Tackling Parenthood…from the other side of the world!

Traveling around a foreign country, staying in the comfort of a small, hot hotel room, living out of suitcases that take up half the space, eating out at a restaurant for every meal because we have no access to a kitchen, trying to communicate when hardly anyone else speaks even one lick of English, trying to clean and sanitize bottles and dishes out of the bathroom sink, feeling people stare you up and down everywhere you go…then add a 4 year old to the mix that is still on Chicago (or should I say Minnesota) time and parenting a new child, a toddler, a girl whose attachment lays elsewhere.  This is the world we live in as we adopt our daughter and attempt to tackle parenthood of 2 children for the first time and it is where we spend our first days together bonding, learning, discovering, and loving each other as a new family of four.  Every aspect of this adventure is challenging in itself and you add them together and what you could have is one very unhappy family.  But for us, this adventure and every aspect of it has led to one very happy family, it's led us to our Amelia, and we could not feel more blessed!

Today began with the tears of a very cranky, cold and cough-stricken, runny nosed little girl.  First let me say though that we have been blessed with a child that, for the most part, sleeps through the night…hallelujah!  Besides her nightly routine of waking and stirring in her sleep at 2:30am, Amelia sleeps soundly all night long.  We, on the other hand, are finding it more difficult considering we sweat all night from the hot, dry, stuffy room and Liam is now waking every morning at 5am rearing to go (although better than his previous 3am).  In order to not wake his sister, we all remain quiet with the lights off until she wakes up.  Playing Uno in the dark with a flashlight has become one of our new morning rituals J.  Amelia wakes up at 7am (her routine is like clock-work).  The first moments when she wakes up are priceless.  She makes the sweetest little noises and one by one, she hands us every little toy and stuffed animal from her crib.  With every toy, she makes more sweet sounds, which we can't get enough of, especially since throughout most of the day, she is very quiet and hasn't talked or babbled much at all. 

However, today, this sweet moment quickly led to many tears, as she didn't want anything to do with Mommy.  I've read many other stories where adopted children from China only take to the father initially.  This morning proved this to be true.  After several hours, we knew we needed a good distraction (other than Daddy)…but what do you do on an extremely rainy day when there is no indoor playground, Monkey Jo's, or anything indoors that would not only entertain our 1 year old, upset little girl, but also our 4 year old boy who was also in great need of an energy-burning outlet.  Well, desperate times call for desperate measures when you're parenting from across the world…so on to the dirty, germ-infested playroom we went that resided right inside our hotel.  This playroom consisted of a "dirty" ball pit, a few "dirty, sticky" bouncy toys, and a tunnel.  So going there, with runny nosed Amelia just to add to the germs, seemed like the perfect solution.  Sorry for all those out there with germ phobia—but I just put on my "laid-back Mama hat" and made the best of it…and glad I did because it turned out to be a huge success!  Amelia looooved all the balls and we saw more smiles out of her in this 1 hour timeframe than we had in the last 48 hours!  And she even seemed to like her Mama again too, which was a huge plus!  Liam even had fun, attempting to play various sports (typical) with the limited resources he had, but considering he hadn't seen much in the version of a toy or sport since arriving in China, this ball pit was enough to make even our 4 year old boy happy! 

Although not having a kitchen has been a challenge, eating hasn't been as bad as we had expected…thanks to our hotel restaurant.  The restaurant has both Chinese and American foods, which we've actually really enjoyed.  Although, I'm pretty certain eating French toast, bacon and fried Chinese noodles every morning may not be the best for my figure, but oh well, again, I blame it on parenthood from across the world!  Amelia seems to love to eat and we're quite impressed with how well she does at restaurants.  Today she sat in a highchair for the first time, but she seemed like a natural (so this was likely not a first for her).  Besides drinking her formula 3 times a day (which she puts down like a shot gun of beer), our girl loves bananas.  She must have eaten two of them at breakfast.  She can eat on her own with her fingers, but when we tried to feed her with a spoon or fork, she turns her head the other way.  No wonder, as being from China, she's probably never seen utensils before.  So far, we've also discovered that she likes bread, congee (which is white rice in boiled water), gerber puffs, yogurt drinks which I brought from home and cookies.  Our boy has been living on vegetables and fruit, fruit and more fruit!  Plus a few pringle chips, oreo cookies, and lollipops in-between. 

Living out of a small hotel room has been one of the bigger challenges of the trip.  We seem to have stuff EVERYWHERE, which isn't good for my slight obsession with tidiness.  I think every other sentence out of my mouth must be "Ben, I can't find….have you seen….where is…."!  It's hard staying organized when you have a small room, with 2 full sized beds, a crib, and luggage laying everywhere taking up most the leftover space.  The room is also very hot, dry, smokey and stuffy…which has only made everyone's coughs worse.  At night we sound like a coughing band (with Amelia's many toots adding drums to the musical lineup)! 

Today our one excursion was to the local Walmart down the street to buy more formula and a few other essentials, like Liam's trucks, cars and any other toy that would help interest him for our remaining 2 days in Zhengzhou.  Whether we travel by taxi or by ground, we put our lives in jeopardy.  Taking a taxi means being put into a car with no car seats, or even seat belts for that matter, and driving along the crazy streets of China.  The other option is walking, but with this, we have to walk sidewalks that are shared amongst bikes and hundreds of mopeds (which Liam calls lopezes) and especially when you're walking against traffic that becomes the most difficult, but entertaining nonetheless. 

I was excited to hear there was a Walmart…but once we got inside, what I saw was nothing resembling what I know as Walmart!  I snatched one picture before getting yelled at as they don't allow cameras (strange).  Basically, there are open displays of food everywhere, coated with guuk that made everything you touched sticky, and everything is written in chinese, so you're not sure what you're getting unless there's a picture, and the entire place smells like rotten fish mixed with Chinese fried rice.  But, on to buying apple juice, formula, snacks, and toys we went, again, putting all the filth and stench aside with smiles on our faces!

The hardest part of our adventure so far has been not being able to share our new joy with all of our friends and family back home.  We so appreciate all of you who are following our blog and sharing your excitement with us from thousands of miles away – your love and support mean so much to us! 

So although adopting a new child and tackling parenthood from the other side of the world may not be the fairy tale story most mothers dream of having one day…it's MY fairy tale, it's OUR family's story, and I'm so very thankful for every stressful, chaotic, humorous, shocking, frustrating, joyous, love-producing, Liam & Amelia-filled minute of it!!!!!!!!