Ms. PacMan

I promised I'd post this - this is what we call Shaomei's "coin slot" or "mail slot" - the rectangular bald spot on the back of her head. We're told that this is 1) a remnant of where her head was shaved in back for ease of care and to accomodate the hot weather in Dongguan, or 2) where she rubbed the back of her head sleeping on the hard wood crib-bottom. While I understand the idea of discarding as much of the bedding as possible in the hot, dog's-mouth-humid climate of south China, I'm sorry - wood as bedding? SO Neolithic. Makes my head hurt just to think of it.

We're introducing the concept of pillow. Slow, but sure. We'll have you dancing on the bar in your panties and cowgirl hat yet, li'l American Girl...(now THERE'S a Daddy-heart-attack image...)

A Question for Adoptive Parents

Are all orphanage babies very passive and reserved - by which I mean; is it common for these kiddos to have a very "flat affect" face on most of the time, at least at first?

I'm asking because after two weeks our little girl is still very much abstracted. I think I've mentioned that we know she CAN smile, laugh and interact. It's just that she doesn't, most of the time. We spent a lovely late morning and early afternoon with our friends Millicent, Floyd and little Nola, and the contrast is even more marked than our last encounter. Nola is a typical toddler - happy, angry, selfish, greedy, loving, fretting - and each and every emotion shows up in her face. It's wonderful to watch her with her parents, who are clearly goofy about her.

In contrast, our little girl is so stone-faced. She will gesture or point, will babble a bit, moves, eats, does all the expected things...but no animation. No vividness. No spark. There's so much going on right now: the shock, grief and loss of her past; accomodating her new home and family; fighting off the giardia and general physical discomfort (poor tad pitched a header on the playground Friday and her little nose is all banged up)...so it's hard to tell if this is an orphanage thing, a transition-thing, or a Shaomei personality thing.

Hence my question. I admit that I'm hoping that this is a typical "we saw this in our daughter, too, it seems to be an orphanage issue that goes away with time" sort of thing. It's not that I couldn't be OK with a daughter with a sort of Calvin Coolidge personality...but a bubbly little diva would be much more work...and much more fun.

The Accidental Tourists

First let me say it - SLEEP!! It's nearly 6am and everyone else in the houe is still sleeping: Mojo, the Peeper and Shaomei. Everyone slept all night, too! Right next to harnessing nuclear fusion and the invention of the portable baby wipe, that is the most incredible thing since sliced white bread...
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I have to go back to work tomorrow so I thought it would be a good idea to start getting up at my usual 5am. I also wanted to get back into my routine: get up, brush my teeth, get a glass of water and then downstairs; check the news blogs, read the headlines, weather, check in with my cyberpals like walternatives and kelli (thanks again for the congee, girlfriend - it RULES!)...and blog my own self.
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This morning I thoght I'd throw out some images from our trip to China. Not for anything, really, other than just to give some backstory to little Miss Shaomei. And because I toted the damn camera 5,000 miles and I'm gonna damn well get some use out of the results.
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First, probably the most overviewed scene of all: the vista from the window of Room 1118 at the White Swan Hotel. Note the haze rising over the hip, sophisticated skyline of Guangzhou (for those who missed this last time, I am kidding. Guangzhou is hip and cool like Fort Wayne, Indiana is hip and cool. It's like Pittsburgh except all the signs are in Chinese.). Note also the mirror-like Pearl River. From the 11th floor you cn't see the early-fall trash run floating downstream to spawn. More about that later.
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The upper picture gives you a pretty good idea of how we spent the two weeks in Guangzhou. Mojo will probably say that the small room makes her ass look big. Also note the crib where both girls never slept...
Here's the little family (minus the Peep) in the "Swan Room", Mattel's contribution to international adoption. Shaomei luuuurved her some of this ball. We called this ball "ballylove" because she would hold it, roll it, snuggle it, even bury her face in it and giggle.
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You meet pretty much 90% of the IA people in the Swan Room. It is a great place for the kiddos, both newly adopted and existing family. For good and bad: I'd have given money to have a brace of Swan GoonsTM whose job it would have been to drag off certain of the folks who somehow slipped through the homestudy process, like the woman we designated the large unmoving slorg whose style was to squat her ginormous ass in the middle of the room and screech "Gentle!" at her out-of-control daughter as the little girl ran around the room snatching toys and slapping at other kids. Or the wierd, sour guy whose wife chose to stay home and sent him to China alone to pick up their child, who was always good for an almost nonstop rant about how miserable everything was, how miserable he was and how he couldn't wait to be out of the place...
Shamian Island is...well, it's an island. So it's got water all around it. Sort of. The Pearl isn't exactly your Wild and Scenic River. Any illusions I had about that were shattered on one of my dawn circuits of the island (I power-walked around the island most mornings, both for exercise and to keep myself sane) when the fella I thought was a homeless guy huddling at the bottom of the water steps on the canal side turned out to be not huddling but...ummm...squatting.
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This puts some perspective to the heroics of the Shamian Dao Recreational Natorial Society (sorry, no picture), the group of old guys who congregated on the river side every morning to swim in the foul and fetid thing. We would go to breakfast and watch the heads bobbing along out in the ship channel. Watch out for the brown trout, boys...
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Another odd thing is that all the early morning exercisers - I was only one of a pretty good-sized group most mornings - were forty- to fifty-and-over. I asked "Rob", the agency guide, about that and he said something to the effect that only the old people still did that stuff. All the young people were out partying at night, sleeping in and getting up to make money. Hmmmm...
One cool thing about Shamian Island is the ancient camphor and fig trees along the perimeter. Where the trees have become so ancient that they are in danger of toppling the municipal authorities prop them up with these odd concrete and steel struts designed to look like limbs. Go figure.
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Shamian Dao is a - to our Portlandic eyes, anyway - somewhat surreal mixture of the very old, Asian and somewhat to extremely rundown alongside the very new, Western and hypercommercially glitzy. I liked this picture just because of the perspective rising from the old wall, complete with clunky Chairman Mao bicycle and large character exhortation (saying "Joe's Parking", for all I know) in the forwground, the old tile-roofed buildings behind it and, rising above all, the glass-and-steel commercialism of the White Swan. Very much a flavor of the place.
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Mojo and Shaomei are strolling along the major north-south street leading from the WSH towards the city side of the island. Note the signs above right. These, too: "Edna's Place", "Jennifer's Store", are an odd feature of the place that appears to thrive on the adoption trade. Nice people, generally, who are keenly attuned to the art of making money from Westerners here to bring home Chinese kids. Not for nothing are the Cantonese known as the "Jews of China", both for their hard work and commercial ethic as well as the Cantonese diaspora that has given us everything from Jackie Chan to sweet-and-sour pork at the Panda Buffet...

