Almost Done

(Wednesday and Thursday in Guangzhou)

What a difference ten days make!
Joseph on adoption day (left) and 10 days later (right)

This week has mostly been about sitting around and waiting for papers to get finalized.  Since our wonderful, amazing, couldn't-do-this-without-them guides do all the leg-work for that, we mostly just wait for them to tell us to "sign here" and have hours and hours of free time.

Zonked out in his "cage" (as Abigail calls it)

Yesterday, Wednesday, was our Consulate Appointment (the CA, in adoption circles and around which the entire adoption trip is scheduled).  This is when we take The Oath.  Everyone makes it seem like a big deal, as if we are taking an Oath of pro-citizenship and anti-treason or something Yea America.  But it is just an oath that says we filled out Joseph's paperwork correctly to the best of our ability. 

This park made up for not staying on Shaiman
Island during this trip.  It is beautiful and we
only saw a fraction of it.

After that, we fed our hungry kids McDonalds for lunch (cheap and fast).  While I feel badly about feeding McDonalds to our kids 3 times while in China, I justify it to myself by (1) Abigail has only eaten McDonalds 1 other time ever and that was when we were looking at houses with our realtor and she bought it for Abigail, (2) we have exposed them to tons of Chinese food here, and (3) we are tired of blowing through our usual weekly food budget every 2 days here.

We finished the day with more swimming and dinner with some travel friends at the Coffee Cafe across the street from the hotel. 

Today, we had a leisurely breakfast and took the kids to the park again.  Larry really enjoyed watching the choir practice.  He concluded that their director is classically trained and he got one of the ladies to show him her music.  He was fascinated by the use of numbers in place of a staff with notes on it.  He wanted to watch longer, but Abigail was getting fussy and Joseph had melted like Olaf in summer, so we moved on.  Abigail did, however, like it when we happened across a woman singing to a few instruments in a more traditional Chinese style of song (which to me sounds like screeching cats).


After that, more swimming.  Joseph really loves putting his face in the water.  He even got several nose-fulls of water and he just kept doing it and giggling.

He ate 3 of these cups of noodles.
We don't know if it is healthy that he has added 1/3 of his
body weight in the past 10 days but we'll worry about that
with his pediatrician next week.

For lunch today, we gave the kids Ramen noodles in the hotel room, for a cost of about 85 cents and didn't feel bad about that either because they are Chinese noodles.  Abigail *loves* them (she first had them last week and wondered why we never have them at home)  and Joseph is a pro at eating long noodles, something he had in the orphanage and he ate more than Abigail.

Tomorrow we begin the 30 hour journey home.  Until we got our travel dates, Larry was planning on playing piano in the pit for our school's musical this week.  As Larry described it in reference to all one time zone, we will leave our hotel slightly before the curtain rises on

"Can we have Ramen when we get home to
Virginia, Mama?"

opening night  and get home well after the curtain closes on the second night's performance.  (And that is if everything goes smoothly and we don't get diverted to Inner Mongolia for hours like we did on our trip to China 2 weeks ago!)