Day 6: Meet Sawyer
Today is gotcha day. We're Sawyer's guardians today and tomorrow the adoption will be official.
At 9:30 am our group met in the lobby of our hotel, made sure we had all the needed paperwork, and took off to an office building to meet our children. The 10 children were coming from seven different orphanages. We got there about 10:30 or so. This is Yisha. She is one of our adoption agency guides while in Zhengzhou.
Here's where we got the children. This is not an orphanage. I hope later in the week to go to Sawyer's orphanage.
Inside was crazy. Lots of people (including people who were not with our group of ten families) and lots of crying. The kids seemed to react one of two ways. They either cried or they shut down.
Sawyer arrived about 10:45 am but had had an accident (and was wearing split pants with no diaper) so they took him in the back to clean him up. When he came back I held him. He had one little tear but otherwise was stoic.
Our orphanage brought a picture book with more photos of Sawyer growing up. It is really nice to have. We'll also get his abandonment notice (translated in English) that was placed in the newspaper after he was abandoned at the end of 2010. No sign of the red parcel that was supposedly left with him. The orphanage said they would look for it. Finally, he has a red bracklet and a red necklace. I have not looked at them closely yet.
Michelle told me to bring food and I'm glad she did. He saw another family with food and wanted some right away. He liked me feeding him Cheerios. That was good.
When Sawyer poses for photos he tries to make the peace sign (I think). He's done this a number of times.
After I changed Sawyer's diaper (well, put one on with a clean pair of pants) he gave me a smile. Just a quick one. Otherwise, he stayed stoic the whole time.
When we got back to the hotel, Sawyer came to life. What a relief. He sat in a chair, ate Cheerios, fed me Cheerios (he thought that was pretty funny), had a bottle, and then he started to tease me and smile. He'd drop Cheerios and I'd make a big deal out of it and he'd start to laugh. Same thing taking the milk. He'd stop drinking and laugh like he was teasing me. It was good to see. Fortunately, Michelle was on Skype for this so she got to see him open up too.
One last family got their child at 1:00 pm in our hotel so we all went to the elevator bank to celebrate with them. Sawyer was all smiles for people. So far so good.
I got back to my hotel room and put Sawyer in his crib at 1:30. I laid him down and went to sleep in five minutes. Easy.
I'm anxious to give Sawyer a bath. Will wait until tonight for that. He's a little smelly right now. It looks like he may have an ear infection (it's a little bloody and he's putting his finger in his ear) and he may have a cold (hopefully, just a cold). We have a doctor in our group so I'll ask him to take a look.
I had to wake Sawyer from his nap to go fill out paperwork. I'll finalize the adoption tomorrow and apply for his Chinese passport too.
I was really hungry early on tonight so we went out to dinner alone at 4:30. Sawyer ate and ate. He likes dumplings the best but ate chicken soup, beef, rice, noodles, Cheerios, and more and more dumplings.
I ordered way too much food but we got to try a lot of different things.
First bath. I dipped his feet in and he giggled. Very excited.
I just got Sawyer down for bed at 7:30 pm. I held him for a little while but he seemed to be trying to stay awake. When I laid him down, he went right to sleep.