tl;dr: Elspeth is here with a death grip on a hard boiled egg and lots of tears…
… and now the long version. As you probably guessed it’s be an emotional trip even before we met Elspeth today. As for today, it started with a 5:15am alarm in Nanning which didn’t sit well with Katrine at all. We made it to the airport and after a slight mix-up with out tickets said good bye to our guide Mary and got on a short flight to Nanchang. We basically went from a really hot city to the 4th hottest city in China… yeah. After settling in we got ready to do a bit of shopping before the kids showed up. This is when things got a bit much for Katrine and a few tears were seen (too be expected really) but a little bit retail therapy later and we were all good. After dropping the stuff back at the room we went downstairs to wait.
Waiting was required because the babies (toddlers really) were delayed due to traffic. In the meantime one of the other families received their little girl (from a different orphanage). At this point we were all beyond excited. Soon after that a van pulled into the hotel parking lot with what looked like a bunch of babies in it. We were ready to go. Our first view of Elspeth was a small girl standing next to a van in a onesie, knee-highs, and sandles – quite the fashion statement. She was brought in with several other babies and when we came close she began to cry, a great start but reassuring none the less. She also had the remains of a snack in each hand, cookies bits in the left, and a hard boiled egg (thankfully still in the shell) in the right. They did not leave her hands till she fell asleep. We tried giving a few snacks to her in the lobby, but they were all emphatically refused. And after a short time we returned to our room for a rest.
Once in our room, and with snacks refused once more, Katrine took over. Being a great big sister she first found a musical toy that helped sooth the savage beast and then proceeded to demonstrate the proper usage of may of the toys that we brought. A quick baby sign lesson followed along with colours and all sorts of other important information that much be passed from big sister to little. We managed to get a few mouthfulls of water down but all food was still refused. We sent out for room service but Elspeth was still refusing to eat, well that was solved by Katrine giving a small piece of melon, mouth opened, teeth chewed, the food was swallowed. After that we managed to get about 6 pieces of melon, a few small pieces of beef and a 2cm long piece of noodle down before Elspeth decided she was done.
After our dinner, such as it was, we strapped Elspeth into the baby carrier (to give Heather’s arms a break) and walked the hallway for 20-30 minutes till some droopy eyes were seen. So we headed back for our bedtime routine. Well to no surprise really, the bottle was refused but we did manage to get 3-4 more mouthfulls of water down. We changed her diaper (kidneys are functioning) and put on the PJ bottoms, but left the onsie as a top. Toothbrushing was right out and we didn’t even try for a bath so story time. She was quite enthralled by the pokemon story Heather read to Katrine but was obviously fading fast having probably missed her afternoon nap. We popped her into the crib and within 10 minutes she was fast asleep and finally releasing her death grip on the egg and cookies.
Tomorrow we do the big paperwork and everything will be official. We are also hoping a bit more food and drink go down. Updates as they happen, pictures as we get them.