Our Family Blog – Mike, Louanne, Nadia, Amelie, & Dani
The Chinese like to have little children and babies all bundled up. The day we got Amelie was no exception. This is how she was dressed on Gotcha Day.
Layer 1 – sweater and socks
Layer 2 – topped with winter PJ’s.
Layer 3 – Topped with snow pants, boots and a lined jacket.
And we were expected to bring a winter coat and hat for her to take her back to the hotel, which of course we did so the ladies wouldn’t come after us 🙂
We leave for the airport in 90 minutes. We have a 3 hour flight to Korea, then a 2 hour layover, then a 11 hour flight to LAX, then a 3 hour layover. Then a 2.5 hour flight to DFW.
That is a lot of travel time and we are grateful for your prayers. Specifically:
Thanks for all your support during this adventure.
Amelie having pizza for the first time – she loved it!
This is going to be the fastest typed post in the East because I am tired and we need to get to bed because we leave the hotel at 10:30 am to head for home. We have almost everything packed except the toys and the toiletries so I am feeling like I will sleep well tonight. Praying that Amelie sleeps all night! We got up and headed down to breakfast and then decided we better head to the island to finish our shopping while I was feeling good from all the medicine. We headed to “Jade’s Place” to get a chop with Amelie’s name and “Michaels Place” to pick up some gifts I had on my list that I didn’t get on Tuesday. We saw a family from our travel group (the Nielands) and posed for a quick photo since they were headed to Hong Kong in the afternoon.
We had lunch at the Deli at the White Swan and then went back across the bridge to our hotel so Amelie could have a nap. At 3:45 her and I headed down to the lobby to wait for Grace to show up with the children’s visas and our brown envelopes for immigration in America. After that the Hameloths said they were going to get Pizza Hut so we decided to have a pizza party (reminded me of Nanchang with our 1st travel group). That sounded great to us and we went down to the club level to eat. Here is Logan and the girls playing “ring around the rosie”.
And here is a photo of us with the Hameloths. We traveled the paperwork and matching road together so it was very fun to get to spend our week in Guangzhou together getting to know them in person.
So I went to bed on Wednesday basically in tears and woke up in tears and told Mike I had to go to the doctor. There is a clinic in the White Swan on the island, but after reading about everything we decided they might want to do an x-ray so we should head over to the big ex-pat CanAm clinic at the Garden Hotel. After breakfast we took a cab over for my 11 am appointment. In the cab Nadia puked all over herself and Mike. I was glad that she refused to eat breakfast at that point so it wasn’t really icky.
At the clinic they were very friendly, everyone spoke English and they asked a lot of questions on the consultation. After that the doctor decided that I should have a chest X-ray and we waited around for the results. The X-ray came back that I hadn’t done anything to my ribs and from the other exam she said my heart and lungs were fine. She did say that I had a respiratory infection, but that it was strange that I didn’t have any fever or ear pain. She said that my throat was swollen where my tonsils should be. They gave me a stronger anti-biotic, a Chinese cough syrup, an American cough syrup and some extended release Advil. By the time they were done with me Nadia was back to her old self and chipper as ever. She was still coughing though and we have continued to give her medicine.
The Garden was really swank. Check out this staircase and Nadia counted that it had 50 steps.
We headed back to the hotel and hung around the room. At one point Mike went to get the photos from the orphanage, but only 4 came out because we think the film was loaded wrong. I will post those after we are home. For dinner we just went down to the club level and ate there. Then we all went back to the room to get to bed early. I was in pain again and was ready for sleep.
Here are some shots Mike took from our hotel room.
Amelie continues to be more and more relaxed with us. Nadia continues to learn about real sharing since she didn’t really expect this about having a sibling no matter how much we talked about it. She is very possessive, but the good thing is we are hearing less and less about the Green Goblin and how he would react to situations.