One oddball thing we noticed was 1) everybody in Guangzhou does white-on-white for their wedding, and 2) 90% of them have their wedding pictures taken on the main mall running the length of Shamian Dao. I liked this because this couple was getting the thing done right across from a bunch of rather raggedy PLA/police recruits we guessed were practicing for "National Day" which was a short time to come from that afternoon.

And just in case you thought we NEVER left Shamian Dao...here's a pretty little pathside rest house on the way up Baiyun Mountain Park. Lovely place - nice for me bacause it's very birdy. The odd bit was that the monent we stepped out of the tram it felt delightfully cool as opposed to the dog's-mouth humidity of Guangzhou City. But by the time we were halfway through our stroll we were sweating again. So "comfortable" as a climatic term is plainly very relative. As Northwesterners we just don't do heat and humidity well.

Damn - I thought I'd included the shot of Mojo and Shaomei getting the blessing at the Six Banyan Temple. I'll have to get that in another post. Okay, here's a shot of Miss Shaomei taking a very dim view of Daddy pipetting her some "sweet milk", a loathsome South China concoction of milk with extra sugar added. Yeech. But she loved it - what kiddo wouldn't?

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Oh - I've got to tell this story just because. So last night Mojo and the Peeper ran out to Target for an umbrella stroller and other neccessities, leaving me with Little Missy. I played with her while I cooked IKEA Swedish meatballs, rotini and butter peas for supper. With the meal under control I did what any concerned Daddy would do with his little daughter - tried to get her to EAT. Foolish American - I tried her first with just buttered noodles, a Peeper staple. She was mildly interested, but no enthusiasm. Meanwhile I was getting myself around the outside of some delicious meatballs-and-noodles in cream sauce. She tried desperately to get her little paddy-paws on them, so I popped a besauced noodle in the cakehole. Eureka! She ate all my noodles, another cupfull and more! Clearly this child has very adult tastes in food (she also picked two dozen peas off my plate - this is the girl whose brother once ate a half a green bean by mistake and has regretted it ever since? Sweetbabyjesus...).

So that's it for this round. I haven't forgotten all the usual things I want to blog about. Our national slide away from the principles of the Framers...and our loathsome slide towards a wider war in the Middle East. Once I've had the chance to get a little more back on-track I'll be back to blogging about all these. But for now...I am just enjoying being home with our kids. Kids. Plural. That has a nice sound to it.

