Trip to China
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Tuesday, December 15, 2009 Today was our Consulate appointment so we had to stay in our room this morning while our guide Elvin took our paperwork to the Consulate. If we did not receive a phone call by 11:30am then we were all clear! We were all clear and we spent the rest of the morning repacking our clean laundry and organizing our room. We stayed in the room basically because it was pouring today. POURING RAIN!!! At around 1pm we grabbed some White Swan umbrellas and ran over to Lucy’s for lunch. Afterwards we came back to get ready to meet our group to tour the Botanical Gardens. I was wondering if we were going to actually go since it was raining so hard. We all met at 2:30pm and the choices were to visit the Electronics Market or brave the weather and visit the Gardens. One family decided to stay back at the hotel. The 3 other families decided to brave the weather. It was sprinkling when we left but started to rain harder as we pulled up to the Gardens. We all said WHAT THE HECK and decided to tour anyway. There was only about 3 other people there and we had the whole place to ourselves. It is certainly a beautiful place regardless of the weather however I much prefer visiting the Garden in the SUN! We got back to the hotel at 5pm and decided on Subway for dinner. We plan to hang out in the room for the rest of the evening. As I was looking back at this site I realized that I have given the impression that everything has been a fairytale with Ava since we received her. I want to be totally honest on this site. I know that when we were adopting Luke and having a tough time I thought I was the only one having a bad experience. I felt so alone thinking that we were the only parents not living the fairytale. It is important to me that I give an accurate and honest account of our journey. We received Ava on Friday, 12/4. She cried for about 20 minutes and then stopped. Since that point in time she has not grieved at all. We have not experienced any situations where we thought she was breaking down or secluding herself from us because of grief. What we HAVE experienced it some very spoiled and disobedient behavior over the last 12 days. I obviously know that some of this behavior is very normal for a child who has been taken out of their environment especially since they feel that they have no control over what is happening to them. I also know this manifests itself in different ways. In Ava’s instance she is disobedient and very very mean to Katelyn. Katelyn has been really wonderful to her. She has been the total go-to-girl on this trip. I have been very impressed by her behavior. Since moment one, Katelyn has done whatever she could to help Ava acclimate to her new life. Ava is very interested in Katelyn if she has food or a toy Ava wants. But other than that Ava will scream, cry and tantrum if Katelyn stands too close to her, gets too close to her stroller, hands her a tissue after she sneezes, helps her into a chair, offers her a drink, helps to get her food from the breakfast buffet, etc. The list goes on. The first several days we really tried to work through this and we catered to Ava's wants however we found the more we catered to Ava that the more ridiculous her behavior became. The past several days we have had multiple tantrums per day. The worst instance was 2 days ago when I asked Katelyn to simply push Ava’s stroller up 2 feet so I could access the safe. Ava flew into a tantrum complete with crying and screaming. I will not lie and say that this has been easy to deal with. It hasn’t. It has been ridiculously tough. Katelyn is my helper on this trip and I depend on her to assist me with the girls. Kiah has also been under a lot of strain due to this issue. Up until several days ago it was almost impossible to have a quiet moment with her. So, all in all, we are just like everyone else dealing with being away from home, eating unfamiliar foods and dealing with all of the aspects of adopting a pre-schooler. So if you have experienced a rough time, please know you are not alone. I confirmed our return flights this evening and we are looking forward to the swearing ceremony tomorrow at the Consulate as it brings us one more step closer to going home. We don’t have any new pics today due to the rain and being in the hotel all day so these pics are from the past few days.

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