Our New Twins

Let's Get Growing

On the Monday after we got home (second week of April 2005), we took the girls for their first doctor’s appointment. Dr. Russo said they were the healthiest adopted girls from overseas that she had ever seen. They were in perfect health, except they were a bit small. They were even smaller than their Chinese medical records said they were. At 13 and a half months, they were each just over 18 pounds. I don’t remember how long they were, but each girl was in the second percentile for both weight and height for their age. At least they were on the chart.

They may be small, but they are trying to catch up. They began by eating whatever we would feed them. In China, they had never eaten from a spoon. By the time we got home, they would eat whatever we put on the spoon.

Before the weather got hot, we could take the girls out to the deck. They loved to run around, play with their ball, or just climb on the furniture. Mom would sometimes take them out with her gardening. No, rocks are not for eating. No, you can’t eat the mulch. Katherine always loves having them outside with her.

We are now getting out more.  We've been to two horse shows already.  Julia sat on Ken's horse and Katherine is already trying to get them interested in the horse world.  Everyone is trying to help us with our pony problem.  I did not know we had a pony problem.  The girls don't have a pony.  That's the pony problem.  I see don't see the problem, but the girls do now have new rocking horse ponies.  At least we've solved the pony problem for now.  

Going Home

Going Home

The Guangzhou airport is like so many airports in China – virtually brand-new, spacious, and with short lines that move very slowly. Needless to say, the Chinese population does not travel by air in large numbers. It reminds me of air travel in the US in the 1960s, except each flight is much more crowded and the seats have narrowed (or so it seems).

We flew from Guangzhou to Beijing in about three and a half hours and met Michelle who had gone a day earlier to visit friends. We then had a two hour layover before the big flight. We had our last hours in China waiting at a small coffee shop / cafeteria. With the last of our Chinese money we bought water and had a bite to eat. The cafeteria served the best Chinese dumplings that I had on the whole trip. It reminded me that our focus had been very different for this trip. But I sure wished we had sought out better Chinese food when we had the chance.

At 5 pm local time Thursday (Beijing), we boarded our flight for Chicago. We expected to arrive at about the same time in Chicago – 5 pm local time Thursday. It was a twelve hour flight and a twelve hour time difference. The Boeing 777 has five seats in the middle and, with the girls seats, we took up an entire row. Katherine and Michelle on one end, me on the other, with the two girls in the center. We had a favorable tail wind (sometimes as high as 75 mph) and the girls were sleeping much of the time. Both combined for a great flight to Chicago.

Fortunately, we landed in Chicago about an hour early. We needed the extra time to get off the plane, find our strollers (which took forever), then go through customs and immigration. While Michelle waited for us in immigration, she was sniffed by a fruit-smelling customs dog. Apparently, she was tagged to go through an additional customs inspection for fruit (and pushing a cart with our bags on top of it. We finally made it out of customs, only to find that we had to go two terminals over for our plane. Because the strollers could only go on the elevator and because we changed several levels getting to the terminal, in addition to having to re-enter security, we made our flight to DC with only seconds to spare. We had just flown over seven thousand miles, through three international airports, and almost missed our connection in Chicago, of all places.

We finally made our last flight and headed for home. Unfortunately, we were delayed leaving O'Hare Airport. When we arrived at Dulles Airport, about 45 minutes late, we saw our greeting party. Karen was there to pick us up and John was there to get Michelle, but Ken and Laine also were their to see the girls. It was great fun seeing our friends and family after two weeks in China. The girls continued to be great. They laughed and maintained a great humor while being passed around for all to see. We were home now, and it was time to get these girls accustomed to their new home.

As an aside, the only hitch we had with our luggage occurred in our flight from O'Hare to Dulles. Our luggage had followed us from the start from DC to Chicago to Beijing to Chongqing to Guangzhou back to Beijing then to Chicago. The handlers at Chicago, however, could not get our luggage to the plane, even though our flight arrived early and our flight to Dulles was delayed. All of our luggage was left in Chicago.

Guangzhou

We left Chongqing on Saturday, after completing all of our paper requirements for the adoptions. When we left Chongqing, these two little girls were ours by Chinese law. They were ours by love the moment we met them. Now we were ready for the last leg of our trip. On to Guangzhou and processing for their visa at the U.S. consulate.

