Willow in Wuhan

Bonnie and Linda become instant celebrities as they feed their babies Willow and Samantha in front of a shopping center in downtown Wuhan

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> Click here for a movie about Willow’s finding place

Our first week with Willow has been, in a word, full. The first few days Willow was inconsolable, crying with an intensity and at times a fury that left both if us bewildered, anxious, tense, and worried about how the seismic and sudden changes in Willow’s life were affecting Willow. She also has had a cold on top of all else. And is such a curious little thing that encouraging her to sleep can sometimes be difficult. Upshot: None of us were able to sleep very much those first few days, and when we compared notes with our travel group about how they and their girls were faring, most of the stories were the same.

One of the most difficult aspects of the first few days was Willow’s complete aversion to Gong. He understood that it was common for babies to initially bond with one parent rather than the other and accepted it intellectually, but he felt deeply hurt at the  beginning when Willow would not even look at him, and felt sad when she would wail uncontrollably whenever he came closer than a few feet from her (a third unfortunate effect was the “evil eye” she would cast in his direction every once in a while). We discovered that Willow does like eating solid foods (perhaps a little too much for her tiny digestive system). Going to the hotel restaurant has become a highlight of her day, as she likes to nibble on bok choy leaves, noodles, and steamed egg. Her aversion to Gong was given a temporary reprieve when he took her to eat, as she allowed him to hand feed her at the restaurant.

A big turning point was when Bonnie went on a day excursion to visit Willow’s finding place and the orphanage that oversaw her foster care (see the video link below). Gong and Willow had to learn to live with each other for almost 7 hours without Bonnie. Gong thinks that climbing Mt. Everest on his hands backwards and blindfolded and in a Speedo bathing suit in the dead of winter would have been easier than that first day alone with Willow. She would not stop crying, even on walks, back in the room, in the restaurant, and to make matters worse, Gong had to deal with three explosive diarrhea diaper episodes all before lunchtime. This was his baptism by fire if there ever was one. When Bonnie returned, things with Willow began to turn a corner. Not only was she happy to see Bonnie and therefore was able to relax more, but she began to accept Gong much more readily and has finally stopped giving him the evil eye.

Willow likes to show off in the restaurant, she loves people, especially women. She has started to giggle, make faces, says “mama” a lot, loves to offer her queen-in-a-carriage wave to all beings, far and wide. We are even starting to have fairly long baby talk exchanges with her; even at this primitive level, we’ll take it. She has slept through the night in her crib for at least a couple of nights running, and spent a good part of last evening in her crib standing up and interacting with us. She cracks herself up, cracks us up, and seems amused by the slapstick routines we are creating on the fly to entertain her (lots of leaping around the hotel room, dancing, spinning, and making up silly songs). She seems much more relaxed, although we don’t want to speak too soon. Our new relationship is still so very new and fragile.

We received all our documents yesterday recognizing Willow’s adoption as official in the eyes of the Chinese government. Next stop is Guangzhou, where we begin the final week of our journey and work with the U.S. Consulate to ensure all the necessary steps to bring her home.

China is a cool and interesting place. Bonnie is finding the pollution difficult to manage and has had a sore throat from it for days. But it’s fun to watch the way people here like to exercise together in beautiful ways. We watched some mesmerizing sword dancers in the park by our hotel yesterday morning; there are also always people practicing tai chi and waltzing every morning and evening in the park next door. The Chinese like to bring music wherever they go and seem to really enjoy communal exercise and art forms. At one of the parks we visited this week we saw a man inscribing a poem in beautiful Chinese calligraphy with an oversized brush dipped in water directly onto the park’s hardscaping. Talk about ephemeral art! What an exquisite impulse.

It also struck Bonnie that if we were in America people would be charging for the exercise opportunities rather than offering them up free of charge in parks. It seems as though there is something that we could all learn from this.

Bonnie, coffee snob extraordinaire (there is one coffee place and one single bean she will deign to drink from in Santa Fe) has taken to enjoying her morning coffee from the McDonald’s across the street from the hotel, which is open all night and therefore accommodates her and Willow’s early morning schedule.  Gong, meanwhile, has been drinking the instant stuff provided in the hotel room, ameliorated with Coffee Mate and sugar. “Mmm,” he remarked the first morning he sipped it. “Reminds me of the coffee I drink at my parents’ home.” We all take the comforts we can find, wherever we can find them.

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> Click here for a movie about Willow’s finding place

Hello, Willow

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> Click here for a video

Willow is beautiful. More beautiful than we ever imagined. She is a healthy, perfect size for her age, she has a delicate disposition, and a surprisingly tender cry.

