China - Part 10 - Got'cha! day, back at the hotel

A shorter post for once.

This is Got'cha! day back at the hotel...

I couldn't even begin to tell you when we got back to the hotel that day. It was a whirlwind of time and emotions. I thought I would be clever and go check the properties of the original photos, but they are on "American" time, not China time, so they show December 4th and a time that is not accurate either. Oh I'm sure that if I thought about it really hard, I could figure it out but it's late, 8:20 cornfield time, I'm tired and have two boys yelling at me for various reasons from across the house.

Loosely translated, it ain't gonna happen.

Regardless of what time it was, let's have a look, should we?

This was the boys playing with their cousins' Nintendo DS.  There were two DS's but of course they both wanted the same one.  Caleb is still in the clothing that we picked him up in, the under-clothes, the wool pants, snow pants and heavy sweater, even though the room was plenty warm, he was NOT going to allow us to take them off.  We did get him down to the under-clothes for pj's that night which were essentially long underwear and a long sleeve under shirt.

Here he is in sole possession of one of the DS's.  He couldn't play the games but he really liked the music that came out of them.  He would get control of one of them and then try to hide it somewhere in the room so that his big brother wouldn't get it back.  It was kinda cute and sad at the same time.

I'm thinking that he's immitating me in this photo.  After we were back at the hotel for a while, I got out my notebook and began scribbling my memories of the earlier part of the day.  He watched me for a bit and then indicated without words that he would like some paper.  We set him up with a notebook and pencil of his own.  He wrote in the notebook for about 45 minutes.  He wrote out little scribbles on each line just like I was doing.  He still likes to do that now!

Here's Robby doing what Robby does best... play football.  He's got his Iowa State autographed shirt on and was running back and forth at the foot of the bed and down the hallway towards the door, stopping only long enough for the occasional photo op.

Along with writing, this was Caleb's other favorite activity; looking out the window. At this point in the day, we didn't know what this meant, but at dusk, we're pretty sure we found out.  We think he was waiting for his foster mama to pick him up.  He got really quiet and withdrawn at sundown and when Momma and Robby left the room for a walk in the hallways, he collapsed against the wall, began sobbing until sobs would not cut it anymore.  At that point, it turned to a wail with a mostly helpless daddy trying to comfort him.  He was mad at me at first, for good reason as we'd ripped him from whatever life he had known, but he eventually accepted my consoling and nestled in.

This crib was in our room as part of the preparation from Holt thru our travel arrangements.  We tried to get it out of there on day one but Echo wanted us to keep it for the first night, just to be safe.  We didn't want to ruffle any feathers so we just kept the silly thing.  He played with the plush soccer ball we got him while in there, but he slept in the 2.5 acre bed with the rest of his family.  We got rid of it the second day...

Here's a shot showing a little bit of his mischeivious side that showed up a few times on the first day. It showed up more on the second day, even more on the third day and so on as his personality slowly came out.  The coolest thing of all is that every day, as of when I'm writing this on Feb. 21st, 2.5 months later, we're still seeing very big developments in his personality.  Luckily, most of it's been good with only a little bit of sassy-ness coming out.  I'm sure that's coming though!

That sums that one up! We went out for dinner that night to a little dumpling shop that was a couple of blocks from our hotel. Echo led us there and it was good food. To our surprise, Caleb ate like a champ and was smiling at us and generally very well behaved. Although, there were some concerns for the upcoming increase to the grocery bill.

Those concerns weren't without merit! ;-)