Beijing

We've been in Beijing for three days now and what bliss. After a rather long day of travel, that included Elan's first flight, during which time she squirmed for three hours non-stop, we arrived to be told we'd been upgraded to a five star hotel. And when your whole world is a hotel room this is newsworthy! An added bonus, the hotel is in a very central location! Another newsworthy fact after ten days on the outskirts of Guangzhou with nothing (and we mean nothing) to do but hang out in your room and the hotel lobby. Our time in Beijing also comes with three pre-arranged tours. We've seen the Summer Palace and Great Wall so far and tomorrow, weather permitting is the Forbidden City. Mommy and baba have loved the tours, Elan not so much. She's finding all of this extremely difficult and has become prone to tantrums and is sleeping badly. We're glad our time in China is wrapping up soon so we can get her home and into a stable routine.

Today we wrapped up the final bit of paperwork - a doctor's appointment and the submission of Elan's visa so she can come home with us. Yay!

The E Challenge

It's been a challenging few days. Elan has started to attach to us but with that has come lots of tears and testing us. We've all become a bit tired of living out of a hotel room and roaming the grounds outside, weather permitting. We're counting down the hours until we leave for Beijing and really, really looking forward to a few days of touring! We'll update again from Beijing.

The Birthday Girl

Elan turned one today and celebrated with her yeh yeh, mama, ah sok, goo jeh, baba and mommy (that is: grandpa, grandma, uncle William, auntie Deborah, dad and mom). She enjoyed eating her cards, smashing her red envelopes into her cake and playing with te grapes on the cake. She's never had sweets before so the cake itself was a mere sideline...here are the pictures from the last couple days.

It's me (E) again!

Well, it's official. The honeymoon period is over. After an amazingly easy first 24 hours together, E hit us with several bouts of diaper exploding poo and a few rounds of spitting up yesterday. And last night a new tooth started coming through. Our hotel room was a shrine to the laundry gods - every spare inch of hanging space was covered in drying baby clothes.

Today started off well. E woke up and when she saw our faces broke out into her big beautiful smile. Then the fussing began again. We think the trauma of what's happened is really hitting her now. She's doing a terrific job adjusting but the curiosity with everything she displayed two days ago is giving way to nervousness at anything new.

She is still the queen of stacking cups and has great fun with the yellow ball gramma bought for her. Unfortunately Sophie the teething giraffe has been classified as ass by E who wants nothing to do with her. She's a champ with her bottle, eats up all her congee, has taken quite a liking to Cheerios but says no to any form of fruit and veggies.

Alive and Kicking!

It was raining here yesterday - a Vancouver kind of mist that seems impervious to umbrellas - so we spent the hours leading up to meeting E in our room watching CNN and the traffic below our window.

When we arrived at the government office the babies were caught in traffic somewhere in the city. They arrived not long after and then we had the odd experience of being in the same room with them but not being able to touch or hold them until our paperwork had been verified. So we spent several minutes snapping pictures and talking to her while she sat in her nanny's arms.

When they finally put her in my arms it was overwhelming. I can't describe the emotion. I just let go and cried. And there were E and baba as cool as can be!

She's been an amazing trooper, handling what can only be a confusing and scary experience for her with spirit! Last night she wouldn't eat but spent lots of time playing with her stacking cups. This morning she downed a bowl of congee and then demonstrated her crawling skills while we filled out the forms and answered questions that officially made her ours! She finally took a bottle around noon. She's gota bit of a cold- we thought she was active already - but after some meds today she really got going, smiling and laughing and playing with a ball and her stacking cups. She has a great attention span and boundless energy!

More soon!

It's the Final Countdown!

This is it! We're into our last few hours pre E! We meet Elan this afternoon at 4pm.

The room at the hotel when we arrived yesterday afternoon was already set up with a crib! We unpacked, bought supplies (diapers, crackers & cheese, noodles, cookies and beer) and generally settled in for the next ten days.

We likely won't be back to the hotel until 6pm tonight and there is the matter of getting Elan settled. We will do our best to update with pics tomorrow but may have to wait until the following day. We're also encountering some difficulties accessing our blog site...

We missed you all!

xoxox

Cats in the Craddle

After days of complete disinterest in the nursery Murchie decided to give the crib and the change pad a try. We have no idea how he got into the crib and thankfully he has not repeated this feat of high jumping since. The change pad on the other hand seems to have become a favorite snoozing spot.

Two Weeks until E Day!

It's almost unimaginable that in two weeks we will be holding Miss E in our arms! After nearly two years we can hardly wait!

