A senior moment X 3

Talk about senior moments. I forgot the account name, blog, email, and password to edit this blog. Fortunately I wrote this information down before I went to China. Since we got back from China, my hair is turning gray, my eyes are baggy'er , and my memory will last as long as my flash drive.

In any case, We're back (more or less). Katie had her welcome to our family party on October 31st, 2009 to welcome her to our family and also to acknowledge many of our friends who supported us through this wonderful journey. This journey is a marathon, and now we're on the second mile.

On November 1st we also had the opportunity to dedicate Katie at our church Chinese Grace Bible Church. It was an opportunity to acknowledge her and to receive supportive blessing from Pastor Joe and the congregation.

The past two months has been really eventful with her palette surgery and recovery. It's been a real blessing to see her grow and cry and scream and touch every button within her little fingers. It's exciting to see her learning sign language and to speak. Unfortunately, Arlene and I tend to look at each other and say "What did Katie say or sign??" So far, she can do her A-Z wooden puzzle quite fast. And she can lose the letters even faster. Life has changed in many ways. I now spend too much time on Ebay shopping for duplo animals!

Katie's poop-con alerts are now becoming are becoming more dramatic. We're more concern about how big her delivery is in terms of tonnage now a days. Currently Katie's crib is in our master bedroom. After she takes a afternoon nap she consistently does her poopbomb and our whole bedroom smells like poop. In order to change her, I have developed the ability to hold my breath for a 2 minute drill. I have to I usually lay out 3-8 wipes in 10 seconds and then lie her down or was it pin her down to pull off the diaper miracle change and then TA-DA! , I turn on the whole house fan to get a breath of fresh air! Ahhhhhh. It's not the best time to turn on the whole house fan in the winter time tho. I always wonder how you determine the number size required for your child. I've concluded that it's based on the diapers ability to hold stuff without leaking or bursting.

With Katie running around more, I'm wondering it our dog has child sheepherding skills or now. Hmm, it's worth trying. Katie's favorite words are currently "Bau", "Moore", and "Mulk".

If you click on the photos, they will become sharper. I also gave up trying to align this post. Blame that on another senior moment. Enjoy

Katie's Personality

It's exciting to see how Katie is adapting compared to us adapting to her. For instance, when Katie takes a nap or goes to bed, that's the time for me to ZzZzZz out too or to finally watch a dvd movie and volume level 01.

At the rate prices are going up with diapers, we thot it was a good idea to start Katie on a potty training regiment. Katie had her own ideas of what pottie training meant.

Katie loves to play with all our pots and pans in the kitchen. Our whole house is becoming a playground again for kids.


Katie has also been developing a very independent attititude toward us. She wants to feed herself and lets us know how she can do it better than us. She may develop a career in plastering. You can see how well she can feed herself and give herself a rice cereal facial at the same time and how cooperative she is with sticking out her tongue at us.



Life continues to be full of joys and challenges as Katie is growing up too fast. It's a blast to see her mimicking our family. I'm not sure if playing the piano and using a cell phone for a tutor was a good idea though. haha. Until the next blog.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Ahh the joys of Fatherhood. I'm learning a version of the game Rock, Paper, Scissors. It's called
Riotmode, Pooper, Starving. I play this game with her everyday. Most of the time she is in one of these modes when she is fussy. To make things worst, she likes to bluff here and there. She likes to do stink grenades and false hunger pains. Arlene is more conservative with the wipes. For myself, I would pour out the wipes and use as many as possible. It also makes her smell more fragrant.

Oh well, it's fun to see here grow and try and communicate with us. She is no longer afraid of our dog. In fact Thumper is more afraid of her! My next goal in the weeks to follow is to see how she likes to write or draw. I'll give her some paper and pencil or use a magnadoodle.

Anthony is now driving and Christopher is almost ready to learn. Katie is already driving, Flintstones style. Enjoy the photos.

Loy

Ground Hog Days again

It's hard to believe today is July 11th. Although we are back in wonderful Sacramento, it feels like part of us is still back in China. The weather is muggy right now and it's in the high 80's.

