Still more pics

A few moments from yesterday and today.





































Mmmmmmmmmm...dumpling soup!

Sorry I still have not posted about yesterday's Wuxi visit. Not quite enough energy in me to do it justice. It is a very nice facility. Huge actually. We got to see the building where Cupcake and one of her fellow Wuxi toddlers in our group slept, played, potty-ed, etc. We saw all the kids their age in their little racecar toddler beds all lined up at naptime. 18 of 'em in the room. All quiet. Almost all sleeping. Someone had already been moved into Cupcake's old bed. We saw the sleeping room of the younger babies and then another room with the youngest, littlest ones. We could not take pictures of these two rooms. We didn't get to see any older kids except for the two 11 or 12-ish y.o. girls who came out shouting "Jiao Jiao!" and waving goodbye when they saw she was leaving with us. The staff was very friendly and fed us a very nice lunch. That's the short version of our day in Wuxi yesterday.

We all had dinner in one of the other family's suite tonight since we had our guide call in a Pizza Hut delivery order for us. The Chinese has food has been pretty good for the most part, but today we were all looking for something more like home. Tomorrow night we are all going out for dinner with our two guides and three other families w/ another agency that the guides have also been working with this week. It'll be our last night in Nanjing. Saturday a.m. we fly to Guangzhou for the US Consulate part of the process.

Cupcake, aka Crushcake, certainly knows how to attach/bond since she has been literally stuck to J like a barnacle all week. We are glad she wants to be with him so much and won't have it any other way b/c it shows that she wants & needs that security which some orphanage kids could care less about and have a hard time ever bonding to anyone. She still will barely ever even look at me. If she figures out it is me patting her back rather than J, she freaks. Once in awhile now she'll give me a smile if she is touching J, and I am not touching her. And she is a biter. Big time. Because she's so petite we think she had to be really scrappy to hold her own with the other toddlers in the orphanage and now she thinks it's the way to relate- especially to other kids. She has bitten all of us except The Spark, but she's hit her at least so she doesn't feel too left out.

She is definitely a good eater though. I think she's been rather underfed and her little arms & legs are so skinny. You can really tell when she's in her clingy footed jammies. Her legs look so tiny. So we are trying to feed her lots, and she's loving that. She can pack it in. She's still getting 3 bottles a day too which we will keep her on b/c hopefully, eventually I can give her a bottle which would be a great bonding time. Eventually I'll get to hold her and she'll settle into my arms, right?!

The Spark started out the week asking why people kept talking to her in Chinese. We explained that they did so b/c she looks like she would speak Chinese since she looks Chinese. She said she's a New Hampshire girl now though. We explained that they do not all know that about her. So now she keeps asking when she can learn Chinese. Finally! She has had no interest at home. She asked J yesterday, "When can I make Chinese words come out of my Chinese face?"

And my favorite quote from #2 this week was during a Cupcake crying jag, "It's a good thing you guys know how to do this because you've done it three times!"

Oooooooooo! It's after 9pm! This is the latest I've been up all week. Gotta go get some zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz's.