Finally a Family of Three...an evening in March of 1996(1st in the series)

*to read about Darcy's adoption please click on one of the links below:
In Darcy's mother's words.
In Darcy's father's words.

Three Days After Joining Us,Darcy Finally Graces Us With Her First Smile!(2nd in the series)

Scenes from our third day onward in Nanchang...(3rd in the series)

Late November 2002(4th in the series)

Hmmm...I was only able to find one of our albums from our trip to China for Rayna. The first three photos were taken as Grant, seven year old Darcy, and I traveled to get Rayna. Darcy was an amazing traveler. In the 19 hours or so it took us to get to Hong Kong (our port of entry), she sat in her seat so still and quiet! She happily read nearly the entire way, pausing occasionally to carry on rather grown up conversations with nearby passengers. She was a joy to travel with. She never once complained she was bored (unlike her mother!)...and she only made two trips to the bathroom. She was very excited about getting to return to China...though she wasn't too gone on the idea of getting a baby sister! That changed the MOMENT she saw Rayna, though. I have never seen two children bond as fast and as hard and as deeply as though two sisters did from the very first day.





The photos of Rayna in the pink and white snowsuit were taken moments after she was placed in our arms. Unlike our adoption with Darcy, all the waiting parents were gathered together in a conference room of the hotel and we all received our babies and completed the legal paperwork all right there all at once. No trip the following day to a government building. The government officials all met us there that day in the conference room. We were probably in that conference room for about an hour. After about half an hour, the babies were getting so hot that they gave us permission to take the snowsuits off and dress them in lighter clothing, thankfully!

The snowsuits were adorable...but so impersonal. The babies were dressed in brand-new clothing from their heads to their toes...they carried away from the orphanage no trace of their former life. Even the women holding each baby seemed to hold no specific knowledge of the individual babies. When I asked the director of the orphanage if Rayna had had a specific nanny, he had proudly informed me that he made a point of rotating the staff frequently so that none of them would become attached to any child in particular. He seemed to feel this was most efficient and something that we would find admirable. I found it heartbreaking. Rayna is the child I have the least "before us" information on. And, she, has always from the moment she could speak, been the one child of my three who genuinely wishes to know about her life before us. I guess she hasn't brought it up much in the last few years...probably finally realized that we will not know any more with the next round of questions than we knew with the first round.








I think this is a "God thing" though... Since we had already previously adopted from China, we were allowed to specify on our paperwork what province we would like the child we would be matched with to be from. There were no guarantees that this request would be honored, but it seemed it usually was when practical and possible. So, we had expected we would be matched with another child from JiangXi province. The same day we received our referral, another family with our same agency received their referral. They were first time adoptive parents and, as such, had not requested a child from any specific region. They were assigned a baby from JiangXi province. We were assigned a baby from AnHui. Meanwhile, Grant and I had befriended a young man who had arrived from China while we were going through the long process of adoption. (At that time, our adoption took nearly two years...which seemed extraordinary to us when our first adoption had taken nine months and THAT had been considered extremely lengthy--the adoptions just prior to our first one had only been taking three to four months. Now days, two years would seem like a breeze. But, back then, it was longer than most adoptions at the time were taking.) We had become quite good friends with this young man, Z. W. When our referral for Rayna came, we were surprised to see that not only had she come from the very same province as our dear friend, but even from the very same small town in that province! And the person listed as having found her was another man with the family name of Z....just like our friend. This Z. was not personally known by our friend, but still, it was amazing.

Rayna was found at the town's salt factory. That seems to fit her melodramatic temperament! No one would ever think of calling our youngest child bland!





In the next post, I will try to have photos beyond our first day with Rayna...and will tell about our dinner on Thanskgiving day with Zhang Wei's family, there in China! (How nice is that...to find an entire family who claims you as their own, living in the same town your new child is from?)

Luminous Rayna(remembering back to November 2002)(5th in the series)

What I remember most about Rayna during that Gotcha week when we were first getting to know our precious new little daughter was how BOUNCY she was. She was constantly so ANIMATED and EXUBERANT. She was not still for a nanosecond a single waking moment and she slept very little. She was an amazingly happy baby and the most outgoing child around. She LOVED people...all people. And she lived to CHARM the crowd. She had a gift for making each person feel like THEY were the most delightful person that ever passed by her world. She just glowed with enthusiasm and joy. Looking back on our photos now, still makes me smile. Those little legs of hers were always kicking and swinging and her face was nearly always lit up with the biggest smile around. She was a very ENGAGING baby! Her personality has remained very true to our earliest impressions of her!