We finally got medical coverage from my workplace "The poor State of California" on July 1st, 2009. It took them forever. They were going to ding me on my paperwork because I used the wrong color ink and they were soo confuse which name to use for medical coverage. If we had to furlough off some more people, I know who I would recommend. grrrr.

Well it's been roughly 4 weeks and I feel like I'm in the movie Ground Hog Day like Bill Murray. I wake up each morning with the Alarm clock crying out " Wah, Wah, feed me, change me! ". I say to myself, where am I? We go downstairs and realize there isn't a beautiful waterfall downstairs nor a koi pond, nor a fabulous buffet. Oh well, it's back to CHEERios and wonderful work. Well live is actually more exciting and fun now that Katie has medical coverage. Katie still loves to eat food and somehow some of it gets stuck in her nose. Gross! We're proud that we taught her some sign language "more, hungary, and down" and she taught us some too " I want that, go down, go thataway, and change me" with just one finger! We met some cool parents at our church and they taught their boy 60 symbols and working on 61. I can only handle about 10.
Arlene and I were laughing thinking how the two kids could be eventually signing at each other about us and we would be oblivious to what they were saying.

The only ability I've learned to do so far is to watch my dog Thumper give me the poop alert and I go into my costume hero sidekick "Super Changer" where I can change her poopy diaper under 30 seconds with a singe wipe (actually it's more like 5). Thumper keeps her nose glued to her diaper until I change her.

Work has been challenging, but I have a great patient boss. Our governor is making us take off on Fridays. Our pay has dropped 14% and may drop to 19% At the rate we're going, we will have to resort to using regular cloth diapers. (NOT!) It may be better for her, it's definitely worse for me and my asthma. One advantage a cloth diaper has over the velcro ones is that Katie can't undo herself with cloth. One day she learned how to pull the velcro tab and shazam the diaper was off. Needless to say it was funny but then again it wasn't. Imagine the consequences of her doing that with a #2 diaperat your house! SCARY. I dread the day coming........................... that's why we have those diaper pants on her. They're really backup poopy catch all pants. Hmm, maybe we should put on two or three haha! Good thing we also have the PoopCon alert system.

I finally finished my China coffee book album at mypublisher.com via Costco and looking forward to seeing how it looks. I have 54 pages!

A new marathon (but I hate running)

Well, I guess we're in a new marathon of walking the paces of life. We've experience the thrill adventures of China and tasted their foods and seen the country's beauty and weaknesses. Now we're back in the states adjusting to a new precious life in our family. It's been a week and we have yet to unpack our suitcases completely. Our higher priorities is child proofing the house and cleaning it to to a presentable state for visitors coming over to congratulate us. For now Anthony is also back with us from UC Irvine ( =) ). Our church has VBS next week (Crocodile Doc) and life continues more like a fast marathon (run, walk, stand still "huff, puff", walk, jog, walk, sleep.....) than a vacation in China.

Here is a list of the top 10 things We don't miss from China

10. Hard beds. For some reason, The hotels we had in China have really hard beds, thin sheets, and you could probably bounce a coin on the bed.

09. Second hand smoke: Cough, cough, it's sad to see so many people smoke and in restaurants. What's the difference between a smoking and non-smoking section in a Chinese restaurant? Wrong, all they do is take away your ash tray, and now your table is a non-smoking area (surrounded by tables with people smoking. Yuck. ) Sadly, you can buy cases of cigarettes
while you're in an airplane.

08. Cabs. When you enter a cab, it's like going into our dog's crate. It's small cramp and their
are big bars between you and the driver. The driver goes in a direction as erratic as our daughter walks. The traffic here is a living miracle where there are hardly any accidents.
Only here in Zhengzhou where you can cross a 6 lane major intersection and walk diagonally.

07. Grease and oil. All the restaurants here use a lot of grease/oil in their cooking. If you asked for less oil, the omelets would stick to the pan and the pancakes would be permanent fixtures on the top of the stove. I drank a lot of soda to wash down the grease. Fortunately, I love soda.

06. The lack of ice cubes. When you are hot and thirsty. When you are in humid conditions and drenched in sweat from walking or coming out of a bus with no air conditioning. That's the time I want to scream because all I have is a can of warm soda (shaken, not stirred) in my backpack.

