Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Lanzhou - Day 4

Hello all,

Sorry that I haven't written in a while. I have been down with the flu or something for the last 2 days and haven't left the room. And since we have no internet in the room here, I haven't been able to update everyone.

Back to the 31st.... Katie-Beth slept wonderfully the first night. Right to sleep, no problems. She is a very restless sleeper though. She moves around all night.

After breakfast with the rest of the group and babies (who are all doing great) we went to get passport photos of the babies. Too cute! As soon as I get hold of a scanner I will send you Katie-Beth's. From there we went to the Civil Affairs office to deal with all the paperwork. It was all in Chinese, so who knows I may have pledged her to military service at age 14 but we put our fingerprints and her foot print on everything. Then we handed over the $3500. After everything we heard about them needing new crisp bills, they didn't even check, just counted it and we were good. It was a relief to not be carrying that money anymore!

So she is ours now! Ours, ours ours! Nobody can take her away! (We still have to do all the paperwork to take her out of the country but that doesn't happen until Guangzhou)

The second night was MUCH harder than the first night. (Apparently it was for everyone. I guess the babies figured out that this was it they were stuck with these funny looking people) Katie-Beth refused to go to sleep and then she woke up furious around 4:00 a.m.

She is a very stubborn little girl. She won't eat until she can convince you it is her idea. She also gets loudly frustrated when she can't get things to go the way she wants them to. But she is very smart. We caught her trying to put her own shoes on yesterday! And Mary Edwards, she LOVES that baby faces book you gave us. She stares and stares at it!

I haven't taken her around town, but Mike has. He says everywhere we go people surround him and want to hold her. They are all amazed at how cute she is. He went to the grocery store the other day and she was held by at least 6 different people.

Mike is incredible with her. Watching them, I am falling in love with him all over again! He is such an amazing father. And she is just nuts about him. Her eyes light up whenever she sees him.

Here is a picture of Katie-Beth on her first Halloween!!! Go Gators!!! And I finally got one of her smiling. She smiles all the time, but doesn't like to do it for photographs!