Day One

Shrewd.  Cautious.  Happy.  Mischievous.  Surprising.  Quiet but warming up.  Undernourished.

These are a few of the words that come to mind about this peanut kid.  For the first twenty-four hours he barely uttered a sound.  But he drank in everything around him with a keen and penetrating gaze.  Finally, after a full day of assessment and contemplation, he is all smiles and babbling here and there, and playing clever tricks on his brother and sister, and deducing how his food containers can be opened, etc. 

He has yet to shed a tear.  Our assumption is that he learned early on that crying burns energy and wouldn’t get him what he wants anyway, so he just wouldn’t.   As a consequence he always seems content and resilient – even when he falls or is nervous or scared.  He’s also extremely curious and responsive, especially now that the first day is out of the way. 

He is scrawny.  At 31 months, he weighs 23 pounds (average for this age is 31 pounds).  His ribs show, and his arms and legs are thin and weak.  His age-appropriate clothes hang loosely off him.  His head seems ridiculously large for his body.  He walks well, but not with great steadiness. 

He eats everything we give him.  If we let him, he would never stop eating.  Already today we jettisoned our plan to ease him into a richer diet slowly, and have been feeding him chicken and curry and eggs and greens and fruit and snacks and even a couple bites of ice cream.  He shows no signs of having a limit and it all seems to be for the good.

Click on the link to turn back the clock to yesterday…

They set the “gotcha” appointments in Guangdong for every Monday at 2:30 p.m. in the afternoon.  I guess having them earlier in the morning would be too nice for the parents, who instead get to spend half the day torn between the urge to throw up and the urge to do tequila shots.  Somehow we managed to avoid doing either.

  

When the appointed time rolls around, you are chauffeured to a pretty nondescript location about 15 minutes from the hotel, which is the office of the Guangdong Province Civil Affairs division.  It wouldn’t be completely accurate to say that the entrance to the building is located in a back alley, but if you took a right turn instead of entering the building, you would be in a back alley.  There were makeshift shopkeepers a stone’s throw away sawing through and banging away at a pile of scrap metal, to add to the ambiance.

The building is a bit worn at the edges, but the office itself, up on the 8^th floor, is gleaming and new looking.  The kids’ play area especially is very nice.  What they don’t prepare you for – and what I didn’t quite grasp despite doing research and hearing others’ first-hand accounts of how this goes – is that you are sharing one big room with about 100 people when you meet your kid.  There are probably a dozen or more families all being matched with their new children simultaneously, so the scene is one of barely controlled bedlam.  Add in all the kids themselves, and all their caregivers, and it’s crowded.

First contact

We grabbed some low, red-cushioned sectional seats behind a kind of post, which buffered us slightly from the uproar.  Within 3 minutes of entering the room they were bringing Eli Xinxing out to us, through the crowd, flanked by 2 caregivers from the orphanage each holding one of his hands.  Allison, Naomi and Townes go straight to him and collectively wig out and scoop him up and take him to one of the seats.  I, of course, hang back and look fairly useless (per usual), with a pen and our prepared list of questions for the caregivers.  Before I get a chance to ask them, however, there are forty-five documents to sign, in triplicate, and wads of Chinese cash that have to change hands and be counted, and receipts drawn up, and identifying documents exchanged and verified. 

 

So for 15 minutes, I am the designated signer.  Eli is pretty passive at this point, no idea where he is or what is going on or why all these people are shoving toys in his face.  He’s got a deathgrip on an individually wrapped snack cake.  Other than that and the clothes he was wearing, he carries no personal belongings.  He looks quite healthy, but small. 

 

Eli's Caregivers

The caregivers are very nice, one older and one younger, but tired.  They’ve traveled on an overnight bus to get to Guangzhou, and have been at the Civil Affairs office waiting for us since 6:30 a.m.  They need to leave to catch another bus home soon.  But we spend about 30 minutes talking through an interpreter about Eli – his disposition, medical history, eating and bathroom habits, verbalizations, behavior, etc.  We learn that he is a monkey who can climb bunk beds and shelves with ease.  He is always happy, never cries.  He has a tendency to eat too much and doesn’t know when to stop, so we need to watch out for that.  They admonish us not to give him cold drinks, as Americans are foolishly wont to do, and to make sure the bath water is the right temperature.     They answer every question we have, and we laugh together about the scatological terms, in a rare local dialect, that Eli may use or understand when he needs to use the bathroom. 

Eli, meanwhile, is looking around the whole time, not making much eye contact, and happily downing the Cheerios that we brought with us.

 

The caregivers leave, and then it’s time for us to go as well.  The whole process has taken less than an hour.  We’re given custody of Eli immediately, though the adoption won’t be final until the next day, when he and we have had a chance to explore whether our future relationship will be “harmonious.”  We drive back to the hotel in a daze.  Now we are five. 

The next few hours rush by in a haze.  He plays with toys.  We locate food and feed it to him.  He eventually starts to play with some of the things in the room, but hasn’t really opened up yet.  Allison and I keep looking at each other incredulously.

 

Eli goes to sleep at 8:00 p.m., and sleeps straight through to 6:30 a.m.

Today we went back to Civil Affairs for more paperwork, pictures, applications… Back to the hotel for a nap, then mid-afternoon swimming.  Eli is still closed, but finally I think getting used to us and also all the great food is kicking in, and by 4:00 or 5:00 he is smiling, laughing, creative, playing tricks on Naomi and Townes, more assertive, being silly, really very happy. 

 

And so are we. 

Townes and Eli fight over the baby toys.

 

Bedtime 1 hour ago