36 Hours Later...A Progress Report

We've been a family for a little more than 36 hours now! There are some things that we have already noticed about Sydney, and there was some important paperwork that we filled out yesterday.

We took all the babies to the Jiangxi Province Center for Social Affairs (or something like that), which is where the department is that oversees adoptions. While there, we had a family picture taken for our official adoption paperwork, had Sydney's picture taken for her passport and met with a provincial official who conducted an interview with us as a final step in the process. She gave us a gift of porcelain, because Jiangxi Province is known for their work in this area.

Afterwards, we traveled to a notary office, where he verified all the paperwork we just finished. Then he gave us our official little red folder, with the paperwork inside that finalized the adoption. So, she is now officially ours! Today we pick up her passport.

By the way, after we typed the last post, we went to dinner in the hotel lobby with the rest of the group. Once we got back to the room, Sydney's aversion to her father was gone. She is now very comfortable with me, as I am with her. She doesn't mind who is holding her anymore. She will play with both of us, smiles, and talks to both of us. So that hurdle has already been overcome! As a matter of fact, she let Daddy feed her this morning. Here is the proof (although, since it is a photograph, it may have been doctored...)



As far as eating, Sydney likes to drink her formula/rice cereal mix. She also likes to eat rice, broccoli, mandarin oranges, hard-boiled eggs, scrambled eggs and crackers. She does not like egg custard, which some of the babies here just love.

For behavior, Sydney likes to always hold something in her hand. It doesn't matter what it is - we have given her the spoon, a small box, a little container of Carmex, her feeding bottle, her toys, Mommy's hair, Daddy's chest hair (ouch!); just so long as she holds something. She also likes the toys she has at this point, and she is pretty easily entertained. She makes a little scratching motion with her hand sometimes, and we think that may be a nervous twitch or some sort of comforting behavior.

We've been trying to log her eating, sleeping and diaper change times so that we can quickly figure out her routine. She has slept pretty well through both nights, and she takes several naps per day.

Overall, she is a lot of fun to have around! She keeps us smiling all day long, and we can't say the word "cute" enough! We have lots more pictures to prove this, but we'll put up just one more for now:



As I type this, Sydney is taking a nap on the bed. When she wakes up, we'll all head down for some breakfast. Later this afternoon, we get to pick up her passport. Meanwhile, Wendy and I are both trying to stave off colds - something that is going around between all of our travel group (and some of the babies) right now. It's a little frustrating, but we'll get through it!

We'll post more when anything interesting happens. We don't leave Nanchang until Sunday, so we have a few lazy days ahead of us without much planned, which all of our travel group agrees is a good thing. We could have taken a trip to Fuzhou, which is the city that the orphanage is in (and where most of our girls were found), but it is a 2.5 hour drive one-way, and we collectively agreed that although that would have been nice to go to the place where our daughters were found (Sydney was found at the gate of the Huali Restaurant by an employee of the restaurant), we didn't want to put the babies through that long of a day already, especially since they just had such a day 2 days ago, and it rocked their world big-time!

Thank you, everyone, for your warm wishes and thoughts in the comments. We really do appreciate hearing from everyone and knowing that we have so much support back home! We are less than a week away from coming home! Yeah!