05. The lack of ice cream. We spent $12 for Arlene to have a big ice cream sundae. At least it was big in the menu. By the time they brought it out is was have the size of the picture in the menu and Arlene started to quote a phrase that we heard from a old Wendy's commercial. Instead of where's the beef? It was where's the ice cream? This was the time, when Zhang Rui learned that ice cream was a good thing to eat and she wanted more!

04. Aggressive sales people. When we shopped at Guangzhou (Sharmin Island), the salespeople at the shops are overly friendly in trying to help you spend your money. Whenever you ask about a tshirt, they immediately open a brand new package to pull out the tshirt knowing you may feed obligated to buy it. Bartering can be fun if you can shop as a team. If your spouse says I'll take it, you lost your chance to save 20%. Often I didn't want to barter because the economy is so poor and they need to make a living too. Warning: some of their products may look great but soak them first! Our red tshirts bled.

03. Sewer systems that drain to nowhere. When we went walking to restaurants or shopping with our new friends, I notice they had people (young and old) near many manholes with long poles with hooks. They were pulling up the sludge buildup in the sewer and putting it in buckets for a central collection point (near my favorite Thai restaurant). Needless to say, even N95 masks won't block out that odor.

02. Squat toilets. Overall, we were spoiled and had flushed toilets for most of our trip. The cleanest squats was at Beijing at the olympic stadiums. I had never seen a portapotty squat
toilet with bubbles inside. If you really have to go and would faint at a squat toilet, I recommend you going to a special needs (Handicapp) toilet. Those come closest to the US toilet.

01. Drinkable Water. I try to drink a lot of water to stay hydrated. I hate the idea of hoarding bottle water but that's what I did. You can never have enough good safe water to drink. I was really happy that the hotels provided 2 free bottles a day. That kept us going for Rui's baby formula bottles. Boiled water just tasted funny and had weird floaties on top. I would buy a gallon at each hotel we were at. I wish China would recycle more. There is a tremendous waste in just bottle water plastics. I love our water in the US and especially in SF and Sacramento is good too.

Mission accomplished.

l


We feel like we completed an Apollo space mission, where we rode (a manmade and extremely complex device) a vehicle an extremely long distance to bring back something much more precious that space rooks. Another analogy is that we made the home run and Rui is now in Sacramento.

The airplane ride turned out to be uneventful. We even got to taste a kids meal. It's hard to eat one meal on top of another. Rui enjoyed reading The Wall street journal and Discovery magazines and we were at poopcon 4 alert and we wanted to avoid a hazmat emergency landing due to many people being overcome by a mysterious poopy tear gas odor. Instead a senior citizen had a "P" problem and the stewardess really had their work cut out cleaning the mess from his car seat and the aisle leading to the bathroom toilet. It was not a pretty sight. It was really intense to see the workers walking quickly back and forth with white gloves on and lots of plastic bags and towels., etc. I thought they were going to use a fire extinguisher to deodorize the mess., If you didn't know better, it gave the appearance that they were doing surgury back there.

Rui was set to errupt and we were ready to respond fast. We had to do it before it errupted beyond the barriers of the bassenet. It's really difficult to change a poopy diaper in an airplane. Rui hardly cried (until the big one), and actually slept in the bassinet in front of us. When she did do the big one, it was a level 3 alert (meaning it filled the diaper and no more..... phew). But where could we change her? She was too big for the bathroom. When we brought our concerns to the staff they told us we could use the business class bathroom (big whoopee and 2-4 inches more). Wow we needed it. It turns out that Rui had really dirty feet and she left her marks on the wall. I had to stay afterwards to do the hazmat wipe down. That was our biggest hurdle and we did it with one breadth (maybe two.) The stewardess, afterwards, rushed to spray deorderizer and flower scents to make the bathroom more survivable for the next person.

She got an verbal award today. She is now the Poop queen, because she did 4 big ones in one day. yuck! Hmm, maybe she has traveler's diarrhea. Well we're back and exhausted. We hope to adjust to the time schedule in Calif. in the next few days. Chris has all ready awarded her the drama queen award. I know Father's day is coming soon. Maybe I'll get a set of those high tech headphones that filter out unwanted noises (likes screams, crying, whining, and yelling!). If they don't exist, someone should invent them..

