Blog Six

We had wondered and imagined for months what it was going to be like when we finally met Emma Lee.
Well, it wasn’t exactly like we had envisioned. We were just as delighted and overcome with emotion as we expected to be.
Her?
Not so much.
I haven’t heard screaming and crying like that since we finally took Bunny Rabbit away from Jackson. For me, it was Déjà vu; that’s the way Missy wailed when she first met me.
We met her in the Adoption Center and Civil Affairs office in Hefei (Ha-Fay), the capital of Anhui (And-Wee) Province. When they brought her in with another little girl, we recognized her right away and knew she was ours.
She wasn’t quite as thrilled, though. She kept clinging to the leg of the orphanage director and started screaming when Missy tried to get her.
She kept on screaming bloody murder for about 30 or 40 minutes. As Missy held her and tried to comfort her, she kept twisting around and trying to find the director, whom she was obviously very familiar with. When Missy sat her back down, she immediately tried to run back to him.
With the help of my new trusted sidekick, Frank, our Chinese guide, the director explained to me that it was not uncommon for some of the children to act that way, especially ones her age (about 2 and a half).
He explained to us that she was very attached to her foster family and some of the nannies at the orphanage. Though she was going through a difficult time, it made us happy to know that she had been loved.
He also explained that she had never seen people who looked like us. I wasn’t sure if he was talking about Americans in general, or just us.
He also told us that she was very smart and that she understood just enough to know what was happening.
After a while, she began to calm down and we were able to take her with us. We left with her and another little girl that was adopted by Dave and Lori, our new friends from Livonia, Mich.
Frank took us to a huge mall and supermarket and she enjoyed that, looking around at all the people and things she had never seen before. During the ride, she looked out the window and smiled when she saw all the people, with scooters and bikes zooming by and horns blaring.
In the grocery store, we got a lot of strange looks from shoppers and store clerks. You could tell that many of them were wondering what the strange Americans were doing with a Chinese baby. I guess some of them thought she was Frank’s.
A lot of them also greeted us warmly and came up to see her.
Frank had explained earlier that a lot of people in places like Hefei do not understand the adoption process. He said they know that there are many children in orphanages, but they do know not that Americans and others come to adopt them.
The ones that do understand, he said, are very gracious and appreciative because they understand what we are doing and they were are given their children a good home.
Once we got Emma back to the hotel room, she began to settle down a little bit.
When she arrived at the Adoption Center, she was clinging tightly to a little plastic grocery bag that had something in it. She would not let go of it. She would have a fit if you tried to take it away, jerking it away from you and crying. She held it so tightly her in fist that you couldn’t take it away.
It wasn’t until we got back to the hotel room, about two hours later, that we were able to find out what was in the bag.
We thought it might be clothes or some toys or something like that.
Finally, she let us take it and look inside.
It was filled with food. Candy, sweet cakes and all kinds of treats.
We dumped it out on the floor and she got very excited. I gave her one of the sweet cakes, opened it for her and she immediately starting devouring it. She sat on my lap and ate with while drinking some juice.
This was a touching moment because we realized that someone loved her enough to send her away with a bag of her favorite treats.
Some of the other children who came to the orphanage were dirty and had nothing but the clothes on their back.
Emma was nicely dressed, well-groomed and holding onto her treats. It made us feel good to know that she was loved and well-taken care of. That explains a lot about why she was so upset to leave.
As you can tell by the treats, she loves to eat. She ate two or three of the little cakes before dinner.
The director had also told us that she would eat anything. He was right.
We ordered room service and she ate some of Missy’s french fries. She then climbed in my lap and ate a ton of steamed rice and chicken soup. I can’t wait for her to lay into some of Mama’s chicken and dumplings.
Enough rambling for now. Can’t wait to see what today brings.