Remember the post from “Gotcha Day”?  What a change in our son over the year!  It’s been great to watch him go from scared and defensive to being a happy member of a family.  We’ve had our difficult moments, but really it’s a been remarkably easy year of getting acclimated.  On the way to church this morning, Joshua said “Yaaay, I’ve been home a year!” and that’s all the encouragement Mommy and Daddy need.

At 7:30 AM, one parent from each family met in a conference room at the hotel to complete all of the local forms for adoption. Essentially adoption in China is an agreement between the orphanage director and the adopting family. Since we’re foreigners, we had to go through the additional step of getting the Chinese government’s OK first. Now, we filled out forms written in Chinese that will be used to complete the adoption. About 8:30 the other half of each family joined the meeting to sign all the papers. We spent almost two hours double and triple checking the paperwork to make sure everything was exactly right.

At about 9:30 we climbed on a bus (so far, every day in China has involved at least one bus trip) and headed for the adoption registration office. We were told on the way that the the registry official would chose which order we would get our babies … when we got to the office, we were told that we were number 8 out of 11 (8 is very lucky in China).

A few minutes after 10:00, our guides Daphne and Ellen got us lined up and ready. They started calling names and carefully checking passports, and one by one the babies found forever families.

Our first glimpse of Sarah was a smiling nanny and a crying little girl coming through a door toward us. She was bundled up in five layers of clothes, and cried like crazy for the first 20 minutes we had her (we cried a little too). She came to us with a packet of biscuits in one hand and a cigarette lighter in the other – we assume one of the nannies from the orphanage smoked and Sarah kept a firm grip on the lighter when the nanny handed her to us. The nanny seemed happy that Sarah was getting a forever family, as did the orphanage staff. By 10:15 we had Sarah in our arms and the whole event was short-lived. By 10:25 we were back on the bus headed to the hotel. Once we were on the bus, all eleven babies started crying and we parents tried to convince them that this was really a good thing, not the scary thing they saw it as.

We did manage to get the lighter out of her hand about 2 hours later.

It was actually wonderful being in a group with other parents we had come to know. Some were first time parents, while others were completing their second Chinese adoption. There are all sorts of families from all over America in our group, with one thing in common a new “spicy chili baby” in their family. It’s nice to be able to share with them as we all go through the process together.

Sarah cried for a while until we got up and walking – she likes to look around at new things, and walking seems to keep her calm. Any time one of us set her down that first day, she would cry.

We got back to the hotel and each went to our rooms for some time with the babies. Sarah needed to be changed, so as soon as we got her back, we started changing from orphanage clothes to the ones we brought. It was a gradual process and took until about 1:00 PM to get her all the way changed. We fed her and tried to keep her calm, but she was very scared – too much change all in one day.

At 2:00 Dr Su came to check the babies and we confirmed what we already suspected – Sarah had a throat infection. The doctor gave us some amoxicillin to treat her and we gave her Tylenol for the fever.

The rest of the day was spent cuddling our new family member. She liked mommy and daddy equally well, but Jordan scared her. By the evening however, she was content to watch Jordan from a distance, if not up close.

We ordered congee (rice porridge) for her dinner from room service, and as Gotcha Day drew to a close, Sarah slept peacefully through her first night with her new family.