We love you Amelie!

Christmas Eve 2010 – the last photo we received of Amelie before we traveled.

Amelie in China on the day she was sworn in as a US Citizen.

Amelie’s 2nd birthday – home 4 months.

Amelie’s 3rd birthday – home 16 months.

On vacation at the beach in September 2012.

Click the photo above to see the Gotcha Day 2011 photo album, and see the blog post from that day.

It’s amazing to us that it’s been 1 year since we adopted Amelie in Yinchuan, China.

Our first family photo.

Amelie’s swearing in day shortly before we left China.

Amelie has come so far in the last year that she hardly seems like the sad little toddler we met one year ago. She has grown 10.5 pounds and grown 4.75″ in the last year. Yes, you read that right. In China she was wearing 18 month footie jammies – last night she wore 4T footie jammies to bed. Now she is lean and strong and does everything in her power to keep up with Nadia. She doesn’t let her hands slow her down one bit and really I don’t even think of it as a special need. Amelie is very smart. In so many ways she was like a 12 month old the day we got her, but she has grown by leaps and bounds in every way. Now some quick stats about Amelie that I don’t want to forget.

• She sucks her thumb when she goes to sleep. This is a vast improvement over her sucking her thumb 90% of the time when we got her.
• She loves food. She still cries over food a lot, but instead of every meal every day it’s more like once every couple of days.
• After 11 months with us she finally told me at a meal that she was full. It was startling since I didn’t think she would ever say that.
• She loves sweets, especially chocolate. But eggs are her favorite food. Someone asked her that over the weekend and she said, “eggs!” right away.
• She is a snuggle bug.
• She loves music – any kind of music.
• She loves to color and play dough.
• She loves “choo choo trains”
• For 7 solid months, every time we drove past a car dealership she would yell “balloon” (or at least her variation of it)
• Now she obsesses over when we pass bodies of water or playgrounds and asks, “go? go?”
• We see her smile so much now and she is even starting to make jokes.
• She asks me everyday to do “cool cool” (school) so I have a set of toddler activities I pull out for her and she feels very important and says, “big guurrrlll”
• She asks Mike everyday to do “woo back” which is a phrase she made up that involves being thrown up in the air and flipped. She would let Mike do this until his arms fell off.
• She LOVES to be outside. And in fact asks to go outside constantly – rain, shine, day or night.
• Books are her favorite toy. She will say, “ree ree ree” to anyone who will listen while trying to get a book in their hands so they can read to her.
• She is stubborn and tenacious and feisty. And some days that really wears Mommy out

This was a couple weeks after we got home – she is thinking of giving me a smile.

April 3, 2011 – Amelie’s baptism day.

April 6th – about to have surgery.

The cast is off! Look at those fingers set free.

First trip to the zoo.

Mother’s Day 2011.

Banana themed 2nd birthday.

First trip to the beach.

4th of July.

Water table fun for hours.

First Halloween.

First Christmas and all the fun that comes with that time of year.

Books and more books.

Our Amelie now! We love you sweet girl!

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

That is a lot of travel time and we are grateful for your prayers. Specifically:

• For Mike’s ear to stop hurting so bad.
• That I wouldn’t cough so much since that is what aggravates the pain in my side.
• That both girls sleep on the planes.
• That no one pukes or has any other sickness.

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.

We woke up on Wednesday after a good night’s sleep and not so much screaming from Amelie at bedtime. Mike has a master technique with her and it’s a relief to me that he can put her to bed so well. We went down for breakfast and had to head straight up to our room to wait from 9 – 10 am in case our guide Grace called from the Consulate. Grace called a little after 10 to tell us that everything was fine and to be in the lobby at 2:10 pm to head to the consulate so Amelie could be sworn in. I got the girls a bath right after that and we got Amelie down for a nap. The rest of us had a nap too and then got up to get ready.

We got to the Consulate in about 40 minutes, went through security (they take your camera and cell phones because no photos are allowed inside). We waited around for a while and then the head of the adoption unit came out to explain to us what the process would be. She told us that there were 3000 adoptions from China in 2009 and 3400 in 2010 (60% special needs children). So far in 2011 she said that 73% of the children were special needs. I read in a Chinese newspaper a couple days ago that so far 60,000 children have been adopted out to the US and 90% were girls. Then she had all the parents stand up and take the oath for the children. Everyone clapped and cheered when we were done. Then she said we would wait for our name to be called so we could sign the last document for our adoption (insert more clapping and cheering).

Once our turn came up Mike was about to sign when I noticed that we had the Hameloth family’s signature page and I said, “Stop, that’s not us!” The woman looked very confused, but then she went to see what happened. Somehow they ended up with 2 copies of the last page and our last page was missing. They called us back and we signed the form and we were officially done. All of our group headed back downstairs and here we are with our soon-to-be new US citizen.

Here is part of the group on the bus after the swearing in.

