It is hard to believe that one week has already gone by.
It is hard to believe that only one week has gone by.
One week ago tonight Jaden slept between his baba and his mama for the first time.
We had traveled halfway around the world following the call of our son, led by the voice of our Savior. We did this with the full support and blessing of our first two chidren, Laura and Mitch, who have been onboad and supportive throughout this entire process. We did this with the fore-knowledge of my mother, who told us after we had started this process that she had foreseen it two and a half months earlier. We did this after seeing a powerful form of Christian discipleship displayed by other adoptive families in our community. We did this with the blessing and support of our church. We did this not knowing how Jaden would react to being taken away from everything that he ever knew. We did this not knowing what conditions he was living in at the time. We did this having already fallen in love with a 3 1/2 year old boy from a different culture, a boy we had only seen in pictures and only had limited information about but yet somehow we knew was our son (reference Savior comment above).
Jaden's Gotcha Day was Monday, January 21st. I had worried that perhaps I would not feel love for this child when I actually met him, that perhaps I just thought that we were led to him but that maybe we really weren't, that perhaps I had built up this idea of being his father but that it would not seem real when we were together. We got to the Civil Affairs office about 30-40 minutes before he arrived, and we anxiously looked at every vehicle that pulled up to the gate. Our guide told us that the van he would be in would have a license plate that did not start with the letter A (since vehicle tags staring with "A" indicated a vehice from Nanjing, and he was coming from the tiny village of Haimen City (population one million)).
As each car would pull up, one of us would announce "nope, it's an A tag". Finally we saw one that did not start with A, and we both leaned towards the windows trying to see in to the vehicle, but we could not. When someone got out and opened the trunk we saw a suitcase, and said "nope, that's not him" (We did not know that the orphanage director, Jaden's Ayi, and another person from the orphanage would have to stay in Nanjing overnight so that they could finish their part of the paperwork on Tuesday). But then we saw him, and all of my concerns about whether this was my child were gone!! Even before we started talking about adopting from China, I had always wondered if adoptive parents could really love their adopted child like they loved a biological child. Ask me how I feel about that now! Love, love, love, love, love!
He walked in to the office and I could not believe that we were in the same room. He was scared (who wouldn't be) and withdrawn, but his orphanage folks were very helpful. Jaden had the photo album and pillow with our photos on it that we had sent him, and they pointed to them and told him that we were his baba and mama. Of course to him that only was words, and I wondered even then how long it would take him to realize what that meant. As it turns out, he seems to have figured it out quite nicely in just a few days!
I won't recap the entire week that has occured since then, but I do have some observations / thoughts, most of which will be in random free thought form.
What kinds of things become treasures to a 3 year old orphan, treasures that he would gather every night to make sure he still had, treasures that he would put in a large bag to keep safe? His early treasures included a small plastic fork (still brings tears to my eyes every time I think about it), an empty cookie container, the directions to a baby carrier that has pictures of caucasians in it that he would stare at, a Mandarin guidebook that he decided was his (including my handwritten notes on a sheet of paper that he would take out every time, look at, then carefully fold up and replace), the now-empty Donald Duck Pez dispenser that he gotten at Gotcha and had proceeded to share the candy with us, the Mickey Mouse crocs that he got to pick out as his own (a special lasting treasure that he wants to sleep in every night), the dumptruck that was the first thing that he got to pick out as his own, and the stacking spheres.
Every night Jaden would gather all of his stuff up and make sure it was all together. Before coming to us he had no possessions, nothing that was really his (except for the photo book and pillow we had sent him and a backpack we had sent several months ago that was brand new when he got to us so he had never been allowed to use).
Jaden loves shoes. He must get that from his mother!
Jaden enjoys music. The second night with us he had difficulty getting to sleep, and since we were emotionally and physically exhausted we drifted in and out of sleep as he tried to go to sleep ... at one point he was singing a song of "baba, mama" as he lay between us.
He also likes to listen to music on the Ipod. or Ipad. We have the Hillsong CD which is in Mandarin Chinese and I played that a lot especially the first few days, but he enjoys Animanacs music as well.
He has a nighttime voice which is a high pitched but very soft voice. He uses his hands to stay awake, often reaching up to the ceiling and carrying on pretend conversations using his hands.
The first two nights he slept perfectly still and straight. I assumed at the time that he was just a very deep sleeper, but since then he has begun rolling around in his sleep (his jie jie may have competition for who can mess up the sheets the most while asleep) ... in retrospect I suspect that this still, straight sleep style was partially due to being emotionally exhausted but perhaps moreso due to the fact that he has slept in a crib his entire life with no room for rolling around. And his soft conversations between his hands likely was his form of entertainment when he could not get to sleep in the orphanage. but could not get out of the crib.
Love wins
Jaden learns quickly
Jaden has amazing fine motor skills, especially considering the lack of toys / interaction that he has had his whole life up until January 21st.
Love wins
Jaden quickly picks up what we are trying to communicate, whether it is praising him for cooperating or being helpful or sharing, or it is redirecting him to be gentle / careful, or it is to indicate to him what we are asking him to do. He does have times of frustrations, however, when we don't understand him but who wouldn't ... He has to wonder why we know some Mandarin words but cannot understand what seems like basics to him. One of our challenges there, though, is that some of his language is Mandarin (he does know much more Mandarin than we were led to believe) but a good portion of what he used in everyday living was the Wu dialect, which even Mandarin speakers don't understand. As I mentioned above, he loves his shoes and counts them as a treasure. Well, the day after we bought them for him he was asking for something and we did not understand ... he got more and more frantic and upset. Our guide happened to come by for some paperwork stuff and she asked him what he was wanting. It ends up the word he uses for shoes is used "by rural farmers to mean shoes" per our guide ... umm, we didn't know that word!
As an aside, once he is in bed for a nap or for bedtime he won't go get something even if he is distraught that we don't understand him (like for the shoes, for example) ... again I suspect this is learned behavior from the orphanage ... once you are in the crib you are there and you are not getting out until it is time to get out.
After 4-5 days, Jaden started expanding his horizons, both behaviorally (checking to see how we would react to behaviors / actions that he knew he shouldn't being doing) and then physically (trying to walk a little further away from us to see how far he could get and still feel safe (incidentally, as he got more comfortable I got more worried ... I mean, it would not do well to lose your child in a city of 16 million people) )
This blog program is being crazy, so I am going to split this into two entries ... to be continued.
No comments:
Post a Comment