A little over seven months ago, my life (and my husband’s) changed drastically. As many of you know, I have a beautiful son named Andrew, whom we adopted from China. Several people have asked for a diary about that trip and I finally have the time to do this, so let’s go back in time, to see how we got here.
We left on the last Thursday in August and flew to Vancouver, where we spent the night before the big trip. I treated myself to a little spa action, and tried to sleep as peacefully as I could.
The trip to Beijing was about 11 hours long. We were treated to three fairly forgetful movies, including The Wrath of Khan. Air Canada did offer a cool feature throughout the trip. Occasionally, a map would be displayed on the screen, showing the passengers where we were at that moment. I remember seeing miles of mountains as we flew over both Alaska and Russia.
We arrived on what would be the worst pollution day of our trip. It looked like we were still in the clouds. Our guide, “Jenny” was waiting for us and took us back to the hotel, which was really quite nice. We spent only one day, at the beginning of the trip, in Beijing, as we (and the five other couples with us) were receiving our children in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province.
That flight was truly awful. We had turbulence the whole time and I think that I squeezed the blood out of my husband’s hand. By this time, my body was beginning to feel the fatigue of the stress and the journey.
We were to pick up Andrew the next day, and we had no diapers or formula. I am so glad that we had top-notch guides, “Jenny” (who stayed with our group for the entire two weeks) and “Sophia” (who was only with us in Nanjing). They had contacted the orphanages to find out what kind of formula the babies had been drinking. We went to a small grocery store very close to the hotel to pick up the provisions. Diapers were easy, but the guides did not see our formula (it was there, they just didn’t see it). The guide announced that we would be heading to…Wal-Mart. I am not kidding. I looked at my husband and said that there was no way in hell that I had come all the way to China to shop at Wal-Mart. He went, while I walked in the rain, alone, back to our room. By this time, Katrina was bearing down on New Orleans, but it hadn’t yet hit.
The next day was the big day. The bus trip to the provincial office was very quiet as all of the couples were thinking about the first time they would hold their little ones. I never pried, but I am sure that most of the couples (unlike us) had been through many fertility treatments before they had decided on adoption. This trip was the culmination of many years of heartache for most of these couples.
Of the six families, four of the babies were coming from one orphanage. Our Andrew and one other little girl were from the orphanage in Changzhou. When we arrived, four babies were already there, waiting, with orphanage workers, for their parents. Andrew (and the other little girl) was not yet there. He was stuck in traffic. Fifteen minutes passed and I couldn’t bear to watch the other families, so I went into another room to try and gather myself. I wasn’t long in that room before I looked out the window to see another car pull up and a little speck of a boy dressed in yellow being carried out. Finally, we were parents!
All I remember are tears and a flurry of paperwork. He was so small and had just gotten over the chicken pox. Andrew looked around at everything else in the room and at us a little bit. Now the fun would begin. More about the rest of the trip later.