew we we would have to pack as lightly as possible yet carry everything we would need for up to three weeks in Hong Kong and China. We had found the web site for Families with Children from China, and a packing list provided there by Kirby and Marie Bartlett-Sloan was an immense help. The first thing to remember was that each of us would have to be able to carry all the luggage in case the other had to carry the baby (and only the baby). We had never traveled anywhere that we needed to be so compact. We ended up using two large rolling suitcases which were checked. We then each used a backpack as our carry-on luggage. My backpack was a full-sized backpack which held the camera equipment as well as some of our clothing. Susan's was a baby carrier with a small pouch which held some of our diapers. We each also had a "fanny pack" which held our cash and travelers checks, passports, sunglasses, plane tickets, saline nasal spray for the flight, etc. - everything we wanted to keep as close to us as possible.
Knowing what the weather was like in southeast China in October helped us pack light. Climate graphs showed that October and November were among the driest of the year, and temperatures could be expected to be in the 60s to the 80s for highs. In other words, great weather for us to pack shorts, t-shirts and other lightweight clothing.
We were packed, for the most part, with more than a week to spare. From then on we would find ourselves aimlessly wandering around the house, muttering "Film. Baby Tylenol. Powder. Video tape. Socks. Desitin.....". We were wrecks. It was time to leave, past time to leave. And then the day arrived.....