We arrived at the beautiful new Chongqing airport by 9:00 am for our 11:30 am flight to Guangzhou. This was the girls first flight and we did what we could to make it comfortable. After Lifeng arranged for our tickets and for our overweight luggage, we set off for the gate. The girls were in their orange strollers, which had become their permanent housing outside the hotel rooms. Katherine and Michelle we off to find some breakfast and I had the privilege of giving Julia and Joanna their bottles in the waiting area of the gate. As in most things, the girls were very cooperative. I placed their strollers side-by-side and, with a bottle in each hand, inserted the nipple and turned bottoms up. The girls gladly downed their bottles with barely a drop spilled. After we wiped faces and readjusted our seats, the girls settled down for a brief snooze.

As I sat their watching the girls, one of the passengers looked at me, then at the girls. He smiled and then said in English, "they're Chinese?" "Yes," I said. "Did you get them here?" "Yes" I said, as though I had just left Wal-Mart with two new girls. "And you are taking them back home with you?" "Yes" I said, wondering where this was going. Suddenly his smile grew even larger and he gave me a big thumbs up. "Great, Great," he said, walking off with his thumb still in the air.

The girls were great on the plane. Katherine and I had to hold the girls on our laps, but they were perfect travelers. They munched Cheerios and snoozed the entire way. When we landed in Guangzhou, it was as such a breath of fresh air. Literally. Coming from the pollution and fog of Chongqing, the warm tropical air of Guangzhou was more than welcoming.

We arrived on a clear warm afternoon and soon were checked into the White Swan Hotel. The view at the White Swan could not have been more different than Chongqing. In Chongqing we saw very few Westerners and certainly none with Chinese babies. At the White Swan, being next door to the U.S. Consulate where every American adopting family must obtain a visa for the Chinese children, it seemed that half of the hotel rooms were occupied by American adopting families. The shops outside the hotel catered to families with small children (and everyone did laundry service).

Our day is a free day and we take the time to recover from our colds. The girls continue to be great traveling companions, but the White Swan rooms are very small compared to what we had in Chongqing. We followed An Li's advice and got a suite because the White Swan rooms are small. But the hotel cribs presented our biggest problem. In Chongqing, we had little infant play pens as cribs. They had padded floor and soft sides. At the White Swan, we had wooden cribs with virtually no mattress on a hard crib floor and little padding around the sides. Like the rooms at the White Swan, the cribs were small and not accommodating for babies that like to roll around. The girls were frequently bumping the crib rails with a cry.

The girls had their visa pictures taken on Monday morning, followed by their visa medical exams at a local Chinese clinic. We walked to the medical clinic from our hotel, but faced a line of at least twenty babies ahead of us plus the regular clinic patrons. We were the last ones examined, but we checked out without any problems. We left the clinic by noon, and headed back for lunch and a nap. Since Katherine and I had both been sick, we were each taking naps with the girls to regain our strength.

On Monday morning we headed to the Guangzhou zoo. The grounds were beautiful, but like any zoo, it's residents were held captive outside their native habitat. They all seemed very comfortable (the Chinese tigers were gorgeous), but Katherine and I both find zoos to be like visiting well-maintained prisons. We took the day as an opportunity to stroll the garden-like grounds in semi-fresh air. While Guangzhou was the cleanest and least polluted city we visited, by Monday and Tuesday, the air quality had deteriorated from what we saw on our first day. I could not wait to see the clear skies of home.

On Tuesday, AnLi presented our paperwork to the U.S. Consulate and I had to sign one additional document promising to immunize the girls when we got back home. When the paperwork was accepted, we were told to return for a swearing-in. Since the girls (and most of the other adoptees) had been pre-approved for adoption by the U.S. Department of State and the INS, we knew that the girls would be U.S. citizens when we returned home. Most people thought the swearing-in somehow would make the girls citizens. When we finally went to the swearing-in on Wednesday morning (with about 25 other families in a small room at the consulate), we were surprised to see that the only thing we swore was that we had provided true and complete information on our applications. Couldn't this be done in writing?

