The big day was much sadder than we expected

We got to Guiyang last night and checked into the hotel. Got the best night sleep so far, everyone made it to about 6:30am. Westerners are much more of novelty here than in Hong Kong. Lots of people look twice as they pass us on the street and many want to touch and hold Bayard. He’s not really digging that, so my new job is to act as his body guard while at the same time trying to be friendly and smile.

Michael our adoption agency rep here let us know that they will bring the babies to the hotel at noon, and that will make a trip to Wal Mart at 9:30am to pickup up supplies beforehand. I thought I had heard him incorrectly…..we flew 7000 miles around the world to go to Wal Mart? But sure enough we found ourselves in the Guiyang Wal Mart this morning right across from a huge statue of Chairman Mao. You can all draw your own opinions about that.

So at 12noon we went down to Michael’s room and everyone gathered in the hall to get the babies. The foster families and orphanage directors were there and they handed over the babies one by one. It was exciting, surreal, and very emotional. These Chinese foster families had been taking care of these kids for over 6 months and now were giving them up to us in a hotel hallway.

We tried to let them know how much we appreciated their taking care of Amelia, but words just didn’t get the feelings across. We did a few hugs and pats on the shoulder as we all took pictures together, but then was it, they went down in the elevator and we went into our hotel room. It was really hard to see them have to walk away from these kids and know that they will never see them again.

Amelia began to cry as soon as they handed her over, which really let us know she was clearly very well cared for. She was very sad and mad to be taken away from her foster family. We wrapped her up held her about an hour and a half until she fell asleep.

She seems healthy, very tuned in to what’s going on around her. We’re thankful to have what looks like a good start to things with her. We've got the rest of her life to have great days, but this one turned out to be much sadder than we had expected with seeing her foster family say goodbye to her.

Don't want to end this on a sad note though, we're very excited and looking forward to getting to know each other over the next week here in Guiyang. Stay tuned.....