Great Wall

Great Wall

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Day 5: China Adoption Day and Lessons in Bonding

First full day with Mila today and we are learning her while she is learning us.  We have had a lot of successes with her so far and a few hiccups.  One would be bath time.  We have found that she is very sensitive about us removing her clothes and cried almost the whole time we had her in the bath.  She only stood in the water and looked too scared to sit down despite us trying to play with toys with her.  We don't blame her though because we don't even know if her foster family had a bath tub.  She could have been sponged bathed out of a sink for all we know.  Despite the bath drama, she is a very happy little girl and finds joy in little things (including her iPad).

We managed to wrangle her into bed and get her asleep by about 10:30 last night.  Not too bad considering all the stress she has been through.  She slept between us in the bed.  For the most part, she did rather well considering.  There were a few episodes in the night where she awoke kind of fussy and crying but Mama was able to rock her back to sleep.  She also moved a lot in her sleep.  Seemed that her arms and legs did a lot of flailing and she kept turning sideways laying horizontal between us.  But we made it through until about 6:00 am when she woke up.  That was fine with us because we had to meet our guide at 8:50 and we knew we needed some time to get her ready and fed.  In our adoption classes, we were told that kids can sometimes deal with dramatic stresses by either having problems going to the bathroom or eating.  We are thankful to say that so far she is a champ in both areas (so far).  We are just beginning to learn what she likes to eat.  We took her to breakfast at the hotel buffet where there are lots of chinese foods and fruits.  At first we were dismayed because it seemed that she wasn't much interested in her food at all.   But after watching Mama take a bite, she dove right and and ended up eating a lot.  We found that she liked steamed buns, egg, and water mellon but we couldn't get her to eat any congee (rice soup) like her paperwork said she liked.

After breakfast, we headed back out to the Adoption Center to finalize our adoption in China.  It was a little stressful only because we were having to return to the place where we had just gotten her the day before and we were worried that may cause her to have a set back if she thought that we were taking her back.  Turns out that she didn't have a problem at all with it.  The was some paperwork we had to fill out and sign and we had to give our finger prints and Mila her footprint to make the adoption finalized in China.  So now she is officially ours!  We can also choose to adopt her in the US as well if we want which basically gives a US issued document saying she is ours.  There was some waiting involved while some other families also met with the officer to complete their adoptions so Mila had time to play with a few other children being adopted as well.  We met a Chinese couple from Houston, TX that had been waiting to adopt their child Alice for 6 years and jokingly told us that our wimpy 2 year wait was nothing.

After the office visit, we came back to the room and had the rest of the day to ourselves.  Here's where things got interesting.  In adoption classes, they also teach you about bonding and that often times a child will bond with one parent first and then the other later on.  It seems that we are starting to see that in Mila some.  She is really bonding to Larkin and is often times distressed when she realizes that she is not in her direct line of sight.  This of course is a little hard for us to work through as Bobby wants to bond with Mila too and be able to take care of her when her Mama needs a break.  We are also wondering how much Mila was around males in her previous home.  She may have a hard time being with Bobby because she is not use to male nurturing.  But we of course realize that this is only the first day with her and things can change dramatically as each day passes.  We are grateful for so many things though like the fact that she has taken to Larkin and is obviously seeking her attention at all times.  We did experiment a few times today with exploring exactly how to deal with this situation.  For instance when Larkin goes into the bathroom and Mila can't see her but knows she is close, she will cry.  But if Larkin leaves the room and Bobby can distract Mila for a few minutes, Mila will be fine with it and play with Bobby until Larkin returns.  We are sure that these nuances will continue to change as she adjusts to us and us to her.  Just imagine all she has been through poor thing.

A couple of small successes did happen for Bobby though.  He was able to feed her dinner to her no problem (with Mama close by of course) and he was able to play with her for a while when Mama left the room.  So baby steps.  We are just grateful for what we have!

For dinner, we headed back down to the local Walmart and food court.  We got dinner at a McDonalds mostly because everything else looks really sketchy to us and that is always interesting because they don't speak english at all.  So how do you say hold the onions when they barely get that you want a chicken sandwich.  But we made it through and Mila did well.  We DEFINITELY get a lot of people looking at us now with Mila in tow.  Sometimes people even stop us to talk and we feel bad because Mila is able to respond to them but we aren't and can't tell what they are saying.  We did have the hotel staff write a note for us in Mandarin explaining what we are doing that we can hand people when they stop us.  We ended the night by a quick shopping trip into Walmart to get Mila's favorite rice milk, diapers, and a stroller.  All of this is kind of stressful when you are a foreigner in a foreign land.

One last note is that we are learning Mila has a sense of humor.  When we were driving to the Adoption center, we stopped at a red light.  Mila said something which of course we didn't understand.  All of the sudden the guide and driver just started laughing and the guide explained that Mila asked if the van was broken down because it had stopped moving.  Turns out we've got a real jokester on our hands and we can't wait until we can hear those sweet jokes in English!