Pretty in Pink

Lily slept through the night once again. They told me in her referral report that she was a deep sleeper and they were right! She barely moves all night. Unlike Jack who wiggles all night and sticks his feet in my back. We have a king sized bed in our suite so we are sleeping all together. We made a bed on the floor for Jack, but he didn't want to sleep there. We are trying very hard to include him in everything and didn't want him to feel left out so there you have it. 3 to a bed. It is actually working out just fine-except for the feet in my back!

This morning we played with Lily with some stacking cups and an empty water bottle. She is really starting to come out of her shell. She still screams bloody murder if I leave the room or if Tim or Jack hold her. At least she is bonding with me and they will come later. She talked to us a lot today and is really good at making raspberries. Jack was in the other room and made a raspberry at Tim, he was mad at Tim, and when Lily heard it in the other room she made one. It was really funny. We played "Patty Cake" and "How Big is Lily" and she laughed and laughed!

The breakfast scene is quite something! It is a buffet and the room is very large and open. Quite beautiful. There are about 40 families staying at our hotel who are adopting. So all the tables have a highchair. At the buffet one of the things they serve is congee which is a rice paste sort of mush. I have the recipe for it and you basically cook rice in water for an hour. All Chinese babies eat it and love it. This morning sitting next to our table were a group of Spaniards so of course I had to talk to them. (For those of you who don't know, I lived in Spain my Junior year of college.) I talked to this woman for about a half an hour in Spanish. It was so exciting for me! I could understand everything she said and lots of words came right back. She was from Valencia. Anyway, when I was leaving Lily kicked her foot and knocked a dish on the floor and it broke. All the waiters ran up and cleaned it up for me, but as I was walking out this man came up and told me I owed 10 Yuen for the broken dish. Bummer! She did sit in the high chair without crying so that was another improvement.

After that we got on our bus and our group ventured off the local Walmart. We were given special tags written in Chinese that said 'We are American adopting babies from China etc...' explaining why we were carrying Chinese babies. I didn't think much about it but boy was I glad I had that. We had people really staring at us. I have NEVER felt so foreign in my life than today. Walmart was basically the same as the US ones except in the US they don't sell worms, turtles, whole baby pigs that have been cooked and sauced and many other weird foods for dinner. Yes, worms for dinner. We bought some formula for Lily, diapers, snacks for Jack, a toy for Jack, and some Chinese New decorations for our house. We are going to celebrate Chinese New Year now.

After we left the store, we went to meet our group outside and no one was there. We were hounded by people, men, women and children holding cups begging for money. It was a bit scary for me. When I say hounded I mean it. The bus finally came and when we got to the hotel we realized Jack's new Beijing Olympics Wallet was gone. He had been pick pocketed!

Lily had her first playdate with Lily Grace Chun who lives in Denver. Hopefully there will be many more of those. We had to cut it short because Lily Lu was a party pooper-literally!

We are off to a group dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. They say the food here in Jianxi is spicy-spicier than Hunan. My stomach has been a little weird today so I-yes me! may pass on the spice tonight!

Until tomorrow,
Lisa