The Home Stretch

Today was the last full day here in Guangzhou. We were sad that we had to leave and at the same time anxious to come back home. I hope I remember how to drive. We saw horrible driving all over China. The rules of driving are the following: Any street can go any direction, especially on a one way street. 1 big car will force 1 smaller car to drive backwards. 2 smallers cars though, can make a bigger car retreat!

This afternoon two bus load of adoption families went to the US consulate for the swearing in of the oath. Everyone was really nervous and made the humid weather even stinkier. The actual event was quite boring and we weren't allow to take pictures mainly because of security or because it was so anti-climatic.

Well we are rounding 3rd base and now heading home. Wow we purchased a travel case for rue and it's already full. Time for me to sign out to pack and sit on some cases to make it fill. Hmm this may be a all nighter. See you all soon.

Loy and Arlene.

Approaching Third Base!

Well we're approaching third base. Tomorrow we will go to the consulate for the swearing in process. It appears that all the families in our group was successfull in their paperwork that was submitted today for the consulate. We're so thankful for the CCAI guides who are soo knowledgeable and helpful. Today it rained and tomorrow is the same pattern. Most families are cancelling the zoo tour because of the rain, thunder, and the annoying fast mosquitoes.

The days of a luxury breakfast buffet will be gone in a flash. In another day and a half we will be on a plane hopefully back to the states and not be quarantine like some mayor I read about. Every family will need to endure a 14 hour or more flight back home. I'm thinking of buy a bunch of earplugs for the surrounding seats near Rui. We sure miss Thumper. We hear that she doesn't miss us much. We hope to differ.

I also discovered an annoying fact. The more I listen to Rui screaming in my ear, the more white hairs pop up on my head. I made a new scientific discovery! Do you think it's the screaming or is it stress or is it caused by the heavy load put on our arms? Arlene has a cool child carrier called an ERGO, and it really works well. She can carry Rui with no back stress. We both had to watch the DVD to figure out how to make it work.

Arlene decided to go soverneir hunting today and I did a little too...... Arlene puchase these cool marble like chops (rock signature blocks) and had them engraved with chinese names. Man are they heavy! Prices for things really vary here. She bought some clothes and boy are they bulky. I purchased a dvd on Tai Chi for 25 rmb and then spent 50 rmb for a Subway sandwich meal deal. Where's the logic in that price scheme?

Sadly some stores here are going out of business due to the low number of permitted adoptions and the knowledge that the main White Swan hotel will be renovating soon. There are a lot less families here shopping and business for them is slow. It's a little bit weird when every store is eyeing you and yelling at you to come in to their store. Everyone calls us "my friend, my friend come in..... I give you best price."

Oh no, our suitcases are now over the weight limit! What are we going to do? How did our cases get soo heavy. Perhaps the humidity made all our clothes heavier. I think that's why there is no scale in this room. Should we lose the chops? I wasn't going to panic. I'll super google an answer. Hey, I just found out that Rui is also allowed a check in (hurrah!) for 22 lbs. Ya Hoo! Now we can bring back more junk, uh, I meant quality stuff. I was planning to throw all non-essential stuff like our H1N1 masks, baby wipes (very heavy) and diapers (space hogs). Well it's time to shop more tomorrow to buy Rui her very own suitcase with wheels! I need one with a remote control that will follow us around like Thumper.

Well time for me to go. Hope the swearing in at the US consulate goes well.

Loy

Test Time! Where's Rui?

11 Kids were Adopted

Guangzhou, Day 2

We're nearing the completion of our adoption quest adventure. So far no one has the famous Traveler's D. The two families in need of prayer are doing much better! Thanks. Today was our toughest day in Guangzhou, All the adoption kids had their medical checkup and we had to complete our visa documentation in our guide's room. Our energy level is quickly dropping. The high humidity has a way of draining your vitality I feel like a kid playing softball and hitting his first big fly ball and trying to run the bases as fast as I can. By the time you run past 2nd base your legs slowly give out and you don't want to fall face flat between 2nd and 3rd base. haha. We're getting close to 3rd base.

