Visa and Last Day in China

Woohoo! Valerie got her US visa today!  That's the last piece in the puzzle. Now we can head home!

We leave tomorrow (Saturday) morning at 6:00 (that's Friday evening at 6:00 east coast time) and arrive into the Dayton airport at 8:15 on Saturday evening.  Tomorrow morning we'll get in a van at our hotel in Guangzhou then drive about three hours to the airport in Hong Kong.  From there we'll fly to Chicago and then on to Dayton.

Although Valerie still had a few episodes today when she banged her head on the floor, bit herself and tried to pull out her hair in frustration, she didn't add screaming to the mix so I'm going to call that an improvement!

Not much else today.  Todd took Valerie to a park while I navigated the subway back to the gift and toy market for a few more items. Then we packed up everything for the trip home.  Can't wait to get there!!  But I will miss the awesome breakfast buffet and having our amazing guides who take care of all the trip and adoption details. And we did thoroughly enjoy our travel group and will miss them.

Here are a few words from Todd about our group:

Some people might think we’re a little crazy to be adopting a second baby from China, at our age.  And they’re probably right.  But we’re not alone, and we’re definitely not the craziest.  On this adoption trip, we travelled with several families who are defying convention and perhaps sanity even more than us:

- A middle-aged husband travelling solo to adopt his family’s 5^th child from China, making it 11 children total.  He went by himself on each trip to China, and brought home 2 kids on one of the trips.  All this so his wife could focus on the kids at home.

- Grandparents with kids in their 30’s, adopting a 12-year-old boy who they hosted for 3 weeks a couple years ago.  He’s the same age as their grandson!

- A single mom adopting a 6-year-old girl – her 3^rd daughter from China.

- Another single mom adopting a 9-year-old boy.

- A young family doing their second Chinese adoption, but between the two trips they unexpectedly had a biological child.  So they did this trip with a 5-year-old and 15-month-old, as well as their new 2-year-old daughter.

All the kids that were adopted are either older or have special needs, or both.  And all the adopting families (except one mom) speak little to no Chinese.  The language barrier was hard, the food and customs were strange, almost every day was very hot and humid, and there were a lot of planes, trains and automobiles over these 18 days.  But thankfully there were no major issues for the group in terms of the adoptions, health, or traveling.  And here on the eve of returning home, I will lean forward a bit and say that everyone made it (God willing!) and I don’t think we’d trade one moment of this journey – even the difficult times.

Despite all our differences, the one thing that ties us all together is “the call” to do this -- most of us for at least the second time.  Above I mentioned the grandparents adopting the 12-year-old.  When I told them I thought they were quite brave to do this, the gentleman said “We were called, so we’re doing it.”  Amen!