Home!

We are home! A day later than we had thought, but home none the less. We all feel like we have been dope-slapped from the long flights coming East, but I will Post a few more pics since I am at the home Internet connection.

But first, an explanation on our late arrival. It was the morning of the day we were supposed to get sworn it at the U.S. Consultant and fly home when we got a call to our hotel room by our guides that there was a major problem. We were all in needles worrying about what it could be. It turns out that the computer system for encrypted communication transmission of the U.S. State Department to its embassies and consulate offices was down worldwide. This means that our office in China could not receive the OK message to print Rachael's exit visa. Its a terrorist safeguard that prevents ANYONE from creating a visa that wasn't specifically issued by the central office in D.C. An understandable safeguard, but one that really caused problems. As such, we were told it would "probably" be cleared up the next day and we could leave then. So, we had to rebook our hotel for a night and rebook our flights. The flights had no seat left in coach, so we had to upgrade to business class. All this under the premise we would have the visa the next day.

Our guides really pulled some help for us way above and beyond the call of duty to help us. The next day, we were lucky enough to get our visa, but several other families expecting there visas that day didn't get it and had to rebook AGAIN. To make matters worse, the day we flew out, some families with the next batch still didn't get their baby's visas. Its really bad news and I have yet to find out from my congressman what the heck is going on.

But we got on the China Southern flight in Guanngzhou and flew at a 8:00 pm and landing in LA at 6:00 pm (very strange), then flying through another night to land in Columbus at about 6:30 am.

Mom came and got us and it is great having her here to help out. Although I was fine in the morning when we get home, all of us, myself included really hit the wall about mid day and afternoon. So I will make more blog entries and send up pictures as I can, but I need some time to decompress now. Here are some pictures of our new family and our last days in China. MANY more to come.

Thanks for everyone for your thoughts, prayers and generosity. Special thanks to Karen for helping out with the blog.

Talk to you all soon.

The girls in our adoption group and their red couch picture at the White Swan.

Merrill in her new dress at the White Swan hotel's atrium.

Merrill, Kristin and Rachael on the red couch.

Just a cute shot from one of the red couches at the White Swan hotel. All the girls had on their new Chinese silk outfits.

All of us with the waterfall in the atrium of the White Swan Hotel.

73 for now, everyone!

Coming home!

Our grand time here is coming to a close and this will be our last entry in China. Our two, wonderful daughters remind us how lucky and gifted we have been. Today, we take our last family and adoption group shots in China on the famous red couches of the White Swan hotel. Everything has been so great here and while we look forward to getting home, we still want to see and do so much more here. Lots to talk about when we get home. We hope you all are well, despite the fact that the entire nation seems to be in a deep freeze. While it should have been in the 80's and 90's here, it’s been in the 60's almost the entire time. But we will bring back what warm weather we can. The flight home will be hard, so keep us in your thoughts and prayers. We fly to LA and then to Columbus, so it will take a couple of days to decompress and sleep before I am cogent enough to post another entry. But much more on our adventure to come. Rachael, Merrill, Kristin and I are doing well and looking forward to home and our new family back in Ohio. Take care and thanks to everyone for keeping tabs on us. We love you all and will see you soon. 73

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter, all!

We are having a great time here in China and Easter here has been very nice. Merrill got a visit from the Easter bunny as two eggs with candy strangely found their way to our room this morning. All the staff at the hotel wishes us a happy Easter as they see us at every turn.

We hope you all had a great day and are enjoying the celebration of the Resurrection. Our day was one of tourism. We will be back to a little paperwork tomorrow, but for today, we enjoyed the sights of Guangzhou. We visited an ancient temple built by a wealthy and powerful family for worship and remembrance of their ancestors. More details about it when we get back. But we did also get some time to wander about the island where we are and get a nice stroll in. Merrill, Rachael and Kristin are having a great time and we can hardly be live it will be time to come home soon. So much to see and do here and we love the culture and the history of this place. We really wish we could stay a bit longer, although we miss home and are looking forward to getting back on the ground in Ohio.

Internet access is rather expensive at this hotel, so I will keep it short. Will talk to you all again soon.

Happy Easter!

Matt

In Guangzhou at the White Swan

Greetings! Late last night, we all arrived in Gaungahou. The flight was fast, smooth and Merrill and Rachael were good as can be. Here in Guangzhou, I can see my blog again and I can also update it myself. So I thought I could give Karen a break. Plus I have no spell checker here and I thought everyone would get a laugh out of my typos and spelling mistakes.