When we first met her at the registration office in Wuhan she greeted us nonplussed, interacting with us as she would have interacted with anybody who took an interest in her, neither terribly excited nor at all distressed. It must have been confusing when the assistant director from the orphanage and Joanna, our CCAI guide in Wuhan, began quickly and repeatedly pointing to me and Gong and referring to us as as “mommy” and “daddy.” It probably (understandably) flipped her out and soon she was acting less than nonplussed.

She began to cry and to ask over and over for her mama, which broke our hearts for her. She was in a new city in a new building with a bunch of people she had never seen before who looked and smelled strange. She would quiet down a little when we would take her over to a window to look outside. She might have been searching for people she recognized.

The babies in our groups are staggered in age. Philip and Linda’s extroverted new daughter Samantha is about 8 months old (and is incredibly cute) and SK and Eva’s adorable daughter Arlina is about 2 years old. Samantha and her new brother James are getting on famously (James likes to kiss his little sister a lot) and Arlina, though shy, is already starting to make more eye contact and seem much more relaxed in her strange new environs.

It is almost 4am and the Schwartz Szeto family is awake in our hotel room as though it were full morning. Willow is lying in her crib watching every move we make as she plays with the plush panda bear that CCAI offered to us as a gift. She awoke at about 2:30am without crying, but somehow let us know that she was hungry. She sucked down about four ounces of milk lustily, reluctant to release the bottle even after it was empty.

We’re skipping around a lot, so please forgive our jumbled thoughts as we try to recapitulate Monday’s events. When we look now at the peaceful baby lying in the crib next to the bed it’s hard to imagine how upset and insecure Willow was feeling most of yesterday. At some point she started to cling to Bonnie and wouldn’t let go. Putting her in the crib was out of the question. Even while asleep she held tight to Bonnie’s body and would not go near Gong. (One stranger was probably plenty for her to integrate. Two? Forget about it.) But at this point she seems pretty comfortable here with us as she plays with her panda and yawns in very cute ways and murmurs to herself and her panda and looks around and considers us and probably wonders why it is that we spend so much time pressing buttons and looking into a glowing white rectangle on a silver machine (the dogs wonder the same).

There’s so much to report and so little, really. She’s here with us and we feel so lucky that this lovely little girl has become and is becoming and will continue to become part of our family. We can’t wait to bring her home to introduce her to Annie and Waylon, our sweet dogs, whom we miss so much. We will be thrilled to introduce her to the beauty and quiet of New Mexico, to our loving friends and families.

We already broke the “no TV” rule Hanna Dershowitz suggested to us, by the way. Willow and Bonnie watched CNN together yesterday afternoon. There was too much going on in the world not to.

We also went together as a family to the department store across the street from the hotel. Bonnie first thought that Rome was the worst place in the world to be a pedestrian, but she has now concluded that Wuhan trumps all. The drivers here are simply insane. We bought a new lightweight Goodbaby stroller (a badge of honor for China adoptive parents), more diapers, more Kleenex (Willow has a cold). We had dinner together as a family at the hotel buffet restaurant, where they made a bowl of steamed eggs especially for our Willow. Willow evenly distributed her food everywhere, all over the table, all over the floor, on the chair. We also saw her wave for the very first time (it is a funny queen-to-her-subject kind of wave), as she played “hi” to our table hostess across the room. All mundane and absolutely amazing at the same time.

With love,
Bonnie, Gong, and Willow

NB: We have discovered that China blocks blogs, including ours. Total drag. So we are asking Gong’s brother Nam to help us update Willow’s blog. We’re emailing him our posts and links to photos and videos. This also means that we cannot approve your comments right now, so if you’d like to email us, we’d love to hear from you! xoxo, b,g,w

bonnie [AT] formandcontent [DOT] net

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> Click here for a video

On our way to Wuhan

Aberdeen Harbor

Tomorrow morning (Sunday) we will be leaving by plane to Wuhan, the capital city of Willow’s province, Hubei. Today we met several couples in Travel Group 1274, a group that is traveling in tandem with ours (we are in a smaller group, 1270, with only two other families, whom we have not yet spent time with as they have been visiting locally with friends and family).

CCAI, our agency, had arranged a Hong Kong tour for us today, which was how we came to know some of the people in group 1274. They’re all super nice and were fun to be around. We’ll see them again in Guangzhou, after we all have united with our babies. It will be very nice to meet up with them again at the famous White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou in about a week or so and meet their little guys, all of whom of are from Chongqing. (The White Swan is where most Americans adopting from China converge before returning back to the States, as the US Consulate is in Guangzhou and that is where we have to apply for and pick up our childrens’ visas, which will allow them to travel back to the US with us.) Group 1274 left this evening for Chongqing and will be meeting their babies tomorrow. Our thoughts are with them on the eve of this exciting event.