If you watch action movies you will know that defcon1 through defcon5 means the possibility of military action due to a major incident, leading to the possibility of war. Well today we were doing a humorous version in that where we where at PoopCon3. Rui had eaten a ton of food for breakfast and we were afraid that she would do the big one at the med clinic. Everytime she drank a bottle of milk, the big #2 would surely come. Well we survived the medical exam. She gave us the bomb while we were walking back from the med center. (P-you). We were at a shop on our way back and they wouldn't let us leave. We said we have to go change Rui's diaper, and they kept saying "you buy at 160, good deal, really low price, how about 135? I said we had to go and offered 100 rmb. Guess who won? They did. Fortunately the huggies brand diaper held it all in, and we saved 60 rmb dollars thanks to a poopy diaper!

In the mid afternoon we had to do a lot of paperwork and to find all our reference documents. Our guide called it torture day. He was right. The paperwork was hard to understand but the guides knew what to do. Phew we survived. Tomorrow is wait day where we will find out whether the consulate will accept our group's paperwork, that we did today. Thankfully our group was able to adopt our children before the new Hague convention requirements kicked in. It would've delayed our adoption another 6 months to a year.

Tonight we came back around 845pm and fell asleep around 930. We woke up at 11:30 thinking it was 4 am. My short nap was enough to recharge me to do this blog. Hope it makes sense. I'm still sleepy and typing in the dark with a headlight. Signing out until tomorrow.

Shaolin Temple Photos

Guangzhou!

We've been in Guangzhou for roughly a day and a half and it's a very interesting place. We arrived at the airport surrounded in 94 degree heat mixed with high humidty, pollution, and a lot of smokers. Asthma spray here I come. We felt like swimming in the air. We eventually adjusted to the weather a little. My job title advance to pack mule, surgeon assistance, chemist, pack organizer and magician.

In a diaper change, I'm the surgeon assistance and magician. Arlene would call out and I would repeat what she said. "Poopy?, poopy; Pad, pad; Diaper, diaper; Wipes, wipes. Oh no, we have a hazmat emergency, break out the emergency pack, breaking out the emergency pack; Hazmat contained! hurrah! deodorized poop bag, bag; Activate decon wipes, decon wipes. Yea, we're done. High five! Sometimes I feel like a magician because things have to miraculously come out of my mule pack. We won't tell you our airplane adventure where the passenger in front of Rui was leaning forward as far away from her screaming or how she made such a mess that the stewardess kept giving me napkins or how they need a shopvac to clean the lunch they gave us.

Saturday we flew to Guangzhou and arrived around 3 pm to their smoggy airport. Thankfully we didn't have to take the H1N1 scans. They use buses to drive us from the landing area to the luggage area. We took roughly 5-6 hours of waiting in lines, and the flight to get to the famous White Swan around 4 pm. We were exhausted and hungary. Our new guide said, attention here is a bottle of water, and we will be taking visa photos at 5 pm and we will be walking to the studio. Aaagghh. It was a long day.

The room we had was really nice and had beds as hard as military cots. I'm glad I brought Advil for my back. For a high tech person, I coudn't figure out how to turn on/off lights for 10 minutes! Internet cost is 100 rmb/day or 300rmb/week. I was one of the last big spenders! By the morning we had drank all our drinking water and there were no sundry shops in the hotel and I was too cheap to spend $10 us on water from the mini refrigerator.

The buffet here is fantastic. The food is now more 70% english and 30% chinese. We prefer the previous buffet. They provided tatertots, brownies, peaches, ham, and italian curry trianglar wrapped pizzas?? We had the perfect view of the bay watching mechanical ships and boats manually picking up the hyacyins out of the water. I was busy reloading my empty water bottles with water because I didn't have time to buy drinking water and I heard these chinese attendant ladies talking impolitely about me about the water (they were smirking that I was a tightwad, etc..) and they were smiling at me the whole time. I had the urge to scold them in chinese but I only knew enough words to get me in trouble, so I didn't. I should have quietly walk up to them and smiled at them and said, I undertood everything you said about me and then walk away. They would've freaked out. When we shop, I try to talk to the staff and I'm surprise they understand my Cantonese.

