Nanchang Adventures

Hi. After finally getting 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep last night, I'm starting to feel better. Zoe slept from 8:30 to 6:30am. She did wake up twice but Eric (world's greatest father and saint) was able to get her back down in about 15 minutes each time. Poor little thing has a cough which wakes her up.

Right now Zoe and her daddy are taking a nap together so I thought I'd catch up on the blog. This is actually a big moment. Until now she would only nap outside of our room. When we pulled into our hotel in Nanchang our guide told us about a baby once who would scream whenever she was in the room..outside of the room fine, inside she'd scream. Guess which baby we got :) We actually had some successful floor time today.

Yesterday we went to the Walmart in Nanchang. Unless the Walmarts back home have suddenly started allowing their customers to choose which live animal they wanted slaughtered and hacked up in front of them.....it's not like your typical Walmart. There was also this smell which i can not describe except to say it was putrid. Forever now when I smell something bad I'm going to refer to it as "smelling like Walmart." In fact today I ate something and said, "it tastes like Walmart smells." Two thoughts kept running through my mind in the store..1) Which one of these is not like the other ones, and 2) have you ever felt like everyone is staring at you? For the most part everyone was very friendly. They came up and read the card our guide had given us describing that we were adopting her. There was one younger woman who just glared at us and the thought crossed my mind that of all the thousands of people in the Walmart, maybe someone had abandoned her baby. We had a group dinner last night at a local place our guide took us too.

Today was a relaxing day. We went to Elephant Lake and there is a palace there to celebrate Taoism, I believe. Very pretty. An older man came up to us, read our card, and gave us the thumbs up sign. It's nice to know the adoptions are accepted by the older generations. We went to lunch at a fabulous place. I ate the best shrimp, heads, shell, and all. All of our group meals have been served in a manner to share. All have also cost only 5$ per person. At home that meal would have run 40-50 dollars easy.

Real quick to answer Melanie's questions.....the money was no big deal after all my stress. Our guide took everyone's money and presented it as a group (I think, he had the money anyway). The legal fees were converted to yuan before we paid those. Oh for Shawn and Karen, Zoe fits into the 6 month onesies..but the 6 month sleepers with feet don't fit because her feet are too big. Our girl has clown feet...just like her mommy.

I also wanted to say real quick to those of you coming next month, particularly those who don't have kids yet....when you first get your girls you are on survival mode. I wasn't prepared for that. I don't know what I thought, but we did bring US videos to watch "after she feel asleep". I can hear the BTDT parents laughing. She goes to sleep and 5 minutes later I'm right there with her. You stress when they don't eat, you cry when they cry at the baths and diaper changes because it's all new to them and they are scared, you worry about pooping. You hate to give them Western meds with no guidance and doctors back home with a 12 hour time difference. You're in a strange place where people don't speak your language and you can't read their characters and you have a little person just handed to you and off you go. Your hotel room isn't home. I'm sure the experience is different for everyone and if you're in a place that's more Western than Nanchang it may be a bit easier....but maybe not. Every day gets better, easier..but your first couple days may be different than you imagined. It's completely and totally worth it, but I would never say that it's been easy.