Around Guangzhou. The hotel is on an “island” in Guangzhou a somewhat isolated, manicured, colonial-era neighborhood. There are a couple of beautiful parks and it is a very pretty and friendly place to walk. There are a lot of good restaurants, hotels, a Starbucks and many shops that cater to families like ours who are adopting. People come here to get wedding photos taken apparently (like every day), and Jiao Jiao goes up to the brides-to-be and pushes into their hoops and trains and looks up at them as if they were old friends waiting to be included in the photos. Of course they think she is pretty cute.

 

QiuLi is doing well. There are rough patches for her especially at sleep time. At the moment she's pushing Kathie away at bedtime and mostly has to fall asleep with me. I feel for Kathie, because it is a pretty special time-- I don't think it will be long before things shift however. Ella Jiao continues to be a great trooper. She is doing her best but it is clearly tough on her to have the attention suddenly shift away from her.

 

Today was a real good day -- the girls got along much better and played a good bit together. Ella Jiao wiped tears from QiuLi's face at one point. At another point, Kathie put on some Chinese music and QiuLi immediately started singing along with it. Ella Jiao, not familiar with the lyrics, promptly asked QiuLi "you need to go poo-poo?"

 

QiuLi meanwhile isn’t fazed by any language barriers. She continues to imitate us, not knowing what most of it means of course. A lot of her sounds are affected by her cleft palate. Luckily, she’ll be learning most of her English with a repaired palate and hopefully won’t learn English with compensatory habits and sounds – so the timing of the repair, adoption, and language acquisition could work to her advantage.

 

 

Posted by Tom