Goodnight from China

Well, here I sit on our last night in China and although I'm ready to go home and sleep in my own bed, see my kids in real life and not just through a computer (what would life be like w/o Skype?!), and get back to a normal routine, I am still a bit sad to leave here. Ok, so some of it has to do with the fact that normal for me involves cooking and cleaning and I haven't had to do any of that for the last 15 days. But most of it has to do with this strange sense of finality that leaving here has. Our long journey is about over. Yet, the real work and journey is just beginning.

We just said goodbye to the family that we have been traveling with for the last 2 weeks and it was harder than I expected. Caleb and his little friend happily waved goodbye to each other neither knowing what it really meant. But we did. And they giggled and waved while we cried.

So tomorrow morning we leave our hotel at 5:30am (that alone almost gives me a headache) for a 3 hour flight to Beijing. We'll spend about 5 hours hanging out at the airport (which actually sounds a bit, just a bit, enjoyable b/c it's at least air conditioned and has more places to walk than up and down crowded Chinese streets!) before our l-o-n-g flight to Chicago...and then customs and then one more very short flight home. Andy felt a bit motion sick during our 30 minute bus ride today to our oath ceremony. Not a very good sign of things to come for him. Could be a very interesting 24+hours! If I'm not going crazy (which is very, very likely), I'll try and take photos of it all. I'm hoping for a non-eventful easy going travel time. Again, not very likely considering how Caleb handled the 2 hour flight last week.

And speaking of "oath ceremony"...that's what we had today. We weren't allowed to bring in any cameras so I don't even have a picture to document the big moment. The word "ceremony" was probably not the correct word to describe what it was. In a nutshell, we drove to the US Consulate in Guangzhou where about 50 (or so? I'm really bad at guesstimating numbers) other adoptive families were as well. We stood in a line. Then another line. Then listened to a lady tell us info that was typed on a piece of paper we had just received and then we stood up and said something to the effect of "I promise to take care of and never abandon this child" and that was it. No photo opps, no music, no nothing that would make it kind of like a ceremony. In fact, Andy missed the oath part b/c he was taking Caleb to the bathroom for the 4th time (in about 20 minutes). Definitely another non-Hallmark kind of moment. Very strange. But the 7 minute "ceremony" made everything official. And that is good. Weird. But good.

And so as not leave on a weird kind of note, let me add a few pictures from our last days in China...

This is how Caleb "sits" sometimes. It is just how he squatts while using the squatty potty. I think it is so cute!

Caleb and his friend Ru Sheng...what you can't see is their prized possessions around their necks: a generic Barbie play phone and a purple and pink broken plastic guitar. They both carried them around their necks for the majority of the week as if they were the luckiest boys in the world.

The next are quite blurry b/c the humidity fogs up my camera really bad. They are all three pictures of brides having their photos taken. The custom in China is to have wedding photos taken well before the actual wedding day. The place where we are staying has European style buildings and pretty gardens all around so it is a popular place for wedding photos. I wish I had taken a picture of every bride and groom we saw while here. Too many to count and the dresses were lovely.

The view of Guangzhou

Trying to get a good deal on a lovely silk blanket...success.

Caleb

And, again, this one is for the kids...mostly Nathan. Caleb loved it: the peeing statue.

Next post will be from a very tired mom. But tired at home. Can't wait!