I am sitting on the plane some where over the Bering Sea on our way home from China. Madilyn is sleeping in the two seats to my left, Sue is on my right and Amelia is snoozing on the floor under my feet. The trip thus far has not been easy for we have been up since 4:45 AM, are on our second plane and already spent 4.5 hours in airports. When all is done I suspect the trip from door to door will be 30 hours or so. Sue, Madi and myself are doing fine but poor Amelia is having a tough time sleeping with all the noise and commotion around us, hence the comfortable nest made up for her on the floor. There are several babies on the flight and there always seems to be one or two screaming about something (Amelia included).
I just wanted to post one last time at the end of the trip to close the loop. This trip has been nothing short of miraculous.
We now have another daughter who is a wonderful child and has quickly become part of our family. She knows us now as her family and comes to us while shying away from others. She plays with us, lights up when one of us returns from being away and cracks a great big smile when one of us shows up at the edge of her crib. She may be a bit quiet for our household right now but she will learn that this clan makes a lot of ruckus and is always on the move (she probably already figured this part out, poor thing). I am sure she will learn to keep up quick.
Madilyn has been nothing short of spectacular, I cannot say enough about how great she has been. I can think of only one episode where she really struggled and it was a tough spot where we spent all day on our feet in Beijing then flew to Guangzhou and had to rip her from sleep at 11:00 at night, she cried for about 10 minutes then asked why China was so stinky and commenced playing games with us (keeping Sue and I from spitting fire btw). She has tolerated every meeting, every airport, every plane ride, every tour, every endless bus ride and every crappy meal. At times she has offered the calmest head saying ‘it’s ok daddy’ with a pat on the leg when I was fired up about something or ‘that’s ok, I wasn’t that hungry’ when the meal we received was horrible and she was starving. I could not imagine taking this trip without her. The endless inquisitive questions, the perfect reactions to uncomfortable situations, the instant affection for Amelia, her tolerance of me pushing her along when we are in a rush, saying ‘ok’ every single time we said it was bed time, sleeping anywhere including: the hotel floor, busy markets, cabs, stinky busses and just about every plane we got on. She never failed us on this trip, always Madi just taking things in stride.
The trip itself was truly an experience of a lifetime and will forever shape who we are as a family. Not only do we have a new addition to the family we have learned a lot about an extraordinary culture and a lot about us as a family. We have been part of two warm and friendly communities, one in the Chinese people and another in the adoptive families we spent a great deal of time with.
One quick tangent: We met a family adopting a 10 year old blind girl, another family a 6 year old deaf girl and many, many other special needs children. These families are truly heroic in what they are doing. We are here to expand our family, they are improving the life of a child that may not have otherwise been taken care of. Babies like Amelia would have been adopted by another family were It not for us because she is healthy, the boys and girls with cleft lips or other ailments are often left if the orphanage or foster care until they are 18 then turned out to the streets. There were 4 such families in our group alone.
That aside, we feel fortunate to have been able to take this trip and cannot be happier about how it went. I see no other circumstance where we would have spent 2 weeks in a city like Guangzhou doing the things we did or seeing the things we saw.
Updated, Saturday morning…We made it home without a scratch last night and are all healthy. The 14 hour plane ride was not too bad, 4 hours with immigration and customs in Chicago though was awful. Sleeping last night was a bit of an issue but we should be able to work it out in the next couple of days. Now we work on getting life back to normal, as normal as can be with 2 kids under 1 year old.
Thanks for all the support and e-mails we received, a little contact with the outside world went a long way.
A special thanks to Jack and Ina for taking care of Bradford while we were away, infants are hard work and we really appreciate the sacrifices they have made so that we could travel to China for Amelia as a family.
I have posted a bunch of random pictures that we like.
This will be the last post to this blog, I hope you all enjoyed following our trip.
Take care, hope to see you all soon.
Chris, Sue, Madilyn and Amelia.
No comments:
Post a Comment