Guangahou is very different from Nanning. Its much larger and the area where we are is a small island developed by the British during their initial contact with China, so the buildings here are very old and distinctively Western, mostly British Colonial / 2nd Empire style.

The White Swan is grand. Large, spacious and elegantly decorated. Service is excellent. The center of the building is a large open atrium with a limestone waterfall and fish pond, surrounded by restaurants. I will send more picture of this place as I take them. we just finished breakfast and I came down to the business office where I actually have my own office to work on a computer to send you this message.

Merrill is doing great and she has the uncanny ability to be active, awake and happy that instantaneously switch off and fall asleep no matter what she is in the middle of. Kristin and I are doing well and Rachael is coming along nicely. The trip hasn't seemed to affect her and she enjoys the new sights and sounds of the hotel. Today, we get her medical exam and we start some basic paperwork. I need to head out to get ready for today, but I have so much more to tell you. I will try and get a little time in over the next couple of days to tell you.

Hope everyone is well and we can't wait to get back and have you all meet Rachael. She is SO cute and just a real joy. Merrill is being a perfect big sister and she will enjoy telling you all about our trip.

Take care and talk to you all soon.

73

Saying goodbye to Nanning

Today is our last day in Nanning and Guangxi province. Last night, we all tried to soak up the entire experience and Rachael and I went on our nightly walk outside this time down by the bridge by our hotel.

It has a waterfall that runs off the sides of it and is illuminated by brilliant colored lights in ever changing patterns. She finally fell asleep and we enjoyed our last evening here. Today, we go to the airport and fly to Guangzhou where we begin the worst of the paperwork. From what we hear, it’s a major stack of stuff we have to do. But we will get through it.

As we leave here, we are all somewhat preoccupied with a sense of sadness. We very much like this area and want to spend more time here, but that's not mostly why there is a bit of bitterness to it all. Rachael is leaving here and coming with us. We rejoice in that and her new life with us in the United States. But her culture, her bloodlines, her birth family are all here and we have suddenly been very cognizant that we are taking her away from here...far away. As far away as she can be. And it is not just the distance. It’s also the radical different culture. While we will keep her in touch with her county's culture and history, her life is going to be radically different than it otherwise would have been living with her birthparents in China. I can't really express it clearly and I don't expect anyone to really understand it. You can't unless you experience it for yourself. It feels like we are having to leaving something behind and taking something away all at the same time. Complex to say the least.

But tomorrow begins a new adventure. I will drop a few lines as soon as I can in Guangzhou when we check into the White Swan hotel and get settled in. Until then, 73.

Watercolor Mountains and Terra Cotta Roof Tiles

Greetings all! We are doing very well here and tomorrow, we head for Guangzhou. We all have had a grand time here in Nanning and we will miss this area greatly. We all want to stay more. Our hotel is fantastic, and the food at the restaurants is beyond excellent, all of it costing about $7 to feed all of us.

Nanning is a great city and today we traveled to the country to see an area similar to where all our babies would have come from. Back to that in a minute. About all of us for a few lines...I am doing very well and really have not had much difficulty with the time change. I do get tired around 5:00 pm, and usually hit the sack fine, but we are all waking up around 2:00 am and struggling to get back to sleep. The last few days, I have been porting Rachael in the baby carrier on my chest and she loves it. She is very cheerful, allows me to feed her easily and usually konks out on my chest for a nice, peaceful nap. She looks around when awake and seems comforted with being so close to either Kristin or me. We get a few people, especially in the country today that came up to us and smiled and tugged Rachael's legs to bring a smile to her face, which she provides easily now.

Merrill is having a grand time. She refers to China as "paradise." She loves her baby sister and seems to have no major difficulty (at least for now) having the attention shared a bit. She is very curious and concerned about Rachael's well being. As Rachael begins to cry, Merrill issues decrees of diagnosis as to what the problem likely is, usually that she probably is just a "mamma's girl" and will take a while to get used to dad. Thanks, Merrill. :) Merrill is enjoying the attention she gets from the Chinese people. While not as overt as we had been told to expect, she does have several people smile and wave to her and a few pat her on the head. She is very polite.

Kristin is also doing great. Rachael and Kristin are getting along splendidly. Although Kristin was having a hard time for a bit with the sleep and jet lag issues, she's much better now. And always thrilled with our new daughter. It has been nice, by my observation, for her to get away from school and teaching for a bit. I also have a good time lagging behind a bit in stores to watch young Chinese men follow her around checking her out, then pretending to be interested in whatever is nearby on the shelves when she turns around to look about. :)

Rachael is just perfect. She is cheerful and very curious. She can crawl and sit up by herself and has excellent dexterity. Aside from being an expert crier when necessary, she is making cute little verbalizations of various reactions to things. She smiles more and more and is still very transfixed by Chinese people, mostly when she hears them more so when she see them. Men certainly seem to interest her more, which is common with adopted little girls from China. Aside from having picked up Merrill's infant antipathy for going to sleep at night, she is a joy and we can't wait for you all to see her.

