Out and about

Well it's Monday here in China. Yesterday we the Mid Autumn Festival in China. This is the second largest holiday in China where families journey back to their home city and celebrate being a family.

Dan and I spent part of the afternoon walking around the downtown square area. We went to a local bookstore that the Marsh family had recommended to us. It was huge and extremely crowded. Our guides said that it probably was particularly crowded because of the extra people celebrating the Mid Autumn festival. We were trying to find the elevator to take Chloe's stroller up to the sixth floor where the children's books were. I had my Chinese travel guide with me so I was able to show one of the bookstore employees the Chinese characters for the word elevator and he showed us where it was. We were able to find some Chinese/English books to bring home for Lia as our neighbor Wen (who just moved here recently from China) is going to start teaching her Chinese. It was amazing to us how many children were just sitting on the floor in the bookstore reading books! So I've included some pictures from our afternoon on the blog.

Then last night I went with our group (Dan stayed at the hotel with Chloe because she has a bit of a cold) on a boat ride on the Yangtze River. Because it was the Mid Autumn festival, there were a lot of lights lit up on the river and they were sending off paper lantern tiny hot air balloons. One of the people from our group got a good picture of that so if I can get it, I'll post it. There was a group of Chinese people on the boat who were very curious about why we were all adopting. One of our guides, Veronica, helped translate and I had a somewhat lengthy conversation with them. They wanted to know how long the process had taken us, did we have biological children and if no, why not. They wanted to know if they could adopt a baby from the US and why we didn't do that. They also wanted to know why we wanted to have more than one child (because Veronica had told them that I already had a daughter from the Chongqing area who was 5 1/2 years old. And they wanted to know why the baby's birth parents had abandonned them. I told them I had no answer to that question either and they said it was probably because they were too poor. They wanted to know if Lia knew she was adopted and what she thought about that.

It turns out that one of the ladies we were talking to had applied for domestic adoption and it had already been two years for her and she still hadn't gotten a child. And the other lady had a friend who had applied for domestic adoption and the same thing - it was taking a long time. But they didn't seem to be annoyed that we were getting the children and they weren't (I asked Veronica later just to be sure). They were just very curious about it all.

Anyway, Chloe slept very poorly last night because she has a cold and had trouble breathing through her nose and so she kept waking herself up. Therefore, we decided to not go on the group site seeing adventure to one of the big parks so Chloe could get a good nap. That's what she's doing right now as I'm writing. So keep her in your prayers that her cold clears up and she can get some better sleep and we can get some better sleep!