Looking Back

Here are some photos from our trip to China. It was just about seven months ago that Marty and I left to bring Elizabeth home. I don't know if we really knew just how dramatically our lives would change once we returned home. Actually we didn't know.

There are so many days I marvel at the odds and the absolute miracle that had to transpire for all of the forces to converge and for us to be brought together with Elizabeth.

Here we are just moments after seeing Elizabeth in person for the first time...



This is us just before she showed up....(sorry for the random order of these photos...it is too darn hard on this blogger program to go back and reorder the photos)




And here we are with the 17 other families with their new babies...sometimes I think back on that experience and of traveling around China on a bus with 17 babies who just met their parents--probably one of the most intense of my life experiences.





This was the view outside of the room at our second hotel. We really did get our money's worth out of those hotels--aside from our required outings and official business--we barely ventured outside owing to the really bad air and our deire to avoid a lot of the chaos that seems to define Guangzhou. I sometimes feel bad that we didn't see more of the city but then I remember how crazy it was getting around (not to mention the smells--oy vey!) and the stress involved in traveling around was way more than we were up to at that point. Our goal for the trip was to get there and to get home with Elizabeth, hopefully all in one piece.



Here we our at one of our required outings--a visit to the medical center at Shamian Island where we had to go through the basic beauracratic medical exams--another surreal experience. This is also where we realized we were staying in the wrong part of town. Shamian Island was where most of those who adopt in Guangzhou stay. It has lots of amenities we could have used. Our facilitator didn't want us to stay there for reasons that were strictly his own.



Here is Marty standing outside the hotel next to ours...just a day before we met Elizabeth. Ah, he looked so fancy free then.



This is just part of the medicine cabinet I traveled to China with. I had another section of cold and flu medicine that was just as large. Believe it or not last week I discovered a small bag that I had not yet unpacked that had some of these things in it. Guess I have been a little busy, eh?



And here are our suitcases still unpacked on the first day we got to China. Little did we know that this was the last time our lives would look so organized for quite a while.