Saturday in Guangzhou...All Is Going Well!

Greetings everyone! I hope you are all well and happy and blessed this wonderful day! I am in good spirits even though I am tired. I just haven't been sleeping that well. I guess there really is "no place like home." I do love it here but am anxious to get home...and I miss my bed! The beds here are very hard...and therefore, I toss and turn alot.

It has been raining the last couple of days, sometimes pretty heavy. I heard you had some rain in Birmingham too. Hannah was sleeping over at scout camp on Thursday night and I got an email that said they moved them into a cabin...they were in tents. Wet tents...fun fun! The Pearl River has been FULL of boats...cleaning up all the debris that gets in it from the rain. Sometimes we have counted 25 to 40 clean-up boats on the water at one time...just around the hotel area. They are trying to keep it clean for the "dragon boat races" that are happening today and tomorrow. We have been watching the dragon boats moving along the river also from our room on the 12th floor. It's a great view of the movements of the boats. (Want to know more about the dragon boat races? Click on the title of this blog.)

It is 2:30 here now on Saturday afternoon and Jasper and MaryAlyce went out for a walk while I got Esther Marie down for a nap. By the way, we are mostly calling her by her Chinese name right now to help her feel more secure....Hai Mei. She responds to that name when we use it. We will begin to call her Esther Marie and change over after we get home. Anyway, she is sleeping peacefully and I am wanting to blog and post some new photos. Then I hope to go out and walk around some since I haven't really done that since we got here.

We were supposed to go to the orphanage today, but all the rain has flooded some of the roads that we needed to take to get there...about an hour and a half away. We hope to go on Monday or Tuesday. We, along with another family, bought some blankets, bibs, and baby PJs to take to the orphanage as a donation. We also have some gifts for the director and the primary care givers so I hope we get to go. We want to see where Esther Marie has been living. At first, we were told she was probably in foster care, but then we found out she was living in the orphanage the whole time.

Instead of going to the orphanage today, there was another site-seeing tour set up. MaryAlyce was running a low-grade fever, so we opted out of that and stayed close to the hotel. She seems to be doing fine right now. We will be able to tell more tonight as we get closer to bedtime, I guess. We had a leisurely breakfast and then had some time in our room. They we enjoyed a play time out in the hallway with several families on the 12th floor. It was nice to see all the kids together having fun...and we enjoyed talking to the other adults. One family is from Mississippi, another from Georgia and another from North Carolina. We met a lady at breakfast from Michigan. In our group, two families are from Alabama and one from South Carolina. There are two more families coming in today from our agency and one of the families is adopting their 4th child from China....and that will be their 8th child! WOW!

I want to share more photos with you from our Chinese Adoption Day and just some fun "hanging out" photos....so I hope I can do that on the site since I am blocked out of part of it.

More soon! Love, Sarah