AnLi picked up the girls' U.S. visas (in their Chinese passports) on Wednesday afternoon. Everything looked correct, so we began packing for home. We bought an extra suitcase from the street vendors outside the hotel for 100 yuan (about $12 US), and began packing. We faced a long flight back home.

On Thursday morning (local time), we left for the Guangzhou airport. We spent the next twenty-six hours either on the plane or changing planes. In one day we flew from Guangzhou to Beijing, from Beijing to Chicago, and from Chicago to DC.

Chongqing and The Twins

Chongqing (pronounced Chong Ching) was recently carved out of Sichuan province in Southwest China and made a non-affiliated, separate municipality. It is a huge city that, like Beijing, is undergoing massive new construction. The municipality covers several hundred square miles, partly dense urban city, but mostly rural countryside. Six to seven million live in the urban area, 26 million in the countryside. It was the capital of China for several years during World War II after the Japanese captured the eastern portions of the country.

Chongqing is famous for its perpetual fog. The city is shrouded in fog most of the day.  The sun burns through only between 4 and 5 pm. Otherwise, the city is grey and damp, with visibility of 1 to 2 miles on the best of days. I have never seen a gloomier city. When the fog lifts momentariliy, the pollution continues to obscure the view.

We arrived at our hotel in the city center – the Harbor Plaza. The Hotel is beautifully situated in a Manhattan-like urban landscape with people everywhere. Michelle says there is a saying in Chinese the describes "mountains and oceans of people." That’s what we saw in Chongqing.

We arrived on Sunday and on Monday we traveled to the Chongqing Municipal Adoption and Marriage Bureau. The Bureau is located in an office building several miles from the hotel. We arrived with Jeff and Lorie Petrie, a family from Rochester who are adopting a boy (the only boy available for adoption at the time, we later learned). As soon as we walked in, we saw the twins from across the room. The room is filled with six other families meeting their adopted children from various orphanages across Chongqing municipality. The twins come from Fengdu; the Petrie’s son from an orphanage in southeastern Chongqing.

We see that the twins are dressed exactly alike, in pink and yellow pants and a jacket with a bird face on the side. It’s not a cold day in Chongqing, but the babies are dressed in heavy clothing, in the style of the Chinese. Even in the warm areas of China, the Chinese tend to dress very warmly, leaving no skin exposed. If you are strolling your baby down the street in China in a light outfit, Chinese ladies will think nothing of coming up to your stroller to cover any exposed skin. There are few western faces in Chongqing but the Chinese people are friendly, helpful, and very interested in talking.

When the nanny from Fengdu sees us looking, she walks over. No one introduces us, we recognize them instantly from their pictures. Katherine gets Joanna, who immediately bursts out crying. I hold Julia, who is shocked and subdued by the whole event. We are there about an hour, holding out babies, taking official adoption photographs, and completing the adoption paperwork.

We traveled back to the hotel.  The girls watched out the bus window as life goes on in Chongqing. Back at the hotel, we put the girls in more comfortable clothing and out of their sweatsuits. We spent the next 36 hours playing with the girls, feeding them, and changing lots of diapers. Although Katherine had a terrible cold over the next five days, the girls were great.

LeFeng completed our paperwork and we received our official Chinese adoption papers by Friday. These were our little girls and we were ready to go home. But first, we have to go to Guangzhou, for processing by the adoption unit of the American Consulate.

Highlights of Beijing

The next day we began our tour with a trip to the Ming tombs and the Great Wall. The Ming tombs are the burial place of emperors from the Ming dynasty (around 400 years ago). The grounds around the tombs are lined with massive stone scuptures of lions, horses, soldiers, and assorted protectors of the spirits of the dead emperors.  Michelle visited the grounds the first time she came to Beijing twenty-four years ago.  Then she had her picture taken on a large stone horse.  We obliged her again this time with another picture on the very same horse.

The Great Wall is an important symbol for Chinese culture and stability, but also a great marketing tool. One of China’s most famous wines is called "Great Wall." Many of the buildings in the area of the Great Wall carry the dental moulding feature of the Great Wall. Even the trash cans on the Great Wall are miniature versions of the Great Wall towers.

