I Have Never Worked This Hard to Impress a Girl in All My Life!

These have been hands down the hardest 3 days of my life. To have these grand visions of sweeping in and taking this baby away from an orphanage life to one of love and comparatively speaking, privilege, then have her struggle through the process is heart-wrenching. But every day she has blossomed just a little bit more, and now she seems to be coming to terms with the idea of being a member of our family. She has started feeding herself a little and can walk entirely by herself! If you ask her where her Mama she will either look at or point to Lori, and she even acknowledges who her Baba(Chinese for Daddy) is by pointing to me. Today for the first time she reached out and took my hand without prompting, and even reached to touch my beard. She still turns her head if I try and kiss her, but I will take what I can get.

Today we visited the Baiyun Garden. It is very beautiful, but I think the Chinese feel like they need to be more like the west, so they have decorated this wonderful place with all sorts of tacky cartoon character figures. It is sad that this is our influence on the world. Lots of Chinese people fawn over Audrey and the other babies in our group, but there is also a large number of people who look at you like "who the hell do you think you are to come here and take our babies away?" I think this is more shame at their fellow people than resentment towards us, but it doesn't make it any less painful to witness. The people who do show kindness more than make up for the others though, I have to make sure and have my sunglasses on when I see them coming because every time it makes me cry. Usually it is either the elderly or the younger generations who react this way to us. I expect as much from the young people who have been raised to want to be like the U.S., but it is the older ones that always touch my heart, because they were raised to either hate us, or at the very least, distrust us. To see the kindness in their eyes is really amazing, we might not be able to talk to them, but a smile is a smile in every language.

By the way, someone already likes Twizzlers like her Mama!