Memories of Thankgiving 2002Our Best Thanksgiving Ever(6th in the series)

Six years ago, the day before Thanksgiving, Rayna was placed in our arms. Later, that same day, our translator knocked on our hotel door and told us, with a baffled expression, that she had received a call from the front desk. They told her there were some people down in the lobby claiming they knew us and wanting to speak to us. The personnel at the front desk found it suspicious that these people who could not speak English were asking to see the C. family (foreigners--US!), claiming they were FRIENDS of ours. The staff at the front desk were bent on protecting our privacy and were certain that these people must surely be up to no good, because how could we (an American family who had just arrived there the day before) possibly KNOW locals? Ahhh...but we DID know them! At least we knew their brother! We had been very good friends with their brother, Z. W., for several years. He was living in America and we had become friends with him when he first began developing his conversational English skills. He had become a very dear friend. He had been so excited when he heard that our baby was coming from HIS home town. He had called all his family and given them our travel itinerary. He had told us we should call them the moment we arrived in HeFei. We felt uncomfortable calling his family, though...we didn't know them, we didn't speak Chinese, and we didn't want them to have to travel to HeFei on our account. So, we hadn't called. But, that didn't deter them a bit! Here they were, down in the lobby, on the same day we had gotten Rayna! The wife of Z. W.'s brother and that wife's sister and that sister's husband had all piled in a taxi and made the long trip to our hotel!

We assured the front desk that they WERE indeed friends of ours and we would be happy to come down and meet with them. Our group's translator (Judy) graciously offered to come along. We met them in the lobby and visited a while with them there, then invited them up to our room. Before they left that day, they insisted that the following day we must come to the home of sister-in-law's sister's home (she and her husband lived on the far side of HeFei, he was a university professor). They had no idea that tomorrow was Thanksgiving.

So, it was, that in the early afternoon of Thanksgiving in 2002, we were in China, sharing cabs with our new found friends. (They had returned to our hotel to take us to the one couple's home.) Judy (our group's translator) offered to come with us to our utter relief and absolute delight. What a memorable Thanksgiving! We left the hotel far behind. Soon we were in the outskirts of the city, far off the beaten path of foreigners. We walked along the outskirts of the university and wound in and out of narrow alleys afoot. The alleys were buzzing with life. People were sitting outside the doorways of their home carrying on animated conversations, smoking pipes, and cooking...lots of cooking going on either outside or just within the dim interiors that we caught glimpses of through the open doorways. I felt like we were walking some place that none but Chinese feet had walked trod. We were in the heart of a vibrant neighborhood. As I walked along, I felt like I was being allowed to be part of something that foreigners were not suppose to be part of. It was so different from the business areas or the public parks. It was so personal. We climbed steep steps and found ourselves in a very clean, small apartment. I remember that Z. W.'s sister-in-law offered us bananas. Darcy HATED bananas. Always had. Refused to eat them. Couldn't stand them. I was desperately hoping my seven year old would not embarrass me by expressing her intense dislike of the bananas being offered. To my surprise and utter relief, she eagerly reached out for one and proceeded to happily eat the entire thing. She later told me, "I like the bananas in China! I just don't like the bananas in the United States!" Darcy holds to that claim to this day! Personally, the banana tasted like a banana to me...but, now that she is back in American, Darcy once more can no longer stomach bananas!

After the sister-in-law's sister's eldest son came home from high school, we all set out on foot for the restaurant. (Sister-in-law, her husband (the brother of our dear friend) and their pre-school age son; Sister-in-law's sister, and her husband, and their high school aged son (the only person in the group who knew some English!); along with our translator, and our own family of four. The walk was a couple of miles. The evening was beautiful...like a gently cool Fall evening. Walking, I felt so much more a PART of China than I had ever felt riding past in a taxi or bus or train or plane. And we were in a part of HeFei that only the locals would be in. We certainly drew a long of stares...but, then we were staring wide-eyed ourselves, trying to take it all in and burn it all into our memory. I had forgotten to bring my camera. I was still so overwhelmed with my brand new baby, getting to know her and understand her that somehow I had managed to leave my camera behind. The best part of China will be forever only etched in my mind...no pictures to look back on or share with others.

