Chinese Milk and Cookies

These sweet brown cookies with pink frosting were a huge hit with Myah when we first got her. Mary our social worker had told us about these type of cookies before we went to China, she said that it is a way to "bond" with your baby, by giving her something like this that she likes. Funny enough, the orphanage gave us a bag full of necessities on Gotcha Day and these cookies were in it. They are made by Kra*ft and have the cutest little faces on them. I bought a few packages of them to bring back home to help in the transition, and to give her something that she liked and was used to getting in China. This coconut milk was also in her bag from the orphange. The babies loved it! I purchased some more of this as well, I just poured the rest out the other day.

This was a bag of formula that the orphage gave us as well, it was the infamous "Sanlu" baby formula that was tainted, I gladly poured all of that out! Still I kept the package because they had written some information in Chinese on this particular bag.

One last bag of cookies, these were the vanilla version of the sweet treat that Myah loved so well.

I neatly put all of these empty packages in a baggie and put it in with Myah's special box, I hope that someday she will appreciate that I have kept all of these little things from our trip.

The other day my friends took Myah for the day, I took full advantage of my time to myself and decided to clean out her closet, something that is almost impossible to do when she is home because she gets into everything. I have recently moved Myah into Dayton's old bedroom so she has the small walk in-ish closet now which is SO nice! I have two huge totes in there that hold some of her most precious treasures, everything from China. I finally sorted everything and put the things that we plan on giving her as gifts in the future in one and in the other one I put all souvineer-ish type things, and special momentos from our trip. I brought home some food/candy/tea to share with our family and friends. I still had it all wrapped up. I figured it has been almost 3 years, we most certainly are not going to eat it, but I had a hard time parting with it. So I took pictures and saved the wrappers that they came in. What would I do with the food after all this time anyways? It is just that everything from our trip to China is so precious to me. So I am doing a special post just about food, Myah's favorite thing in the world.

Wuhan Snow

This was one of the headlines today on my Charter.com news, I just about fell over, this is in Myah's Province of Hubei and we stayed in Wuhan. The snow is crippling China, this is the worst snowfall since 1950. A few people I know are missing their Gotcha Days because they are stuck in Beijing unable to fly into the airports of their baby's Province. I can't imagine the headache this must be causing. When we were in Hubei we learned that it is one of the 3 Furnaces of China because it is soooo hot!!!!! When RuQing was here for Christmas she told me that she knew of Wuhan as being a "ring of fire" because of the hot temps. The snow is beautiful even though it is causing so much trouble!

Stranded passengers wait in a snow-covered yard to get into the railway station in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province Monday Jan. 28, 2008. At least 25 people were killed and 13 injured when a bus plunged off an icy road in southern China early Tuesday, as bad wether severely disrupted the nation's busiest holiday travel season. AP photo and article

A Special Meeting and Alert!

A few weeks ago all of the Chinese adoption boards/forums and also local news channels were all a buzz with the sad story of the family who were in China adopting and the father passed away while they were there. Well, I don't know this family personally but I saw my Aunt Katie at my Grandma's party this weekend and she asked if I had heard about this family. I said that I had and she told me that she works with the Aunt of the little Chinese girl. Aunt Katie said that the other day the mom Sandi brought little Hannah in to visit her aunt. So my Aunt got to meet this special family. She said that little Hannah is adorable and that Sandi appeared to be doing alright, I am sure this is the most difficult time in her life. What scared me is that my Aunt told me that the dad was diabetic and that the Chinese government would not allow him to bring his pump into the country. They required him to go to the hospital 3 times a day to receive his medication. Evidently, he passed away under their care. Maybe if he was allowed to keep his pump this would not have been such an unfortunate incident. She said that the dad was cremated over there, per his wishes. I hope all of these facts are accurate, I am getting them 3rd hand, but I just wanted to pass this information along so if any of you know anyone traveling to China in the near future that requires any sort of medical devices, please let them know about this situation and maybe something can be arranged before they travel. This might be old news to everyone but I thought it was a pretty good source and I had not heard this yet so I figured it was a pretty important piece of information to pass along.

