Our Adoption Trip to China - Page 4

October 12th - October 19th
Changsha, China

Although Changsha isn't one of the "must see" cities in China for most tourists, it's probably the most special city in China to us. For it is in Changsha that our daughter was placed into our arms and as a result a piece of our hearts will forever remain there.

In Changsha, we met up with the rest of our large ASIA adoption group. There were 20 families in total on this trip. Two families were adopting "special needs" children and traveled to other cities. The rest of the 18 families were all in Changsha and anxiously awaiting for the 13th of October to arrive...our "Gotcha Day" when we first met out gorgeous daughter, Mia.

I'm sure you don't care too much about our stay in Changsha except the parts about meeting our daughter. So we'll just get right to the details.

We were kept very busy up until the hour when we were supposed to all gather in one of the large conference rooms in the Dolton Hotel where we were all staying. ASIA was very wise to keep us expectant parents occupied with very important details like lunch, buying snacks, baby clothes, etc. It helped to keep us relaxed and gave us no time to really worry or get nervous (almost like they've done this before!).

We were to gather at 3:30 PM on the 13th of October. At about 3:15 PM Tom decided that he'd waited long enough and would rather wait with the other families rather than in our hotel room. So we gathered up our camera, token baby toy, and a bunch of Kleenex (for us, not the baby) and headed up to the conference room. When the elevator door opened, there were 6 babies and 6 caregivers sitting on the floor just outside the elevators. I couldn't look. I knew the agency needed to keep this process orderly and didn't need parents grabbing their children before all the paperwork was done and before it could officially be done. So I walked straight into the conference room and got the camera ready, and Tom and I stood waiting. No more than 3-4 minutes went by and someone called out, "Tom," from the hallway where the babies were. The babies and caregivers started to enter the conference room where we were standing and one of the caregivers stepped forward with one of the babies. I looked twice at the baby that was heading near Tom and thought to myself, "That's not our babe". (Tom was way too nervous to know whether or not that was our child and just kept walking to the large group of babies). Then the ASIA staff member who knew us and knew our baby said, "Wait, that's not your baby. Here's LiCan." And then one of the caregivers held up a very unhappy and very loud, crying LiCan, and I said, "Now that's my baby!"

Poor LiCan was not happy at all. She was by far the loudest baby of the 6 and wasn't afraid to tell everyone what she thought of this whole process. We were so ecstatic we could care less that she was so loud. I recognized her and was so happy that she looked just like her referral photo...only more hair and two teeth!

We were told ahead of time that once we get our babies, we should go to our hotel room and wait there for the orphanage director, assistant director, and translator from our agency to come visit with us. This was our chance to ask as many questions as we wanted to the orphanage staff regarding our daughter and the circumstances of her abandonment. We had a list of questions made ahead of time since we knew our brains would be scattered and the thought process would be difficult to remember anything. So we waited about an hour and a half during which we tried to calm LiCan down and get her to relax. She was really miserable and finally just passed out from exhaustion from crying so much. The trip for the babies from the Hengdong orphanage (where LiCan was from) was approx. 5 hours. They were all tired and stressed out. She finally just gave in and slept hard. That was great, because we could talk to the orphanage staff in our quiet room and take our time to focus on LiCan's information that we were being given.

The most amazing thing is that we discovered that LiCan was left with a note from her birth mother. Although we could not keep the note (that is kept by the orphanage staff as proof of her abandonment), we were allowed to take photos of the note and the ASIA staff member, Florence, translated the note exactly as was written by LiCan's mother. That brought all of us to tears needless to say. We asked a few more questions and then said our sincere thank you's to the orphanage staff, and after more tears, we all said good-bye to them. We knew that LiCan was well taken care of after seeing the emotions shown by the staff. Emotions are not something that the Chinese show often and especially not to strangers. But they loved LiCan very much and were so happy for her and for us. We were all very touched.

We knew it was time to decide on an American name for our daughter. We had friends back home who had threatened us that we would not be allowed back in the U.S. if we continued to call our daughter "Baby Sedory". Nothing pulled at us immediately so we sat and thought about it for quite a while. LiCan woke up in the early evening and was still pretty upset. We decided that we should turn on the TV to some Chinese station so she could here familiar tones and sounds. Well, Tom ended up putting it on a Chinese sports channel that was showing soccer. LiCan really enjoyed watching it and other than when she was sleeping, it was the first time she was relaxed and not crying. We then put her to bed and she proceeded to kick her legs all night long. We both took that as a sign that we should name her Mia (on of our top 5 names that we had in mind).

We then spent the next few days getting to know our daughter better and started to see her smiles come out more readily and her tears subside slowly but surely. She was obviously attached to her orphanage staff and the other babies. We always kept that as a good sign because it shows that she was capable of attaching, and we knew that with patience and love, it would eventually be attachment to us.

Mia had only minor health issues. She has very fair skin and has a condition known as seborrhea. It is a redness and blistering of the skin that causes itching. As a result, we had to put socks on her hands to keep her from doing more damage to herself, and we tried a few medications which helped to ease her discomfort a bit. She was such a trooper with those socks on her hands, and they never seemed to slow her down. She mastered the art of picking up Cheerios in no time even with those socks on! She did get quite a bit of comments and suggestions from all the Chinese women we walked past. Of course we couldn't understand them, but we knew they were all concerned for her and had lots of good remedies to try! We stuck with hydrocortisone though.

We spent a week in Changsha. In between government appointments, group sight seeing, trips to the local department stores for supplies, etc. we got to know our daughter more and more each day. We couldn't get too comfortable in our hotel room though, we had to head over to Guangzhou to take care of all the U.S. paperwork, the final stop on this amazing adoption trip.

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