We visited a local Christian church (across the street from the hotel) and really enjoy the service
at 11am. It was jam packed and delightful. Rui didn't complain at all (she slept for part of the sermon). We did a small amount of shopping. I hope the dvds I purchased aren't contraband! Of course not! I have receipts.

We took the visa photographs for the children yesterday and photos of all the families and then all the kids, and then the whole kitten kaboodle. It was completely fun, crazy, stressful at the same time. We made enough noise to attact the attention for the whole floor. We were all yelling out "CHEEZE" for roughly 20 cameras!

Every group has it's adventures, ups and downs. Please pray especially for two families where their adopted 10 yr old child is having a rough time adjusting, and for another mother who developed some medical conditions. Both families are believers at different stages. It may sound like we're having a lot of fun (we kinda are) but also it's a challenged adjusting to a new whiny daughter (applies to me, but it's getting better).

Well, tomorrow (Tuesday) we have the medical exam (we already know Rui is ticklish - yea) and a large amount of paperwork. Our guide said it would be torture and we have to meet in their rooms to save spending 1000s of rmbs. We're okay with that! We live one day at time here, slowly getting spoiled. But their water here is gross. It's a lite green color, if you want to take a bath. el yuck.....eewwwww. Well it's time to sign off. I have to reload my formula cartridge containers!

P.S. I think I'm losing weight!

This Picture Deserved It's Own Post!

Ready to Save California's Budget!!!

Bonus Post

More pictures for you to enjoy!

Descriptions: Checkpoint Lines in Beijing, Forbidden City, License to Drive, Shopping for a Belt, Walmart, Serious Jaywalker, Silk Factory

4th Day in Zhengzhou

Peekaboo!

Many of the adoption families had a great yesterday but a rough night. Many of the kids are still adjusting from the orphanage and are now showing their personalities, including Rui. She is attached to mom and recognizes me but will not allow me to hold or feed her the bottle. I spend most of my time now as a (humorously speaking) mule pack hauling formula, diapers, water, thermos, wipes, extra bottles, bibs spoons, much more (clothes, baby carrier, corn pop crackers and money. I'm finding that we eat a whole lot less with Rui eating with us. She is numero uno.

We had the option to visit the Shaolin Temple today and we went. The group started small and grew to roughly14 people. This was good because it also lowered the price. The temple was roughly 1.5 hours away and it was roughly a half day trip, which later became a 3/4 day trip.

The temple has been updated and fairly clean. The show was good and they demonstrated their skills and the buildings or temples we visited were also nice. The facility was spread out. They charged 20rmb (Arlene and myself) to drive you and your group via tram cart from one location to another location. (20 rmb for a 5 minute ride? What a deal/racket for them... I think our group spent (14 x 60 rmb) for transpo alone.

The temple is well commercialized now and that's kinda sad. A lady stumbled down some steps and a monk just watched. I was hoping to learn more of the kungfu arts and styles and buy some books but that was not the case. You could buy a real sword, but I would have problems bringing itback to the US. The pollution was noticeable and made it hard to take good pictures of the mountains. A number of us had bug bites, but we didn't really see the mosquitoes. They must have been Shaolin mosquitoes that bit us using their kungfu bites. haha.

Our guide recommended us to let me feed Rui dinner while mom took a break outside the room for a break.It was an opportunity for her to bond with me. Was this a successful and possible goal? Of course. I failed big time. She cried for 25 minutes and fell asleep in my arms from crying. Hey! You're suppose to feel sorry for me, not Rui. Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day. I can only stand for soo much rejection.

On a positve note, Rui sat on a highchair for her breakfast which was great. Arlene could finally eat! Rui is very entertaining when she is happy. She loves peekaboo. She can unscrew a water bottle, pretend to chug a lug, and screw it back on. She also tried to put on Arlene's walking shoes and sandals. To top that, she picked up the phone and almost called room service! yikes. Tomorrow is our last day of rest before heading to Guangzhou for our daughter's visa at the US consulate.

I was going to post a pic of a squat toilet but thot that was a bit gross. Beijing's squat porta potties were more interesting. and a whole lot cleaner (if you really have to go, you may opt to go in one that's designed a little bigger for additional needs). If you really want to see it, post me back a response.