CA and Tim's one-week thoughts

 Tracy's thoughts about today first and then Tim will share his thoughts.  :)

Today we went to the American consulate and suffice to say that all went well.  I had a bit of a scare when the guy at the consulate wasn't sure he was happy with Katie's paperwork.  I could tell something wasn't pleasing him by his expression and then he finally looked up and said, "Wait on Mama."  To which I replied, "I am Mama."  He gave me a weird look and just said, "stay!"  Oh, okay.  I can wait a moment.  Oops.  I heard him saying that he wasn't sure the abandonment date was correct to the supervisor.  Luckily, her opinion was that as long as it was clearly an abandonment, the date didn't really matter.  Whew!  We stood up, right hand raised, and swore we hadn't lied on her immigration paperwork.  You know the one that asked if she had ever been a prostitute or terrorist?  Really, that's what they wanted to know.  Good news, I could honestly say "No." to both.  Now Katie will have her visa to enter the US and when her foot (or head in Jaden's case) touches US soil, she will be a US citizen!  Whoot!

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Tim's Reflections on GOTCHA DAY ... ONE WEEK LATER

One week ago today was Katie's Gotcha.  How can it only have been one week?  She is such a part of my heart and life that I cannot imagine it has only been seven days!

Gotcha day is one if those days that you know you will remember for the rest of your life, where images get burned into your memory.  But it is really hard to describe what the day is like.

At 5:45 AM Jaden wanted to go ahead and get up after lying in bed unable to sleep for a while.  He and I went ahead and ate breakfast ... The table was full of the things we had laid out the night before to make sure we took with us to the orphanage (gifts for the orphanage director and Katie's nanny / diapers / wipes / disposable changing pad / bottles/ paperwork / etc), and having to scoot that stuff over in order to have table space was a cool way to start the day!

After breakfast Jaden played with his new shark car ... This was the toy that he wanted to get from the gift shop as we left the Chengdu Ocean Park ... Think transformer type toy.  If I had been picking toys it would probably have been the last one in the whole store that I would have picked, but he has gotten a lot of joy and play time out if it.  The back if the packaging had six other toys of different animals that transform into cars also, and he assigned my hands and feet characters and then directed them around the play area so I got my morning stretches in that way, going from the couch to the windowsill etc.  It was like a version of Twister. :-)

How can I describe the emotions of that morning?  It's so difficult to do.  I never have been able to describe the way I felt the morning we went to go get Jaden.  I never have been able to find the words.  With Katie, I serendipitously found a way that kinda gives an idea of how I felt, which I will describe below.

As we did with Jaden, I have been playing the music of the Hillsong Global Project Mandarin Praise and Worship music.  It is a collection of twelve praise and worship songs done in Mandarin, and I have played it on low for most of the time we have been in China with Jaden and with Katie.  With Jaden we would play it in the room as we went to sleep, and it seemed to calm him.  I hoped that he would understand something about some of the words of the songs and maybe get some of the message of love from them.

Anyway, somehow the music app on the iPad got taken off of repeat mode and got put on random shuffle.  Well, the song that came in as Jaden and I were talking on the morning of Katie's Gotcha was a song that I had meant to remove from my iPad after Christmas  ... It is a great song called "Almost Christmas" by Josh Wilson.  I got up to change the song, but then I started listening to the lyrics ... It is a song about the excitement and anticipation of a child getting ready for Christmas ... It captures the sheer joy and anticipation of an upcoming Christmas that is so unique to a child's perspective, that sense of upcoming wonder that most of us have forgotten amidst our busy lives and worries  ...

    I feel like I'm 8 years old again
    Waiting for December 25th
    It's almost Christmas
    I'll be home soon, making memories
    So excited I can hardly sleep
    It's almost Christmas time!

    There's something new in the air everywhere
    Making me take the time, time to stop, time to share
    'Til the people I love the most really know
    'Cause it's almost Christmas

I found that it really fit the mood and excitement of the day if I just replaced the word "Christmas" with "Gotcha" ... But only if you stop to really remember what Christmas feels like to a child.

    I feel like I'm 8 years old again
    Waiting for April 14th
    It's almost Gotcha
    I'll be home soon making memories
    So excited I can hardly sleep
    It's almost Gotcha time!

    There's something new in the air everywhere
    Making me take the time, time to stop, time to share
    'Til the people I love the most really know
    'Cause it's almost Gotcha

I don't know of there is any way to really put the anticipation and excitement and joy and absolute wonder of Gotcha morning into words, the realization that your child has spent their last night in an orphans bed, that soon they will be set free, but that's about as close as I can get.