After returning to the hotel our guide Grace took Lynnea and us to the photo shop to get our film from the orphanage developed. Once that was dropped off we decided that we would eat dinner at the Guangzhou restaurant which has been around since 1935. It has a pond on the floor inside which is pretty cool. Once they got a table put together for us they came over to ask us what kind of tea we wanted. We all said no tea. Then they got really stressed out and they showed me a translated booklet that basically said ‘everyone gets tea in our restaurant’ and the woman who couldn’t speak much English was saying it was custom to get tea. So we all had tea because what else could you do but leave? Then we placed our dinner order. It was really fantastic and I was once again wishing that my stomach was bigger. We had dumplings, shrimp fried rice, Guangzhou style fried noodles, some fish dish, a beef dish with veggies and shrimp balls with Mushrooms.

After dinner Amelie decided that a meltdown was in order and we took off to the hotel. We got Amelie to sleep in no time flat because she was so worn out. It was a good day.

Tuesday morning we got up and had breakfast. Then we met the Hameloth Family in the lobby to connect with Ann who was going to be our shopping guide. I let her take a look at my list and she got us 2 cabs and she was off like a bullet. At some point she told us that we walked too slow which cracked us all up because we thought she was crazy fast.

The first stop was the wholesale market for hair clippies and pony’s. Mike believes that I purchased enough for everyone I know. HA HA! But the prices are irresistible and some are definitely gifts. Then we went up a couple flights to a shop with silk outfits. We ended up getting some beautiful outfits for the girls for now and some in bigger sizes for the next 2 years. This time we only got ones that were pants and tops, no dresses since Nadia doesn’t like those much and they look way cute in the pant sets.

The Hameloth’s found these cute little practice chopsticks so we grabbed some for Nadia and she really got a kick out of that. They also scored on a backpack and wallet. Then we hopped on the subway to head over to the shoe market. As you know I loved how many awesome pairs of shoes we got for Nadia at such good prices on our last 2 trips. We went to 2 different places and found some great shoes. Nadia is currently the most excited about her light up “How to Train Your Dragon” shoes that have the dragon named Toothless on them. Or as she likes to call him – Herbert. Just like last time I got several sizes up for both girls. 11 pairs total for $50 and most are leather. I got Nadia these totally adorable black boots with wild sequins on them since she loves her boots. Those who know me well know that I love the thrill of the hunt for a good bargain and I love to shop in China.

11 silk outfits for the girls, 1 silk shirt for me, 6 sets of practice chopsticks, 11 pairs of shoes for the girls and boatloads of hair stuff. Total spent? $141 plus Ann’s fee and transportation.

After that Amelie was just about to hit meltdown mode so Ann put us back in a cab to the hotel. And she accidentally told both cab drivers to take us to the White Swan, but we were staying at the holiday inn. By the time we realized our cab fare had doubled and the drivers were totally frustrated. We headed over to the island to grab our clean laundry and then just stopped and ate sandwiches at Subway. It was the easiest thing to do, no translation necessary. We got Amelie down for a nap and she had a major fit about going to sleep that would have worn me out, but Mike took care of everything. Once she woke up it was just playtime and laughing and seeing her relax a little more. We headed out for a late dinner at Pizza Hut. Now I know what you might be thinking, Pizza Hut? In China Pizza Hut is a nice restaurant. This one had a huge menu with everything from calamari to fancy deserts. We got a pizza for us to split, mashed potatoes and a chicken spaghetti dish for the girls. It was all great and we were once again amazed by the amount of food that Amelie can eat. And she totally flips out if you cut her off or if the food is all gone. She just eats and eats and eats. Many meals on this trip I think that she has eaten more than me and she just screams if you don’t keep shoveling it in. We grabbed some ice cream on the way back to the room and got the girls back to the room for bed.

While we were out Mike took a lot of street shots of the pedestrian shopping area that is so fun and lively near the hotel. This really was a whole lot more our style than being on the island. I know that adoptive parents like to stay over there and it certainly can make you feel safer, but I like being in the mix of the people, not just the sanitized portions. Every time we have been out on that street though Mike has caused a crazy sensation with Nadia on his shoulders. People stop, gawk, point, stare, say things in Chinese and tons of people just give us a BIG smile or thumbs up. There are quite a few people who look totally confused and one woman said, “Chinese children?” like she couldn’t process what the deal was with us.

2 photos for Jen.

Amelie continued to show us her sweet personality and we can see a playful side of her now that we had not seen before. She babbles a lot more now and when Nadia starts singing she will sing too which is really cute. She is trying to imitate the things that Nadia does and likes to run around the hotel room yelling “JIE JIE!!” at the top of her lungs.

Mike still can’t hear out of one ear which is driving him crazy, but he can deal with that. He is hardly coughing now. Nadia just has a cold, no other tummy trouble. Amelie is still having her little cough, but it doesn’t seem to affect her much. I also think she has a couple of teeth coming in which could be adding to all her various issues.

Thanks for all your prayers. I am trying to catch up on blog posts now before we start packing tonight.