Harbor Town Girl

According to Wikipedia; "Dongguan (Simplified Chinese: 东莞; pinyin: Dōngguan) is a prefecture-level city in central Guangdong province, People's Republic of China. An important industrial city located in the Pearl River Delta, Dongguan borders the provincial capital of Guangzhou to the north, Huizhou to the northeast, Shenzhen to the south, and Foshan to the west. It is also home to the world's largest shopping mall, South China Mall. City administration is considered especially progressive in seeking foreign direct investment (see below). The three neighboring muncipalities of Guangzhou, Dongguan, and Shenzhen are home to over 25 million residents, accounting for a large proportion of the Pearl River Delta's population."
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It's also the birthplace of a certain young lady: Miss Guan Shao Mei, who entered this world some time in April, 2006, in a small village outside the city and was left at a gasoline station some two weeks afterward. She had what in the Appalachian hill country used to be called "the cat's mouth", that is, a monolateral cleft lip and a small cleft in the facial bone above the mouth, what is known as a "alveolar cleft". The lip was repaired within six months, nicely, as you will see, and the alveolar cleft is relatively minor and can wait several years for repair.
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So I've told you the terrible story of poor Baoxin. We were still in the midst of trying to get her back to her orphanage when "Rob", the agency guide, instructed me to write out all the details of her problems as well as a short list of the special needs we would consider acceptable for adoption.
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Mojo and I had talked about this, especially our visceral horror of dealing with a potential life-threatening heart or lung condition and the awful memories of losing Bryn Rose that would drag up. We put down all the relatively simple musculo-skeletal problems we could think of, including cleft lip and partial cleft palate.
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At the last minute, "Rob" bustled in asking if we'd accept a Hepatitis-B positive child. I pounded my skull: Hep A; treatable, OK. Hep C, chronic, no. Hep B? Maybe? Rob told us that our list was very small and the chances of us getting a referral depended on widening it. OK, Hep B goes in.
Thank Buddha for the Internet. An hour later I was armed with the knowledge that 1) Hep B leads to untreatable liver cancer in as many as 15% of all in-utero and neonatal infections, and 2) is so contagious that we would have to vaccinate all our friends' kids and probably her classmates! Yipe! I called "Rob" - NO HEP B! - and then had to write out an addendum to my letter explaining why not. Lucky us - it turned out later that they (CCAA) already had a Hep-B child they were planning to refer us...

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So Friday morning we got some paperwork from the agency. Seventeen months old, from nearby Dongguan, simple cleft, partially repaired. Healthy, active...she sounded good. We were starting to hope again. OK, we said, we'll accept the referral. Papers signed. We were told to expect her that evening.
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Sure enough, the director and a nanny from Dongguan SWC showed up with a little crew-cut girl that evening. She toddled across the floor, rolled onto her back and slugged down her bottle (a fancy complete-with-insulated-holder model with a cheerful "Funky Dog" logo which immediately and since then has been known not as "her bottle" or "the bottle" but simply as "Funky Dog"). We were captivated.

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So the next week turned into another frenzy of paperwork - this time even more frenzied bacause we needed to get done in four working days what had been planned for a leisurely two weeks. I will tell you that all I know of Guanzhou other then the White Swan, Civil Affairs and the horrible Children's Hospital are two tourist spots downtown and the Baiyun Mountain Park (a lovely spot - ride the tram if you get the chance...keep an eye open for White-throated Laughingthrushes in the bushes up top. Handsome birds).

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The first two days she was VERY quiet, a perfect orphanage baby. But by midweek she was starting to emerge: little flashes of stubbornness, an unexpected and infectious giggle. She turned out to love her mommy best, but liked to have her daddy raspberry her tummy and turn her upside down. She loves egg-and-rice and congee, but did pretty darn well with french fries, scrambled egg and mashed potatoes. Just as well - she's tiny and unskilled for seventeen months. Our friends Millicent, Floyd and their little sweetie Nola showed up Monday. Nola has been in foster care the whole time - and wow, does it show. She's so far ahead - physically, emotionally, even her little girl attitude. We did have a delightful night where both girls gamboled around their hotel room - Shaomei seemed to catch on to Nola's energy. She was a riot with the little mirror under the window, and they both had a lot of fun...and so did we.
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We're home now, and finding that a houseful of grandparents, parents and kids, including a brand new American citizen making huge adjustments to a new home, a new life and a new family, is not exactly a restful thing. Shaomei is still a very poor sleeper, and Mojo and I are getting critically low on sleep. Mom and daughter went to the doctor today (which, among other things, is why daddy spent part of the afternoon with a poopy diaper and several revolting sample tubes but we'll let that pass...) and things look pretty good medically. Now we just need a better little sleeper...
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We've come a long way, all four of us, and our friends, and those of you who have followed with us on the trip. I hope I can help draw you along for the rest of the journey. It should he a hell of a ride. C'mon along. I promise I'll try and be at least entertaining.

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And...you won't have to forego any sleep...