Completing the Adoption day

Today started off at about 6:00ish am. Isabella had a pretty rough night of grieving as I have mentioned in my previous post. She had night terrors and is missing her foster mama very very much. She seems to be great during the day and then into the evening, when things start to calm down is when she misses the most and the grieving begins.

In the morning, Isabella woke up and she was pretty happy. She drank her formula out of the bottle (1^st time) and munched on some puffs. We all got ready and headed downstairs for breakfast.

Our baby girl is quite the eater and I am so thankful. She had hard boiled eggs, a little bit of the plain Congee (which is similar to oatmeal), French fries, ham, apple juice, water, & some bread with butter.

After breakfast we met David, our CCAI rep downstairs and we headed to the Civil Affairs office to legally complete our adoption and make Yong Mei officially ours.

Shortly upon arrival at the Civil Affairs Office, we were met by the orphanage director and one nanny from Yulin City, Yuzhow Social Welfare District. This is the orphanage were Isabella was taken too upon being found. I had the opportunity to sit and ask the Orphanage director any questions that we had regarding the baby, and so this is what I asked and what we now know about our sweet baby girl.

We already knew that she was abandoned at a local market place;

She was taken to foster care on Aug. 29, 2011 (so she spent just a little over 3mths in the orphanage before she was taken to foster care).

She was in the Grace & Hope program;

Her foster parents were fairly young maybe in their 40’s. And she had a foster sibling, older sister (17 years old – biological daughter of the foster mama & baba) her foster sister was in a boarding school and only came home 1x a week. Isabella and she were very close and every time the foster sister would come home, Isabella would run to the door to greet her.

We were so blessed, as the orphanage director has given us a CD with 118 pictures of Isabella from the time she was a baby until today, along with pictures of care takers and her foster family. So at least we can put some pieces together, thank you JESUS.

I asked if she was ever hospitalized. And they said no. They would take her to the orphanage clinic with normal child hood issues, colds and so forth but for the most part she was and is a pretty healthy baby. Never has had an ear infection and she doesn’t have any allergies that they are aware of. I also asked if she was potty trained and they said sort of. She doesn’t like to pee in her diaper so she would tell her foster mama when she had to go potty. So needless to say, I quickly learned in mandarin/Cantonese that “Wo yow neow” means “I have to go potty”.

Our baby girl’s personality is quickly shining through. She is very independent, likes to do things on her own and quickly makes it known when she is not happy. But on the flip side, she is very loving, sweet, funny and playful.

So after we met with the orphanage director, Isabella started yelling “WO YOW NEOW. WO YOW NEOW”, so I immediately ran with her to the bathroom, stripped her down and sat her on the toilet seat. Once she pottied, she clapped and was very happy..

We then went into a waiting room with all the other families until our names were called to go and sign off on all the legal documents and also to be interviewed by a government official. We were the first family up, so we went in and we sat down in front of this official. She began to ask questions, why we wanted to adopt Yong Mei? I informed her because we have always dreamt of having a daughter and this journey has allowed our dreams to come true. Then we had to swear that we would never neglect abuse or abandoned her. We both sweared that would never ever happen, we then signed off on the paperwork, turned in most of the money that we had to give to all the officials; and turned in our gifts to the orphanage director, nanny and government official who completed our adoption.

The orphanage director seemed like a fairly young man, he in turn gave gifts to us for Isabella. One of the beautiful gifts was a bracelet with the name of her orphanage on the inside and her orphanage given name in Chinese on the outside, it truly is beautiful. We also received a certificate of the adoption from them. After both of our families were sworn in, we then had the opportunity to take pictures with the kids and the orphanage director and nanny.

We then left the Civil Affairs office and headed to the Notary office to get all the adoption documents notarized. Again, there was the Cole family, then us and another family with a different agency there. While waiting in the room Isabella comes running to me again with the WO YOW NEOW, WO YOW NEOW, so off I ran with her again to go pee pee in the potty. She was so happy.

We then finished up with the notary, gave her a small gift and headed back to the hotel to drop off some items and head out for lunch.

Our guide took us to this beautiful local mall in Nanning. This mall has about 10 escalator floors, it was insanely huge. Anyways, David wanted to take us to eat Chinese in this great restaurant. It was so so good. We all stepped out of our box. David ordered the food for all of us including the girls and the lunch was delicious. We had sweet and sour pork, fried noodles, onions and vegetables and some sort of chicken. The girls had some sort of creamy soup which Isabella hardly touched. She was more into the noodles that we were eating. She showed her personality at lunch today and we will have to make some modifications with her when we get home. She likes to eat by herself which is fine; however, she was playing more with the food then what would go in her mouth, she does not like to wear a bib and had a hissy fit upon putting one on her. So, we have to start teaching her table manners because today was a bit off the wall.

After lunch we walked to the Wal-Mart to pick up more items that we needed. Isabella fell fast asleep after lunch. We took a short cab ride back to the hotel. Isabella and I went to the room while Herb and David went to pick up some new glasses that Herb wanted.

Isabella and I laid down together and we took a nap for a while. After our nap time, we decided to stay in and order room service. We ordered some fried spaghetti with meat sauce and it was so yummy. We all had dinner in the room and Isabella ate her little heart out.

After dinner we played for a little while and then it was bath time. She still is very calm during her bath time and again I tried to see if she wanted to play with the rubber ducky but no deal. Mr. Duck went back on the shelf. I took her a warm bath, wrapped her up in a big towel and brought her to the bed; I then grabbed baby lotion and massaged her little body as I put on her PJ’s. She continues to make excellent eye contact while the bonding is growing.

She fell asleep again around 9:00pm, tonight she’s had 2 meltdown (grieving pretty hard) and while I was rockin her in the midst of her grieving, she was making excellent eye contact with me and she was saying mama, mama… Oh how my heart breaks that she is hurting and does not understand what is going on and on top of it all, I cannot even explain to her anything because of the language barrier. All I kept saying is “Mama, I nee mei mei”… which means, I love you. Btw – Isabella goes by the nickname of Mei Me, that is what she has been called all of her life and what name she goes by.

When she finished grieving to some degree, her baba came in and she turned to him and said “Bow, baba baba” (which means “I come to daddy”) so she went with her baba and minutes later was fast asleep.

Praying that tonight she sleeps the whole night.