November is Adoption Awareness Month

This picture was taken right before we lifted off in Guanzhou, the last time that Myah would be on Chinese soil. I had a caption saying "Bye Bye China, love you forever"

Tomorrow night we will be speaking at our adoption agency's open house. In celebration of Adoption Awarness month they are hosting a night for people who are potential adoptive parents to come and hear stories and gain information about adopting. We are representing the Chinese adoption families. We love helping out our agency any time we can, how can we ever repay them for completing our family. I know it will be hard to express to families that yes there is a long wait ahead of you but it is worth it. Hopefully just seeing how happy Myah is and how she interacts with us and the love we all share will be enough to convince them that 3 years isn't too long, yikes! I have decided to share the journal entry that I wrote on our baby jelly beans website when we started our process. I hope you are inspired!

For this child I prayed, and the Lord has granted me what I ask of him. I Samuel 1:27
Once we decided to adopt, there was no looking back for us. Adding to our family was something that we had prayed about for years. After having Dayton in 1995 we struggled for many years trying to have another child. After much testing we learned that Dayton was our miracle baby. We have never felt slighted at all that he was our only child, he is such a blessing to us. As the years went by he never had any interest in a sibling, but that would change. In August of 2004 my sister Melanie and her husband Chris adopted a little baby girl from Florida , Annabelle Claire. Dayton fell completely in love with her and has such a special bond with her. I believe that Dayton really never knew what he was missing until she came into our family. He then decided that maybe a little sister might not be such a bad thing after all. This was our first sign that adoption might be for us. Then in December of 2004 we were in Traverse City over Christmas break and we happened to turn on the tv and see the coverage of the devastating Tsunami in Thailand . I was riveted and could not believe what I was seeing. That night I could not sleep, I literally tossed and turned thinking about all of those children who became orphans instantly. I kept thinking that we have a nice loving home and maybe we should look into saving one of those children. I could not get the thought out of my mind. We came home and I started searching on the internet for some information on these children and how could I help. My search ended when I learned that the officials were trying to locate family members first so that the children may go live with them. God wasn’t about to leave this one alone for me. That following Sunday we were in church and our new Pastor Kelly was giving his first sermon since being hired. He and his family had just arrived home on Christmas Eve with their adopted daughter from China, Whitney. As fate would have it, his sermon was about adoption. I sat there listening to his message and telling us about his journey to bring Whitney home. I started thinking about what adoption has brought to our family, the joy that Annabelle has given us, and also that Mark’s Grandpa S. had been adopted. How wonderful their lives were because of the love of others. I started to cry and I mean the ugly cry. I told Mark that I really needed to leave but I really wanted to hear the rest of the message. Pastor Kelly shared with us how Whitney was found in a park, and that thousands of little Chinese girls are abandoned every year due to their one child only policy. That would be perfect for us, we really would love a little girl! Then he turned on a music video by Steven Curtis Chapman, it was a song that he had wrote about his adoption of three Chinese daughters (this is the song playing). I had lost it at this point, I was so embarrassed! But I knew right there, this was the answer to my prayers! Now, I need to convince Mark!! I told Mark that afternoon that I would love to adopt a little girl too. I cried most of the day. Over the next few days everywhere and I mean everywhere I went I ran into Kelly, Linda and Whitney. At Target and baseball sign ups there they were, was God’s message getting through to me or what?! Then on Tuesday night Mark walked in the door after work, I could tell that he had been crying. He couldn’t even speak to me, I sat him down at the table and was worried that something bad had happened at work ( you never know!). He then looked up at me and said “I want a Whitney too”. I knew that right then and there that we had to do this!! God put this desire in our hearts and was going to fulfill it . Well, let me tell you, Kelly was at our house the next weekend answering our questions, we went to an information meeting at the adoption agency the next week and we were on our way to record speed of getting our documents together! How could we wait? We have already waited 10 years! You just know when something is right, and this truly felt right. This was our answer.

So there you have it! The rest is history! I just would also like to say thank you so much for all of the heartfelt comments and emails that you have sent regarding my previous post, Mark and I were both very touched by your love and support.