Eventually, we emerged from the maze of alleys far too narrow for vehicles to drive though and came upon a very busy street that was four lanes wide. We had to dash across this street in order to reach the restaurant. I remembered anew how in China the MOTOR vehicles have the right away, not the pedestrians! We scrabbled across the lanes through the traffic like a frogger game come to life! When we reached the restaurant, there was a huge round table already set, waiting for us. Our dear friends spared no expense. They ordered dozens of lavish entrees and appetizers and soups. There were frog legs and duck and venison and EVEN TURKEY! There was so much to try and it was all delicious. There was even fried alligator! The alligator was particularly tasty. It had been prepared much like a blooming onion with bite sized pieces sticking up all over off the back of the alligator. You just picked a bite-sized piece off. Each bite was individually coated in a light crispy shell. The snow white meat inside was tender and delicious. As I ate delicious, unfamiliar food, surrounded by welcoming strangers speaking a tongue I did not speak in a land where I was the newcomer, it struck me that never again in my life would I be likely to have a Thanksgiving so much like what the Pilgrims in my own country had experienced that first Thanksgiving.

That night, we had the most lavish Thanksgiving feast of our lives....in the heart of China, far off the beaten path in a restaurant where there were nothing but locals present--and ourselves...with new dear friends who had such generous, loving, hearts embracing us in their midst...and none of them had any way of knowing the significance of the day they had chosen to lavish their best dishes upon us--our Thanksgiving! That was the most beautiful Thanksgiving of my life. We were so far from home, and yet we were home.

The following evening, our friends came to our hotel once more, and this time to tell us good-bye and lavish gifts upon us. They agreed to stay and have supper with us at the hotel and, once more, our dear, sweet translator, Judy, set aside her own evening plans to join us.

What touched my heart most of all over those three days was how the young sister-in-law's heart just went out to our new baby daughter. She couldn't hold Rayna enough or baby talk and play with her enough. It was as if her heart was so hungry...so lonely...for a baby girl of her own. She spoke wistfully of a friend of hers who had had a baby girl and kept her. A few years later this friend had defied the one child rule, choosing to pay the fines and suffer the consequences to have a second child, hoping for a son. The friend had, indeed, had a son the second time. The decision to defy the rules cost her dearly. She was stripped of her career and much pressure was brought to bear upon her and her husband, but she did not regret her decision. The sister-in-law spoke so wistfully of her friend and quietly mentioned how she wished she could have a second child. Her heart yearned so deeply to have a baby girl. She spoke of all the baby girls that are abandoned in the countryside. She spoke of parent-in-laws who force young mothers to give up their baby daughters. There was pain and sorrow in her heart...but, hope, too, at seeing our beautiful baby daughter so alive and joyful...and so very loved by us. She loved our baby, too. I wondered if the love that family poured out upon us was because we were friends with their relative or, maybe, even more, because we were giving a loving home to one small, fragile, precious little DingYuan girl....a girl from their town....one of them. All of the adults, even the men, doted on Rayna and delighted in her smiles and her attention. They loved her so much. But the young wife of my dear friend's brother, her heart knit so deeply to little Rayna. Her heart hungered more than all the rest to hold this baby of ours and press as much love on her as she could in our short time together.

Leading Up to Our Third Adoption(7th in the series)

Continuing on in this series recounting a bit about each of our adoption experiences...

We had adopted Darcy at the age of 8 1/2 months back in 1996 (arriving back home at Easter) and then in 2002 we had adopted Rayna at the age of 9 months (spending Thanksgiving day in China). Darcy, who had not WANTED to adopt a little sister, was so enamored with Rayna that we had barely been home a day or two before she began lobbying big time for us to undertake a third adoption. She thought she needed at least one more baby sister!