Today, we went on a trip to the countryside. It is magnificent here. I can't begin to describe the landscape. Truly mesmerizing and ethereal. We passed through a small range of mountains like those that you would see in West Virginia, which it reminded me of greatly. Not as tall, but very dense and heavily covered by forest. So green and lush. Coming out of that area, we entered into an area of spellbinding beauty. The flat lands of a farming area with magnificent, sharp, steep limestone mountains covered with lush green trees and vines jutting up our of the flat fields, like chess pieces on a green and brown chessboard. The mist and the clouds hung at their tops and the humidity made everything look as a Chinese watercolor painting. I can't wait to show you pictures when we get home. The village we went through as simple, primitive and in many ways unclean. But I can't describe the unique way in which it was also beautiful, cozy and comforting. The architecture was that of simplicity; uniquely Chinese in form and function. Brick homes with simple handmade tile roofs stretched along forever in little villas, making a visually interesting patter of warm colored diagonal chapes, broken occasionally by simple arches, doorways and wooded beams.

The people there were very friendly, and Kristin and Merrill especially were subjects of observation by everyone in the town. They no doubt found us as curious as we found them. Many people were delighted to have their pictures taken and we were invited into someone's home to see their house first-hand. Simple and somewhat primitive though it was, the design was also elegant. A gate takes you into a courtyard where a well pump and a small garden reside. Surrounding two sides of the courtyard are building for animals and storage. The other two sides are made of the walls of the house, which was three stories of brick and whitewashed plaster. Red banners still hung from the doors from Chinese New Year and wishes of love and wellbeing for a recent wedding that took place there. The ladies of this home were gracious and kind and happy to have us there. The matriarch of the family (several generations live there), with so little of their own, gave Merrill and another little boy in our group each an orange; a very prized item for these people. Merrill and the other boy were very thankful for it. An adventure none of us will forget. This place has made a huge impact on us and it has changed me. So much more to tell you about it. But I need to head out now. I will try and make an entry before we head to Guangzhou tomorrow. Take care and talk to you all soon. 73

Table for four, please

Well, it’s official--Rachael is part of our family and we are her parents. The paperwork stage was actually not too bad. It lasted for about three hours and we had breaks as each family went into various offices to do their work, so it was not constant. We were on tight schedules to do everything by the book, and flexible, Chinese bureaucracies are not.

While I will spare you the play-by-play of the various paper signings, the most important meeting was also the most surreal. The first meeting was with the civil affairs office director who signed the paperwork and decided if we were fit parents for Rachael. Our Chinese guide who prepped us for the details of the meeting escorted us into the office. The actual event was very interesting. The psychological and political tones of the meeting are less than subtle. We walking into a somewhat small room about 6 feet by 12 feet with clean white wall, no adornment except for the Chinese Communist government seal on the wall. In the center of the room was an immense monolithic black table, spotless and sparse except for three things. One was a large red stamp pad, used for inking our thumbs to make thumb prints over our names on various documents and to make a red foot print on Rachael's documents that stay in China. The second object was a black painted wood block with a vertical wire extending about 12 inches high with a cross wire forming a "T" where on the right was the flag of China and on the other side was a red flag of equal size with the sacred symbol of communism, a hammer and sickle. I think I was transfixed on it with a rather dirty look, so I looked away and smiled, reminding myself this wasn't the time for a political statement. The third item on the table was our paperwork folder sitting in front of the director, a very young, well dressed woman who was sitting at its center. The desk was so large, it took up almost the entire room, and it sat upon a small platform, which raised the table and the director up about 3 inches higher than we were. Sitting at the table, its top came up to about my chest middle. We looked up at the director and she looked down at us. When we entered the room, she did not rise to greet us, the table prevented us (purposefully I assume) from shaking hands or any exchanging any other pleasantries. The message was less that subtle.