Our Travel Itinerary

October 26 - Arrive in Hong Kong for some Huen family time
October 30 - Take the train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou
October 31 - E Day! Happy Halloween
November 1 - Adoption paper work day
November 2 to 9 - Free time in Guangzhou
November 4 - Elan's first birthday!
November 10 - Fly from Guangzhou to Beijing
November 11 - Tour of the Great Wall
November 12 - Tour of the Summer Palace
November 13 - Elan's medical exam
November 14 - Tour of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City
November 15 - Elan's visa for Canada comes through
November 16 - Free day
November 17 - We're home. Hooray!

Miss E is Eleven Months old Today!

In honour of this milestone Mommy has sterilized bottle nipples, soothers and teething rings and washed sippy cups, bottles, plastic bowls and forks and spoons!

Mommy and Baba can't believe that this time next month we will be celebrating our darling Miss E's first birthday as a family! Hooray!

Travel Dates are In!

Great news! Our agency has managed to move our travel dates up so we can be with our daughter on her first birthday! We will arriving in Guangzhou on Tuesday October 30 and can come home any time from November 16 onward, leaving from Beijing. Detailed itinerary of our time in China to come.

An Élan Update from China!

Yay! Our agency called today to let us know that Élan is reportedly doing very well in her orphanage and had some new stats for us! Our little sweetheart is now 2ft 2" tall and weighs in at 17 pounds - she is now officially bigger than our two fuzz puffs (cats). Her little feet measure 4.1" and she has two teeth!


On the travel front, we won't be meeting Élan before November. We were hoping we might squeeze in before the industry trade fair in Guangzhou begins in October but no such luck (and at a 3000% mark-up on hotel rooms during the trade fair we're just as glad to be waiting until November!). Right now we are scheduled to be in China from November 5-23. Our agency is working to see if we can advance those dates a little bit so that our little girl will be with us on her first birthday (November 4).

Ten months and counting!

The clock has just ticked past midnight in China. Élan is ten months old today!

A Perfect Day to Enter the World

The wonders of the Internet. On the day of her birth this was the weather in Zhanjiang:

Temperature

Average Temperature 22 °C
Max 28 °C
Min 16 °C

Moisture
Average Humidity 55
Max Humidity 93
Min Humidity 19
Precipitation 0.0 cm
Wind
Wind Speed 5mph / 7km/h
Max Wind Speed 11mph / 18 km/h
Visibility 6.0 miles / 9.8 km

By all accounts, a lovely day to enter the world!

Checking the "Yes" Box

Yesterday we met with our adoption practitioner (i.e. social worker) to formally accept Elan as our daughter! (Yes, you can actually tick a box that says “we refuse the proposed adoption. As if!)!

The process involved updating our home study with an “Acceptance of Child” report for the Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services and signing a “Letter of Seeking Confirmation from Adopter” for the China Centre of Adoption Affairs (CCAA). We will be returning all of these documents to our agency today who will then submit them to the appropriate government body. And then we wait for our travel advisory from China! Yay!

On the travel front we were disappointed to learn that we will not be traveling to Suixi to meet our daughter and see the people and place where she spent the first year of her life. Instead, Elan will be brought to us in the capital of Guangdong Province, Guanzhou. Guangdong Province requires that adoptive families spend a week and a half in the province (more paperwork) so we are hoping that during that time we will receive permission to visit the county of Suixi as well as her orphanage and finding spot. We have been able to find a few pictures of her orphanage on the Internet. The play room looks clean and bright!

We’ll know more about when we leave for China sometime in September, when our agency will hold a travel meeting for us and the one other family we will be traveling to China with. We’ll make a smaller than normal group on the ground! (This is because the CCAA batches files by log in date (LID) not by agency. In the latest round of referrals from the CCAA only ourselves and one other family (also of Chinese heritage) fell within their LID cut-off for this round.)

And Baby Makes Three

Drum roll please…

We are thrilled to introduce our beautiful daughter, Élan Mei Xia MacDonald Huen, born November 4, 2006 in Suixi County, Guangdong Province, China! Mei Xia, her middle name, is the name given to her by the orphanage where she is currently being cared for. It is pronounced may (Mei) ha (Xia) and means beautiful summer.

At birth she weighed a healthy 6.4 pounds and was 18.5 inches long. By all accounts she is developing normally. At 1-2 months she could see moving objects and bright colours and would wave her hands and legs excitedly if a toy rattle was shaken. At 3-4 months she was able to roll onto her stomach and could move herself to the side of her crib where she would reach across to try and touch the baby in the adjoining crib. At 5-6 months she was grasping objects tightly and watching the going-ons around her. At six months she weighed in at 15.4 pounds and was 26.2 inches.

