Ni Hao!

We made it to Guangzhou 23 hours after we left our house. It was a little painful to see on the video flight map, that we flew back over San Francisco about 10 hours after we left home to catch our SFO to LAX to Guangzhou flight. If only there were direct flights from SFO to Guangzhou! The rest of our 15 hour flight went smoothly, but still felt soooo long. Kalia fared the best of all of us. She slept for most of it, woke up with a big smile, and played happily (and quietly) the rest of the time. Whew!

We met our group at the Guangzhou airport--just three other families, which is extraordinarily small considering their largest ever was 44 families. I just can't even imagine. There's one other couple from the Bay Area and the rest are from southern California. A fifth couple was unable to come with the group because some of their paperwork expired. We're by far the youngest of the group, and we're the only ones with a child already. And because they typically match children with families according to the parents' age, we're the only ones getting a "baby" while the rest are all getting children around 2 yrs of age. (Makena's currently 10.5 months old.) I think Kalia will have fun being the little mother of the group.

Originally Kalia was going to share a room with my mom. We thought they both might sleep better that way, in case Makena cries a lot. The hotel set up a crib in every single room, so Kalia was initially very excited because she assumed that Makena would stay in their room. She set up all her own belongings on the bed next to the crib because she wanted to be the one to take care of Makena. She even came to our room and grabbed the teddy bear from the crib and brought it to their room "so that Makena won't cry at night and wake up Laolao." Once I explained to her that Makena would be in our room, after she was done crying about it, she moved all her stuff back into our room (No offense, Laolao!) and is now sleeping in the bed next to the crib in eager anticipation of big sisterhood.

Tomorrow's "Gotcha Day" and we get Makena at 2:30pm! It's our last night as a family of three, which feels surreal and strange and a tiny bit scary, but exciting and wonderful at the same time. We started the adoption paperwork in June of 2006, so it's been a long process. It's all about to become real.