Poor Grant, was going into sensory overload about this time in our lives. He has always been a quiet, organized person. Though Darcy was an exuberant, loud child...she was just ONE child...and she was kept on a very, very short leash. We had always been very strict with her and extremely consistent. And, even though she was an iron-willed child, still we had achieved a very peaceful balance in our family. She had always been quite advanced for her age, too...which made her fit into an adult pattern of life much more easily. For example, even though she transferred from a crib to a toddler bed as soon as she was able to walk (14 months?), our rule had always been that she could NOT get out of bed without PERMISSION. At first (ie the first three days), this has been a real battle of the wills, until, in utter exasperation, I had re-assembled her crib in her room and told her she could CHOOSE where to sleep, but that if she got up out of bed without permission, then MOMMY would choose. Of course, she chose her regular bed. And, of course, moments after I had put her into her regular bed for her nap, her little feet had hit the floor running to rejoin me in the living room. So, I had nonchalantly scooped her little self up and deposited her in her CRIB to finish her nap out. And then gone to the living room to vacuum my floors (so I wouldn't have to listen to her wailing). A couple of times of allowing her to choose and then letting her lose her choice when she popped out of bed without permission was all it took. We had a toddler who would not get out of bed until we came and lifted her out. Very convenient. That rule turned out to be so handy, that we just held on to it....for many, many years (right up through age six years!). By the time Darcy was two and a half, she was reading simple books on her own. (She read on a kindergarten level. By the time she was three and a half years old, she read fluently at a third grade level.) We had a little bookcase next to her toddler bed, and she could reach over and get books to read each morning while she was waiting for us to get up for the day....particularly on SATURDAY mornings when she would wake up at the break of dawn and we had no intention of getting up until 8:30 or 9:00am ourselves! She would call out to us, letting us know she was awake and would like to get out of bed, and I would holler back in (without even bothering to lift my head off the pillow), "It's too early Darcy. Go back to sleep." Whereupon she would quietly busy herself reading her many books. We would not hear another peep out of her until we went in to her room to tell her it was okay to get up, several hours later. We would find her happily surrounded by books, reading away in her bed.

Life was orderly like that, right up to the moment we brought Rayna home. Even though Darcy was high energy and exuberant child, she had always been much more 'adult' than most children. Enter Rayna. And did our lives ever CHANGE. Rayna, was the Tasmanian devil of the babies in our adoption group....she was a constant blur of motion that never slept. And, Rayna was no miniature little adult, either. She was ALL baby. Honestly, at first, we thought something was wrong with her. She just seemed so delayed. I tried teaching her her alphabet and she wasn't the least bit interested. The alphabet and printed words simply were not relevant to her world. And with her, my honestly held belief that any child could be taught to read by the age of two (given a sufficiently educational enriched environment) went right out the window. Rayna was a bright child, but she was a pretty normal child, too! I gave up teaching her to read. By the time she was four and truly WANTED to learn to read, I was so overwhelmed with our son's needs, that I did not teach her. She learned in kindergarten at the age of five, instead.

Rayna was a ball of fire. And, I was just so much OLDER and tireder. I had been so strict with Darcy and so consistent. Yet, as I had grown older, I had looked back on what we had expected from Darcy at such an early age, and I felt like I had been too harsh with her. About the time Rayna entered the family, I lightened up on Darcy and I was not nearly as strict with Rayna as I had been with Darcy. This was a source of frustration to Grant. Our home had run very smoothly before and now it was mass chaos...or so it felt to him. Not only that, but now there were TWO children in the family. There is a HUGE difference between one child and two! The dynamics CHANGE...the entire BALANCE OF THE FAMILY changes. Suddenly, instead of it being two adults with a child between them, it was now a child per adult. And, having TWO very HIGH ENERGY, LOUD, EXUBERANT, MESSY children AND a loud, exuberant, disorganized wife was just a bit overwhelming for Grant...now he was REALLY outnumbered. So, it is understandable that as Darcy began lobbying hard and heavy for a THIRD adoption, Grant was not in the least persuaded. However, Grant didn't worry about Darcy's lobbying, until, about six months after we had adopted Rayna, when we were discussing as a family our future plans to return to China (once Rayna was older) and take each of the girls to the areas where they had been born. Darcy piped up, once again, with her now familiar mantra that we needed to adopt another baby. But, this time, to Grant's horror, I joined in, making the remark that it just wouldn't seem right to visit China WITHOUT bringing home a baby. Grant looked me square in the eye, and said, "No. We are too old for any more babies. We are 40 years older than Rayna. By the time she is out of college we will be looking into nursing homes!" Poor Grant, he really was feeling very, very old and tired by this time. Rayna, as adorable as she was, had just sucked the life right out of my husband. Not being a very sympathetic soul, by nature, though, I jumped at my chance to rattle my husband and announced with feigned sincerity, "Well...I guess we will just have to adopt OLDER children then!" Neither of us realized how prophetic those words would prove to be....just two months later....