Faith, Hope, Love, & Family: Catching Up with Us

Let me catch you up on our last few days in China...on Friday we were suppose to visit some government park but the weather has been stormy with monsoon season so our guide changed our plan to visit the Guangdong Museum. It was a neat museum with samples of plants, animals and natural resources from the province. Although I'm sure Daniel thought a "look at" museum is not too exciting, he did think the dinosaur skeletons and marine mammal displays were pretty cool.

On Saturday we had our medical clinic appointment. It is total chaos as every American family adopting this week is packed onto the fifth floor. We carefully try to keep track of our guide as she directs us to each station to visit. There is a station to take Daniel's picture followed by a station to weigh and measure him, check his vision and blood pressure. We then visit the general physician station. He examines Daniel but speaks no English so I assume there were no red flags. We then visit the ENT who looks in Daniel's ear, nose and throat. She tells our guide some instructions on ear care for Daniel and then we are off to the TB test room. This is the one room that doesn't allow parents to enter. The staff takes each child in to draw blood for testing. One at a time each child is ushered in, then sent back out crying and holding the site on their little arms where they had been poked. Our Daniel was no different. These are the only tears I have seen thus far from our little man. We picked him up, hugged him tight and immediately fed him Oreo cookies and a sucker. Within minutes he was back to himself busily playing on the iPad.

Once back at the hotel, all Daniel wants to do is swim. It is so hot and humid so we try to get to the pool everyday and allow him to burn off some energy. He especially enjoys when other children are down at the pool so he can play with and speak Chinese to them. Yao yong (swimming) is the currency we use to get him to listen and obey. No eat, no swim. No listen to Mama and Baba, no swim. It works magically for now. Once home we will need to find a different currency as we have no pool to swim in. And yes, we did find him some goggles. He refuses to wear them properly so they are pretty much useless and fill up immediately with water or fall off his face, but he happily wears them around his neck and is delighted to have his own regardless.

Today we visited the Pearl and Jade Market in the morning. If time permitted we could have spent hours there shopping but our seven year old boy was ready to leave after about ten minutes. I guess he is not much of a shopper. We then went to the Chen family temple. It is now a museum, hotel and has several artisan gift shops. The architecture was breathtaking and there is no way our pictures will adequately capture the beauty of the building.

We continue to try and teach Daniel some English. Right now he chatters away in Chinese, rarely using any English but we have picked up a few key Chinese words to get by. The most important words so far are swimming, water, ipad, pee pee, and camera. We have used Google translate to help us communicate with him but it doesn't help him communicate with us. There are a lot of charades and signing as we try to understand each other. I'm sure once immersed in English, it will come much easier.