This picture was taken of the children when we got off the bus!
We made it to the gate and the dear, sweet elderly gate keeper opened the big gate with a smile on his face to let us in. We all started taking pictures. This is where the girls spent most of the first year of their lives at. A couple of the girls in our group were able to be in foster care for a little while. We didn't find that out until later.
We were welcomed into the conference room by Vice Director Chen. He was very nice and was so glad that we were there. He said that we had gotten there a little earlier than expected so the girls were not completly ready. They had just finished up their lunch and were getting baths and getting dressed. So we all walked around in the courtyard for a little bit waiting and taking more pictures and talking. Well it was very warm to say the least. There is no air conditioning in China. They do have fans to kind of circulate the air around and they did have an air conditioner of sorts in the conference room. We had a good time playing with some of the older kids that were there. Fred really made some neat friends with the older kids. It was fun. Well we were all outside when we saw the girls start to come. They were all dressed in matching pink outfits that had little flowers all over the pants and sleeves of the shirt. They all had on little squeekie shoes. Hope was the last one out! I was sooooo busy taking pictures of everyone that I didn't noticed until everyone said "CRYSTAL". I turned around and Joan had Hope in her arms. She came to me. She really didn't cry. I just started to hum with her and just rock her a little bit. She did ok! We found out in the process of the girls coming that Dave and Ruthie's little girl Mia wasn't there, that she was on her way with her foster family!!! They didn't know that she was in foster care. So they had to wait a little while longer for Mia to get there. It was very rough on Mia to leave her foster family. They finally had to ask the foster family to wait outside the gate because everytime they would put Mia down to walk around a little bit, she would run right back to her foster mom or where her foster mom had been sitting. Dave and Ruthie got to spend some time with the family talking with them. Poor Mia...just cried and cried.
Hope really never cried. We went into the conference room to show her a duck that Stephen had sent to her, show her pictures of her new family. We gave her a blanket that had Raggedy Ann and Andy on it. She sat there and did ok until everyone else was crying!! She then started to tear up a bit. So I went and walked around with her a bit. Joan told Fred that we were close to where Hope was found if he wanted to ride over and take some pictures. I stayed back at the orphange to finish filling out some paperwork. We walked around after that touring the orphange, talking with the nannies, taking LOTS of pictures of as many children as we could find!
Fred came back and we spent some time getting schedules and such for the girls. Then the orphange gave each of the familes a bottle that was prepared for the trip back to Chongqging, they also gave each family a bag of formula and also rice cereal.
When we headed back to the gate and noticed that a huge crowd had gathered at the gate. When you see so many people, you often wonder if just so happens that your daughter's birthmom happened to make it to the orphange that day to see that her daughter was with a loving family! We will never know who was in the crowd of people that day. One can only hope that those mama's know that their daughters are loved and cared for!
We then headed back to Chongqing....it was a pretty uneventful bus ride for us. Mia and Ellie were having a bit of a difficult time because they both left their foster families that day!
Hope sat and watched out the window for awhile...she went back and forth between Fred and me for awhile, then she drank her bottle and went to sleep! She slept until we got back to the hotel. After we got back to the hotel, all of the new families headed to their rooms for some quiet time with their new daughters. Hope played with some of the toys that we brought. She wanted to explore a little in the room. We then gave her a bath...well apparently she relaxed a lot...she pooped in the water!!!!! So we started all over!!! She LOVES to take a bath!!! After the bath, we decided since things were going to well, we decided to head down to get a bite to eat. We got there and had dinner with Dave,Ruthie, Mia, Scott, Kimberli and Mia. A few more came down. It was a wonderful day!!!! We all were ready to go to bed when it was time!!!
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