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Thursday, August 16, 2012

July 18


So, we'd wait.  "Hurry Up and Wait" -the theme of international adoption.

Lyric woke up HARD (sleep is still our main issue,) sat in my lap for a LONG time and drank about four ounces of her bottle. She was still just mainly on a bottle with small amounts of added congee -the night before she'd gobbled up a few pieces of my  hamburger- but it was as if she really didn't "get" food, even the Chinese stuff that I got off of the buffet at the hotel was met with sorta a "so?" from her.

Today, we will head to The People's Nanning Park. We'd been told that it was just right down the street from our hotel and very worth the short walk. But we would take our time, we had all day.

I was still the source of Lyric's safety and she was just pitiful -when the door opened, when the cleaning lady came in, when I disappeared, she panicked- whined and cried and came to me, arms up, to be held.

She was beginning to warm up to her daddy, she'd let him touch her, sometimes, but not pick her up. We have a picture where it looks like he's giving her a bottle- nope! That lasted about 2 seconds and then she'd started screaming.


She LOVED shoes so we designated him King of the Pretty Shoes
- until she completely warmed up to him, only he was allowed to put on shoes.




















They played ball.

She brought her doll to him and had him put the doll's shoes on.


She even let him tickle her.

She was interested in everything that he did, she followed him around,
they even played the Cheerio game but she would not
let him pick her up, she 
wanted to trust him but not yet.

And, like any two year old, she was BUSY!

As you know, due to some bladder issues, Lyric has a catheter coming out of her tummy where her belly button would be. She came to us with her urine bag and tubing wrapped in a plastic grocery bag and stuck inside of a "purse" that her foster mom had made for her. (Her foster mom and the people from the orphanage were wonderful! They took excellent care of her with VERY limited resources. Every doctor that has examined her has commented on the health of the skin on her belly -which stays wet - and the fact that she's remained infection free. "Whatever you've been doing, keep doing it." Well, what we've been doing is what they taught us to do and what they'd done for the last two years.)

Unfortunately,  she "leaked"  -the urine bag leaked and a little bit of her insides were outside where her catheter came out and she leaked around that as well.  (Apparently, the catheter should have been put in when she was an infant and then replaced every two or three months as she grew but it was never replaced.) So, we figured out a routine that worked ... pretty much. We put a total of about 5 diapers on her.  We'd undress her, empty the urine bag, and give her a "shower" in the bathtub. Then we'd lay her down and doctor her "wound," taping a piece of gauze over her leaky parts and the top of the catheter. Next, we'd wrap a diaper around the gauze on her belly and secure it using one that we'd wrapped around her back. Then we'd put one diaper on the regular way for poop and put a diaper on over the "poop diaper," in which we'd place the urine bag and the extra tubing. We'd tape it all together and pull on one of Wild Child's old Pull-ups to help hold it together. Voila, it worked most of the time. I usually had to redress us both at least once a day but it was better than the constant wetness that she'd had before.


It wasn't perfect, that wet spot isn't water.
































But, really, who could remember the yucky when you had this face to look at?













Finally, we headed to breakfast and discovered that, although Lyric had been sorta iffy with food in general up until that point, she definitely knew what to do with noodles.  (This chick can eat some noodles!)  She ate them and ate them and then tried just about everything else that we put on her plate.  She really liked noodles and broccoli but meat and beans, not so much.  She ATE her some food.

Poor thing was probably wondering when the dumb new parents
were gonna figure out that she wanted NOODLES!

The night before, we'd met with Another Guy who'd known Q-Boo through her foster care program (he brought us her foster care reports and PICTURES!)  He'd told us several things about her foster family, particularly how hard Lyric's leaving had been on her foster mom and that the mom was very upset to send her to us without hair. We had a good long talk with him and learned some stuff which just really opened up new questions. This is the way that it is with these adoptions, new answers often lead to new questions.

There are several barriers to learning any real info: 1) What is known  2) What they are willing to tell us  3) What is lost in translation. (It's all just pretty frustrating but I'll take any info that I can get.)

He'd also told us that the reason that they wouldn't let us come to Hepu and meet the foster family (we'd asked and been turned down) was because Hepu was so poor, "They don't want you to see it."  While watching Lyric scarf down her noodles, I kept hearing Another Guy in my head pleading with us to “Just feed her good food.”


Breakfast done and bellies full, we headed out  to the People’s Nanning Park.  It was lovely, truly worth the small walk that it took to get there.























Lyric was alternately timid and brave. She had a blast when she’d get up the courage. When she couldn't get up the courage, our Ergo carrier was worth every cent that we'd paid for it.  She loved that thing, still does.(She'll bring it to me and ask to get in it. It still soothes her to be strapped to me.)



















Daddy is fun.




We got stared at a lot, of course – they’d look at her and then at us and back at her again.



She loved the kids’ playground but really wasn't sure how to play with the rockers.   
She wouldn't sit on them, she just pushed them around.





This young lady, on the playground, was fascinated with Lyric and spoke limited English to us about her, “Is this your daughter?  How old is she? Where are you from?” She kept trying to talk to Q-Boo but Q never acted like she understood.  Finally, she asked if Q-Boo understood “Chinese,” we told her that she spoke a regional dialect but that wouldn't cross the language barrier so I said, "Mandarin," and shook my head "no" and then I said, “Cantonese” and shook my head “no.”  I have no idea if she understood. She asked us where Lyric was from but she didn't know Hepu.  (Glen would later tell us that Hepu is "just a village" and that most young Chinese would not know where it was.  They might know where the next biggest city was but not Hepu.)

Another young lady that we saw looked straight at the three of us and said, “You make us happy. Welcome to China!”  I feel certain that not everyone feels positively about our adopting Lyric but since we can’t understand them if they say it, I'm cool with it.  :)



Zig-Zag Bridge


Lyric LOVED this bubble wand.

And, the bubbles that it made.

Daddy scored major brownie points when he handed it to her.



We wandered back to the hotel and took some arbitrary photos:


Guess what Hepu's known for?  (And, the silk road starts there.) 
This was in the lobby of our hotel next to a little place to buy pearls from Hepu.
(pronounced "Her-poo")





Me, as "the Phoenix."






















K-Man, as "the Dragon."





























Arbitrary thoughts:

*They have SpongeBob Square Pants in China, it almost made sense when heard in Chinese. Almost.

*Out of the thousands of people that I was certain we’d seen by then, I'd only seen my third pregnant woman by this day. Pregnant women, according to Nancy, stop coming out in public about the time that they really begin to show.  They stay home “and do nothing, their husbands do everything for them.”

*Another thing that I’d noticed was that while women would wear shorter shorts and skirts, very few wore tank tops and almost none showed their backs or their shoulders. I decided to save all my tank tops for when we'd get to Guangzhou which was supposedly more western.  I'd figured that since the American Consulate was there, surely they'd seen worse than my tank tops.  :)



*By this time, I missed ice cubes , American Tv, my bed, and my boys!

Kenny missed those things and the comfort of the USA -he said that it seemed like everything in China was in a constant state of confusion.

I agreed, the constant "movement" was exhausting, plus I was tired of struggling to communicate.

And yes, I missed Facebook ;)



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