The director was pleasant, smiled with no other visible forms of emotion or distraction, and asked us a series of questions. Most were absurd, such as "Have you decided you want to adopt this baby?" and "Will you take care of her." Others were more oral testimonies of why we wanted to adopt from China. But we did manage to rattle her a little and got an unexpected reaction. At the end of the questioning, she remarked that she observed from our paperwork that both of us worked, and she requested knowing how we would be able to attend to both children is we were working. I responded that I had arranged my business so that I worked from home and primarily looked after the children and worked when I had time to do so. The director was clearly caught off guard; she leaned into the table, tilted her head, smiled rather warmly and asked, "Really?" We nodded, she sat back in her chair, said "Hmm, okay," and jotted something down with a strange little smile on her face. After, she said that by her observation we were proper parents for this child and she pronounced us the new parents of this little girl and wished us well.

A few more documents were signed, thumbs stamped, and we were on our way. Our guide afterward told us the director had never heard of the man staying with the children and thought it was very odd to the culture she was used to, but that she was pleasantly surprised to hear than men did such things.

After all the paperwork was over, we hit the local “Wal-Mart” to get a few other minor things and came back. Today we had a great adventure visiting a local park and museum for what is referred to as a “minority group of China.” We believe Rachael is now probably a member of this minority. I will go into details about that later. They have a rich culture in many areas of art, dance, and extraordinary architecture. I have pictures and will try to post them, but my memory card from my camera isn't cooperating. I'm working on it.

Anyway, Rachael is doing okay. Last night was pretty rough. I had to walk late into the night for her to finally get to sleep. I'm sure that not being around people who look, or more importantly, sound like her is starting to rattle her a bit. She cried a lot and was very upset, so I walked around the hotel public areas from around 9:00 p.m. to about 12:30 a.m. when she finally fell asleep. I hope she does a bit better tonight. Today, she rode on the front of me in the baby carrier and she did fantastic. She's really starting to warm up to me and seems to enjoy seeing if the hair growing out of my face is detachable. :)

I am heading back to the room now and will see if I can get my memory card working. Tomorrow, we head to a small village outside of town to see the countryside and the conditions of a place likely similar to where Rachael and the other kids came from. The other babies are doing well and the families adopting with us are all great. We have made lifelong friends of them all. We will talk to you soon and hope everyone is well back home.

Take care. 73

Gotcha!

At abour 2:30 PM (our time) while you were all sleeping (hopefully), we went to the civil affairs office an waited a short time in a reception room. We watched as the babies were brought in and I recognized Yuhao pretty quickly. She was the one smiling and playfully slapping her orphanage worker! We were called last and she came to us with no crying, no fuss. She was taking everything in, but was also very curious and allowed us to hold her as though she always knew us. She is a very sweet little girl and we are thrilled. Such a long road, but it was worth it! We spoke to the orphanage director also and got some additional information about her that we will relay later. Just too much to do now and I want to get back to everyone up in our room. All the babies were healthy and while one was terrified and cried at first, they are all seemingly settling in very nicely in such a short time. We will see how the next day or so goes. But for now, everything is perfect. Tomorrow is solid paperwork and such, so no pics or blog entry for that day are likely. But we will be touring around the day after so keep coming back and see what's new here. To sum it all up, I can't describe how it feels. Wonderfull, sureal, sweet, VERY HAPPY...all wrapped up in one. I also think of the gracious and selfless woman that did a noble and courageous thing for her daughter and for our family. When you look upon these pictures in the same hapiness we feel, please pray for the woman who gave this all to us, that she may know peace and solace. Take care all, and we will write back in a day or so to let you know how it's all going. Thanks to Karen for keeping you all up to speed. We couldn't do this without her! 73!

I don't think wer'e in Kansas anymore, Toto.

I have a few minutes and wanted to give everyone an update. We had a good night last evening and today, we started the long stack of paperwork. It went very smoothly and we received some interesting news about Rachael. For the last few months, she has not been at the orphanage. She is one of the very few lucky babies to be living in a foster home, where she has received much more personal attention by a loving couple who takes very good care of her. Regretably, we won't be able to meet the foster parents today, but we are hoping we can get their contact information and correspond with them in the future. Now we head out to do some fast shopping for Rachael, come back to the hotel and head back out to the civil affairs office to see our new daughter. Merrill is having a blast here, and LOVES China. Nanning is very beautiful and the downtown buildings all light up at night with spellbinding, mesmerizing light, neon, laser beams, search lights and a visualy stunning array of effects. I will send some great shots as soon as I can. This evening we will certainly send pictures of Rachael. Everything is going well, China is a great place with people that are polite and gracious to a fault. We are all healthy and happy if not a bit fatigued and still in a bit of surreal fog from the trip. Take care and look back a bit later. Its 11:00 AM here and 11:00 PM back home as I write this.

(The pictures at the top of this post are of Nanning and of Merrill next to Rachael's crib)

We will talk to you soon.73!