We finished the day with an extensive shopping trip to the Pearl Market, a six story, open floor design for hundreds of vendors selling watches, silk clothing, knives, and hundreds of other items. The top floor is reserved for pearl vendors. Pearls are very inexpensive and plentiful in Beijing. A string of pearls that might cost $500 in the U.S., will cost about $80 at the pearl market. Once you select the grade and strand of pearl you want, they will string the pearls while you wait with each pearl separately knotted.

Tomorrow (Sunday) we leave for Chongqing. We pick up the twins on Monday.

Touring Beijing

With a few hours of light left on Friday, Katherine, Michelle and I headed to the heart of Beijing.

The city is as vibrant and active as New York or Chicago, but the highs and lows of the city are extreme.  In one block we would see the most quaint and interesting spots, in the next block a new high rise, in the next block tenement poverty like you have never seen. 

We headed for the Heavenly Gate and Tianamen Square.  We made Tianamen Square at sunset, just in time for the ceremonial flag lowering by the Chinese Army outside the gates of the forbidden city.

All over Beijing, street vendors approach visitors, espeically Westerners, to sell books about Beijing, "post-a-cards," and baseball caps advertising the 2008 Olympics.  As it is, Americans are somewhat unusual in the city.  But, to find an American who speaks Chinese as well as Michelle is quite a novelty (and really draws a crowd).  Some will come up just to talk to Michelle in Chinese.  Some will come up to practice their English or to ask a question about the English language or where you come from.  We always found the people of Beijing to be friendly and non-threatening in every way. 

We ended the evening with a wonderful meal at a European-Asian restaurant. 

Finally, Beijing

After flying for 13 hours, we landed at Beijing. We landed at 1:30 pm. The airport seemed deserted. We faced some very stern looking immigration agents but made our way through customs in no time. When we arrived in the public area, we were confronted with throngs of people waiving signs and banners for different groups on our plane.  The tour starts here!  We found Anli (she recognized us before we recognized her), and headed to the hotel in Beijing.

Since we arrived while Beijing was still in winter colors (or just one color, gray), Beijing was very bleak. Some trees have begun to bud, but most were bare sticks. The first thing we noticed was the smoke in the air. A polluted haze hung over everything – so much so that visibility was not much more than a few hundred yards. I have never seen a city so polluted.

The city has been preparing for the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics with massive construction projects on nearly every corner. Michelle said that the city has ripped out many of its Soviet-styled dilapidated apartment high-rises and is replacing them with new and sleek looking apartments. Construction cranes and new buildings are everywhere. The Chinese Government is expecting everyone to be impressed by its progress. In their haste, however, the government is also demolishing some of the old style shops that make the city quaint and mysterious. The Chinese Government may be surprised that the first thing anyone will notice is not their modern progress but China's modern problem – the choking pollution.

We checked into the Avic Hotel, on the edge of the city.

The hotel is nothing special. It’s nice, certainly, but I think that Anli picked it because of its proximity to the airport. When she dropped us off, she said that we are free to explore Beijing the rest of Friday and all day Saturday, but we had to meet her at 4:45 am in the hotel lobby for our flight to Chongqing. While Anli or the Hotel offered to arranged tours of Beijing, we set off to explore with Michelle.

We’re off – Then Back

Our flight left Washington Dulles Airport on March 23 at 9:40 am. Our United Airlines flight to Beijing was in two legs. Washington to Chicago, Chicago to Beijing. Out flight to Chicago went without a hitch and only a few minutes late, even though it was raining. We arrived in Chicago and went straight to our gate. We were scheduled to depart Chicago for Beijing at 12:00 pm. We got our first bit of good luck, when United upgraded us to business class. At least we would have some room to enjoy the long flight. That was all the luck we had on Wednesday.

At the gate, we learned that United had put a hold on the flight for mechanical servicing. The plane had some sort of electrical problem. United boarded the plane by 1:30, but delayed the take-off. We waited on the runway for over an hour before the crew announced that they had a recurrence of the electrical problem. Luckily, they had the champagne flowing in business class and we were burning through through it like jet fuel. The crew finally announced that they had resolved the problem. It was the same electrical switch they had encountered before out flight, but they said it was something they could live without on the flight – “a deferrable issue,” they called it. We would be under way shortly, but we had to go back to the gate to sign off on the paper work for the FAA. We also had to take on additional fuel – the price for sitting on the runway. Everyone in business class hoped they would restock the champagne as well. We returned to the gate for another fifty minutes or so, then departed for the friendly skies to Beijing now four hours late. Fortunately, the champagne and wine continued to flow. No one worried because we had at least ten hours to sleep it off.

