Trip to China
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Wednesday, July 12, 2006 We went grocery shopping last night and Jia did incredibly well. Joe had her in the Baby Bjorn and she was interested in everything. Everyone there was interested in her as well. We received lots of approving looks, which was reassuring. It was horribly noisy at the store with loudspeakers, videos, and staff with microphones shouting about their goods. Jia, in fact, fared better than we did. While we were there we purchased some jars of baby food for her. She really enjoyed the local varieties, such as tremella mushroom, lotus seed and lily paste. She also loved her mashed carrots, as you’ll notice by the mustache. We decided to skip all the bone marrow and liver ones. She finally took a bottle tonight, with many pacifier breaks. Her refined palate apparently requires a mixture of two parts sweetened formula, three parts rice cereal, quite warm water and a fast-flow bottle. Now we know. Her palate keeps changing though. She plowed through a bunch of pureed prunes the first day we got her. (And they did their trick.) But we tried to feed her some today and she actually shuddered at the taste. So prunes no more. Jia has now determined that I’m the funny one, and Joe is still the nurturing one. So I get the fleeting smiles and laughs and Joe gets the cuddles. It’s a role reversal that we didn’t anticipate, but it’s working for now. We’ve been telling her that we’re Mama and Baba. She becomes very quiet, like she’s pondering hard about it, and then looks at us with great suspicion. But we think it’s sinking in. Wuhan lived up to its furnace reputation again today – another steamy 100 degree plus day. We were in a bus for most of the day though. We first visited her social welfare institute. She spent just a few days there in total because she was in foster care almost all of the time, but she did visit the institute regularly. We also visited her finding place, a senior center in Qichun County. The whole trip was quite long so we’re glad we brought a bunch of Cheerios to keep her happy.

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