Matthew, our CCAI tour guide, showed us some cool parts of the city today. Our favorite experiences were a sampan boat ride in Aberdeen Harbour and a trip to Stanley Market, where we found some great stuff. The tour was finished off with a dim sum lunch next to our hotel and a sendoff to Group 1274.

Our sleep patterns are still not quite on China time, unfortunately. We’re very tired in the late afternoon and early evening and not as tired as we would like to be later on and through the night. Might be a good time to pull out the Ambien to help us regularize!

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> Click here for a video of Victoria Peak and Aberdeen Harbor

Settling into Kowloon

Gong and Bruce Lee along the Avenue of Stars, Tsim Sha Tsui Promenade

After a long, crowded flight from LA to HK, Gong and I are settling into a temporary hotel room while another is being prepared for us. I just jumped out of a nice, warm, pummeling shower and feel much more human that I did a few minutes ago.

We were very fortunate to have the opportunity to spend some great hours with my friend Hanna while in LA and to meet her little boy Mars (!) and re-meet her daughter Zara, whom we had met only once before, years ago in Houston when Zara was an infant. It was great to hang out with Hanna and her husband Adam and glean some free parenting advice (which we are noticing arrives in abundance from those who have already embarked on the rocky path that is parenthood). This is not a slam to Hanna and Adam, whose suggestion to keep our kid away from TV at all costs seems like a good one (my chiropractor Mark Morgan, who has two small kids himself, agrees wholeheartedly with this advice; he and his wife have been telling their kids that their TV has been broken for years, and the kids are still buying it).

Back to goings-on in Kowloon: We had been told by our friends Deb and Ian (two-time parents of Chinese children) that the breakfast buffets in China are wonderful. The Regal Kowloon’s, while perhaps not as elaborate as some, presented us with a welcome array when we arrived from the airport starving. Gong thinks this business of having fried noodles and dim sum for breakfast rocks and I was thrilled to see some plain, tummy-soothing congee on the buffet along with hard-boiled eggs and vegetable-infused rice. Gong just jumped out of the shower and is waxing poetic about donning clean clothes. We’ll check in again later after we explore the Tsim Sha Tsui district of Kowloon, where we are staying.

Bonnie

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> Click here for video 1, video 2 of us walking around Kowloon and Hong Kong

Change of Hong Kong and China phone number

If you would like to reach us between Nov. 14 and 30th while in HK/mainland China, please use the following number rather than the earlier one we sent:

011-86-13917527473

Another side of the adoption journey

It is apparent to us from the various reports and photos we have been offered with regard to Willow’s growth, development and demeanor that her foster family loves her very much. I can only imagine how difficult it will be for Willow’s foster mother, who has been caring for this baby since the day after her birth, to send her on her way to her new life with us, and my heart breaks for this woman, who has been the only loving parent Willow has ever known.

For an interesting perspective on China’s foster moms, please take a look at this:

http://research-china.blogspot.com/2005/09/other-mother.html

Bonnie

Getting Ready to Go!

Multi-tasking between being online and on the phone, Bonnie ecstatically books our air travel

With our I-171H, visas, China travel approval and consulate dates all confirmed and in hand, we are now planning our trip with firm dates in mind. Here’s what it will look like:

11/12/07 Leave NM for Los Angeles, where we will overnight

11/13/07 Leave LA for Hong Kong (overnight flight)

11/15/07 Arrive HK very early in the a.m.

11/16/07 Meet up with our travel group in HK

11/18/07 Head to Wuhan

11/19/07 Meet Willow????

11/22/07 Thanksgiving in China

11/28/07 Oath-taking at US Consulate in Guangzhou

11/29/07 Head back by train to HK

11/30/07 Head back to LA, where we will spend the weekend

12/02/07 Head back home to Santa Fe to be reunited with our beloved puppies

Getting there…

Yesterday we were able to pick up both our visas to China and our extended I-171H (yay!). At the end of last week we were notified by our agency that it has received our Travel Approval from China, so we now (finally!) have all of the documents we require to travel to China to meet Willow and bring her home. It’s been a long and stressful road to the I-171H extension from the US Citizen and Immigration Service and we are so relieved now to be in possession of it. Our agency rep indicated to us that she is now waiting for the US Consulate in Guangzhou to confirm our consulate appointment in China. Until that has been confirmed we will not know our specific travel dates. We are hoping we will hear by Monday or Tuesday of this week what are travel dates are so that we can proceed with booking our air travel tickets.

We are inching our way forward to Willow and cannot wait to see her lovely little face.