She is a fan of dim sum and prefers her food a little sweet in taste. She is her baba’s daughter! Her favorite toys are a rattle and blocks and her favorite activity is playing with other people. A good sign we think!

Unfortunately we don’t have any details on her development after six months of age, when her medical was done for the purposes of placing her for adoption.

We’re already smitten as can be and can’t wait to meet her sometime in November!

Geography 101 - Guangdong Province

While we wait for our daughter’s full referral and pictures we’ve undertaken to find out a little bit more about where she comes from. Here’s the low down:

Guangdong (廣東) province is located on the south coast of the People’s Republic of China. The word Guang means expanse or vast and Dong means east - expanse east. It is the most populous province in China with approximately 80 million people and a further 30 million migrant workers. It is also among the richest provinces in the country, boasting the highest GDP, estimated to be $329.67 billion in 2006. Its contribution to China’s national economic output is approximately 12%. The province is populated predominantly by Cantonese speakers.

The province’s northern border is defined by a collection of mountain ranges called the Southern Mountain Range (南岭); its southern border faces the South China Sea with a total of 4,300km of coastline. In the southwestern end of the province there are a few inactive volcanoes on the Leizhou Peninsula. China’s third largest river, the Pearl River (珠江), at 2,200km, runs through Guangdong, emptying into the South China Sea between Hong Kong and Macau. The river is formed by the convergence of the Xi Jiang ("the West River"), the Bei Jiang ("the North River"), and the Dong Jiang ("the East River")

Guangdong has a humid subtropical climate (tropical in the far south), with short, mild, dry, winters and long, hot, wet summers. Humidex aside, average daily highs in Guangzhou in January and July are 18C (64F) and 33C (91F) respectively. Bad news for mom!

A few random facts:
• Most of the railroad labourers in Canada, Western United States and Panama in the 19th century came from Guangdong.
• The SARS virus is thought to have originated in Guangdong, due to the cuisine of the region, which famously includes "anything that walks, crawls or flies". Lookin’ forward to it!
• There is an international radio station, Radio Guangdong, which broadcasts information about this region to the entire world through the World Radio Network.
• Guangdong has a basketball team, the Guangdong Hongyuan Southern Tigers, and two football teams, the Guangzhou Yiyao and the Shenzhen Shangqingyin.

Our Daughter's Orphanage

Right now our daughter is in the Siu Xi County Social Welfare Institute in the prefecture, or administrative unit, of Zhanjiang City – the equivalent of our daughter living in a suburb of Toronto.

Siu Xi County Social Welfare Institute
Wen Dong Road, Sui Cheng Town
Sui Xi County, Guangdong Province
China
Postal Code: 524300

Click here to see where her orphanage is: http://www.redthreadmaps.com/guangdong_m.html

Zhangjiang

Zhanjiang is located on an inlet of the South China Sea on the eastern coast of the Leizhou Peninsula at the point where the three rivers that form the Pearl River converge. The dialect of Leizhou is different from Cantonese and is called Min Nan. This dialect seems to be closer to Taiwanese and is not mutually interchangeable with Cantonese (dammit!). It has a population of 6.57 million.


Zhanjiang was occupied by the French in 1898. At the time it was a small fishing village that the French wanted to develop as a port to serve parts of southern China for which France had exclusie rights to railway and mineral development. In 1899, the French forced the Chinese to lease Zhanjiang to them for 99 years as the territory of Kwang-Chou-Wan. Their efforts to develop the port however, were hindered by the poverty of the surrounding land. The French retained control of the region until 1943, when the Japanese occupied the area during World War II. At the end of the war the region returned briefly under French rule before being formally returned to China in 1946, at which time its original name of Zhanjiang was restored.
Today Zhanjiang is a seaport and trade centre. The city supports many varied industries including shipyards, textile plants and sugar refining. It is a large mining and mineral exploration region and the port gateway to some of the largest agricultural producing areas in Southern China.

The port is also the headquarters of the South Sea Fleet of the Chinese Navy.

The Stork has Landed!

We have a daughter! We got the call yesterday around 4:35pm and here's what we know so far:

Name: Sui Mei Xia, soon to be Élan Mei Xia MacDonald Huen
D.O.B: Novembre 4, 2006, Guangdong Province

Since so many of you have asked, she was born in the Year of the Dog (狗) and is a Scorpio.

We are meeting with our agency on Friday afternoon at 5:15pm to get her full profile and pictures!

Mommy and baba (that's daddy in Cantonese) are thrilled!

Possibly, Maybe

Word on the street has it that June 2006 expedited-due-to-Chinese-heritage families are receiving referrals with the November 21, 2005 batch. Let the stork fly!