Adoption Day! – Sunday, Dec. 15, 2013

YunMei coming down the hall with her orphanage Director Zhou and our guide Maggie.

TODAY IS THE DAY we've been waiting 14 months for! We got to sleep in and have a lazy morning since Meizi was scheduled to arrive at 4:00.  The hotel has a nice breakfast buffet that is included in the room charge with both western and Chinese foods.  Mmm, spicy noodles and pancakes with syrup!  I’m not at all sure, however, how they manage give their syrup the texture of fine melted cheese.  I quite liked the Chinese pasteries and Stacey loves the sauted bamboo.  She’s really into bamboo lately.  Such a little panda.

We spent the rest of the day unpacking and arranging things and feeling nervous.  Maggie came by our room an hour before Meizi to help us prepare paperwork and gifts, which was good. 

Then, marching down the hall we saw our little Chinese angel, hand-in-hand with the orphanage director. 



She cried a little when one of us got too close, but was otherwise pretty calm on the outside, but wouldn’t say anything or do anything other than just clutch onto the director.  We tried to interest her in candy, food, Chinese cartoons on the ipad, toys, etc. but she was closed off trying to pretend we weren’t there.  We exchanged some gifts and then it was time for the director to leave and Maggie walked him down the hall.  Yun Mei was NOT at all happy with that.  She screamed and cried and even slapped Stacey across the face and finally collapsed onto the floor in complete dejection.  Maggie came back in after a while and was able to talk to her and calm her down a little so that she was quiet as long as Maggie was holding her.  Maggie did all the paperwork one-handed because Yun Mei wouldn’t let go of her hand.  We had to put a red-ink thumb print over each of our signatures and then Yun Mei was supposed to put a footprint on the bottom of one of the documents.  This required us to remove her shoes (apparently shoe prints aren’t as individual as actual bare footprints in China) and that caused another traumatic breakdown.  After we got her foot cleaned off and her shoe back on she calmed down a little more but wouldn’t let us take those shoes off for another 24 hours, not even to sleep.  I think she thought that this whole ordeal was just an elaborate plot to take her pretty (2 sizes too small) new shoes!

Thumb printing our signatures on the official paperwork.

After the paperwork it was time for Maggie to leave and then Yun Mei was left alone with those weird white people who don’t know how to talk and smell like foreign-ness.  She cried and cried for an hour or two, just completely beside herself.  We held her and sang to her and Mark tried talking to her soothingly in his awkward Chinese.  Finally, with Mark holding her and Stacey playing peek-a-boo with her new dolly she was slowly able to calm down and watch her Chinese cartoons on the ipad (“Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf”).  Then she climbed down and led Stacey into the bathroom to help her go potty.  

So so upset and angry and not wanting to have anything to do with us. She wouldn't eat or let us remove any of her layers of clothing. (I still have no idea how many shirts she has on under the first two!) She cried for hours. Deep heart-wrenching cries. But the transformation over the last 7 hours has been an incredible thing to watch.

Finally calming down rocking in daddy's arms

 After that she kind of ignored us for another hour or so while she worked hard on getting her new stretchy bracelets wrapped around her plastic finger puppets.  We got some smiles out of her when we congratulated her on her bracelet wrapping skills and while we took some pictures (she does know how to ham it up for the camera and also knows to come over and look at the picture on the screen afterwards).  Finally Stacey was able to get her laughing and laughing reading to her from the Boynton books (“Red Hat Green Hat” is her favorite) and playing more peekaboo (“Yun Mei zai nali, Yun Mei zai nali?  Zai zhe li! Zai zhe li!...).  Mark put her in her bed, which she still hasn’t forgiven me for, and she continued playing with Mama until about midnight when she handed Mama her precious bracelets one by one and went to sleep.  -Mark

I had these bracelets on my arm when we met and slowly took them of and gave them to her one at a time. She has held tightly to them all day. As we played in bed she would hand them back to me and then expect them all back in order. She has them all memorized, so if one slips out of her hands, she knows exactly which one she is missing. 7 hours later as she was drifting off to sleep she finally put them in my hands, rolled over and went to sleep.  -stacey

First smile.

And it gets better...

And better.
She worked so hard to get the bracelets on the finger puppets and was so proud when she finally got them on!
Persistent little thing!

Figuring out how to twist the bracelets onto the finger puppets.

Ta Da! So very proud of herself.