Tracy did a lot of singing to Katie to try to sooth her at and right after Gotcha, and one that seemed to work well was Amazing Grace / My Chains Are Gone, and those lyrics can help point you in the direction if the emotions of a Gotcha day also ...

    My chains are gone
    I've been set free
    My God, my Savior
    Has rescued me
    And like a flood
    His mercy reigns
    Unending love
    Amazing grace

That works pretty well, also, especially since our path to both of our Gotcha days can be DIRECTLY tied to God's love and grace and our experience with Emmaus.  I will try to put a bit of that story into a future blog, but I will tell you that a Gotcha day is a special gift from God, a time when God's presence is keenly felt, a Sacred Moment.  (And I have to give a big shout-out to Mark Whitley who recently led me to the revelation that Jaden's Gotcha day was clearly a Sacred Moment ... and as such also allowed me to realize it during Katie's Gotcha as well.)

The Gotcha itself went fairly smoothly, considering that Katie surely had no idea what was going on ... She was awakened from a nap and she was brought into a room and handed to total strangers.

With Jaden's adoption he was 3 1/2, so at least it could be explained to him what was happening (not that at such a young age he could really truly understand what it meant).  But surely it had to help that he could be told that he was getting a Mama and a Baba who would be his family forever.  Katie is really too young to have any concept of such things.

She cried at first, of course,  but settled down quickly with her Mama holding her and singing to her, and she stayed calm once she settled down.

Her nanny came in after a while and we got to visit with her and to thank her for taking care of Katie.  It was clear that she cared about Katie, and we were pleased to see that she wore a cross necklace (a very uncommon thing in my admittedly limited experiences in China thus far), perhaps indicating some beautiful Prevenient Grace for Katie and hopefully for some of the other children that she cares for as well.

After some of the paperwork was taken care of I got a chance to tour the orphanage.  Jaden went with me, but Tracy and Katie stayed in the meeting room to avoid taking Katie back into the orphanage itself.

I wanted to see the orphanage, to see where my baby has spent her entire life, but I was also dreading it in a way.  I am still haunted by our visit to Jaden's orphanage, by the sterile institutional environment where he spent so long, and I have especially been haunted by the children we had to leave behind, most of whom will never know the love of parents.

I am pleased to say that Katie's orphanage was so much brighter.  Each room and almost all of the hallways were brightly lit with colorful murals or pictures on the walls.  The environment was clean but you could tell that the play areas were used and not just there for show.  (Jaden's orphanage had no play area and zero toys.)

Katie's orphanage is a Half the Sky orphanage ... Perhaps we can put some more information about that on a future blog as well.

But I have to admit that even though I was praying for the children that I saw as we walked through the orphanage, I have to admit that I could not look into their eyes.  I just couldn't take that again.  Call it cowardice, but I carry the weight of the children from Jaden's orphanage with me and I just couldn't add to it, at least not on that day.

Jaden did really well for most of the tour through the orphanage until we came to a hallway that was a little more bland than the others and was not as well lit.  He suddenly began to grunt a strange guttural grunt, but he calmed quickly when I reassured him.  Fortunately, that was near the end and we were able to get out of the orphanage just a few minutes later.

One of the things that we were worried about prior to coming back yo China was that Jaden may have some regression of behavior or possible even some post-traumatic type reaction, but he has done amazingly well.

We have made it a point to talk to him in the past few months about what we will all be doing when we come back from China together with Katie.  He was excited as we did the house renovation to build a play room for he and Katie to play in, so we were fairly sure that he would not have concerns about being left in China, but we really did not know how he would react to being back in China with the sights and sounds and smells of China, and being surrounded by Asian people again.  He has done great, though.  He is very comfortable in himself and his family, and he has continued to tell folks all week that he has a Meimei and that he is a big brother!

With the consulate appointment done, we are basically done with the paperwork part of the trip.  The visa should be issued tomorrow  for Katie to enter the USA, and once that is done we are on vacation, spending some time in Hong Kong.  We intentionally built a few days into the back of the trip in case something went wrong with the paperwork process, but if all continues to go well then it is off to Hong Kong on Wednesday for a few days at Disney and then we will have some time with some of our brothers and sisters in Christ that are part of the Hong Kong Emmaus community.  We are especially looking forward to that, since Emmaus is directly responsible for our realization that we have two children who are part of our family, children who happened to have been born in China.