An hour and a half into the flight, after our first course, dinner, dessert, and after dinner drinks (several!), we all felt the big turn. Oh, I thought, we’re making the big turn to the west toward Beijing. The captain came on the speaker. He said that I’m sure that everyone can see that the nose of the plane has turned and the sun is now coming into the left side of the aircraft. We have a minor problem with the left engine. Apparently a jet engine has a deicing unit that clears the engine of ice as the plane moves through the clouds. It was not a problem now, since we were far above the clouds, but when we land in Beijing they expected a big problem. In fact, they expected so much ice build-up in the engine that it could shut down the engine. We had traveled about a thousand miles due north out of Chicago, but were turning back. At least in business class, everyone took it pretty well. We would have taken any news pretty well. We were all higher than the instruments allowed. So we turned back – another hour and half back to Chicago.

No one could go to sleep on the plane since we all knew we were turning back.  Most of us could not continue celebrating the flight (though a guy in the back had a water bottle full of red wine, which he offered to share with everyone). We just wanted to get back to O’Hare to resume our flight.  No such luck.  United did not have a plane available for us until the next day. 

United put us up for the night at a local hotel, to resume our flight on Thursday morning at 10:00 am. The stars lined up, the gods smiled on us, and we departed O’Hare for Beijing – at 10:45 a.m. on Thursday.

Scheduling

We have devoted three days to arraing our China travel schedule, in addition to dealing with work and Katherine's work travel. We got the word on Wednesday that our visa exit interview at the US Consulate in Guangzhou would be Tuesday, April 5, and that we needed to be in Chongqing on Sundaym March 28. We tried nine ways to Sunday to work our frequent flyer miles on Delta and Air France. At one time we were scheduled to leave Guangzhou, fly to Paris, then to Frankfort, Germany (overnight in Frankfort), then to Chicago and DC. It was going to take us more than two days to get back. We decided it was not going to be worth it to undergo such a schedule with two babies. So, we bought tickets on United, leaving Dulles on March 23 in the a.m., then to Chicago, then for 13 hours to Bejing.  Michelle will be our traveling companion, guide and translator in addition to Anli, and spare hand.  We regret that John (Michelle's husband) could not make the trip with us.

We'll meet Anli in Bejing, see the sights of Beijing for a couple of days, then on to Chongqing on Sunday, March 27. We are scheduled to get our babies on Monday, March 28. We'll stay for three or four days in Chongqing, then over to Guangzhou.

Preparations

We have used Dr. Jane Aronson as our consulting doctor for the twins. We requested and received prescriptions from her for the girls and for us (for conditions we might catch from the girls or others present, such as conjuntivitis or scabies, which we understand are both common for their setting). We have our baby supplies ready, or at least somewhat. We will be packing this weekend. Katherine and Karen are finishing painting the nursery (our former sitting room off the master). I'll pick up the cribs and related materials this weekend, and Karen will probably complete the nursery while we are gone. Katherine and I both want to get going.

The Invitation

The Invitation

Monday, March 14, 2005. Everyone is in a bit of a panic today. We've been waiting for our invitation from the Chinese Government to arrive so that we can set our travel schedule to pick up the girls in China. The invitation finally arrived today, but the word from Anli in Bejing is that China issued 700 travel invitations today (I think that means 701 adoptions). Anyway, we're expecting some trouble lining up our appointment with the U.S. Consulate at Guangzhou, which is the linchpin we use to calculate our travels. Once the consulate date is set, then we plan our preceding days based on that. The Guangzhou appointment is one of the last things we do before leaving.

Cradle has requested our appointment at Guangzhou, and we just have to wait to see what comes back. Because Guangzhou is 12 hours ahead of us, we should hear sometime in the morning or Wednesday at the latest. In the meantime, we continue with our general planning to leave.