Gotcha! He's real... And he's spectacular!

Not quite 6am on Gotcha morning and all three of us were up and wide awake. We headed down for breakfast for the first time at the new buffet. No worries, there are still piles of bacon and sausages. This buffet is even better than the one at the Novotel in Beijing. I've probably gained 10 pounds by this point already but we have done a lot of walking too.

Robby's first words this morning were, "Hi dad. Today is the day that we get Bobo.", with a big ol' smile on his face. He's been saying that he is already officially a big brother. Hopefully, he'll stay this happy about it!

After breakfast, it was back up to the hotel room to sit and wait. We had a little over an hour to sit around and quite frankly, I'm glad because I was not feeling well at all. I'm thinking now that it was nerves although I didn't feel nervous at all.

It was finally time to head down to the lobby to meet Echo, our Changchun guide. She's fantastic. Personality to spare... understands what we're all going through... translates for us and whatever else. All 3 families are in the hotel lobby waiting when Echo arrives. We talk for a bit and she then leads us out the door to the bus.

We had the same bus driver as the dude who picked us up at the airport and delivered us to our hotel. I can't imagine that somebody would want the job of driving in this city, but apparently they do. He does a good job and so far, no fender benders even though we've literally been within inches several times. Heck, he made a wrong turn when we were right by the building were Caleb is at, and he whipped a u-turn in the middle of the road (in a city bus!!) without a curb check. It was some pretty impressive driving to say the least.

Not really sure what I was expecting as far as the building and the way everything goes down, but what really happens was not it. The building is a fairly non-descript stone/concrete looking building just in the middle of any other city block. The only difference is the red communist China flag flying out front indicating that it is a federal building.

The lobby of the building was a wide open space (the photo of Robby and Caleb dancing is in the lobby) with a couple of smoking guards. Lots of smoking in China...

Echo led us to the the elevators to head on up to the 9th floor where we'll meet Caleb. We get off of the elevator into a dingy hallway with doors that look like an old American appartment building with about 30 layers of paint on the doors so they don't seal tightly any more. There was some mild confusion as to what door the kiddos were behind. Echo made a quick phone call and then led us through this big heavy metal door that would completely seal off the main hallway when closed and latched. The kiddos were in the room on the first door to the left after that big security door. I was the first person folloing Echo and I saw little Caleb in the room. He saw me too and ducked back around the corner as fast as he could. We were led into the room to meet the kids.

As would be expected, Caleb was quite shy at first and only wanted to be touched by his care giver from the orphanage. He had a little blue bag that was brought with him from the orphanage. It had oranges, bananas, snacks of various kinds and his photo book and cd we sent him a few months back. The care giver showed him the pictures and pointed to us to show him Baba (daddy), mama (I think that one speaks for itself) and gu gu (big brother). He didn't care.

We then had to leave that room and head up to floor 12 to a court room. That room was fairly large and loaded up with about 40 - 50 leather clad chairs, fake wood floors and lots of marble on the walls. It was a cold room, which was fitting for the cold thing that was about to happen to the little guys. The care givers were in there for a few minutes and as soon as we started to do paperwork, the care givers handed the boys over to their new parents and left. You could see Calebs little heart break, and in case you weren't looking, the little painful sobs turning into a full fledged wail would have given it away.

He went thru a little anger period where he would hit us if we tried to hold or comfort him. He was holding on to his bag of corn candy's (note I did not say candy corn, very different) which was the last thing his care giver had given to him prior to her leaving. He clung to it for dear life. At one point, he ran over to the doors she exited through and tried to get out himself. When he couldn't, he backed into the corner by the hinges and collapsed into a big sobbing, sometime's wailing, heap who wanted us to go away.

Lesley, Robby and myself were all trying to comfort him as best we could and finally I scooped him up and took him over to one of the chairs to sit down. He didn't want to be on my lap but he would stand between my legs and let me rub his tummy, back and shoulders. Progress!!

This went on for a while until he finally indicated that he wanted to be up on my lap! That's more like it! He crawled up on my lap and sat there crying for quite some time. Robby and him played some ball, played with the little truck and cars we bought him but he really wanted his care giver back. The longer he sat on my lap, the more I could feel him relaxing in. He was still quite tense, but he's getting there.

He eventually got to the point where he leaned back fully into me with zero reservation. It was a glorious moment, indeed. About 5 minutes later, he was asleep. Unfortunately, we had to leave around 10 - 15 minutes after he fell asleep. He woke up in a decent mood however most of that was due to the fact that he got to put on his hat and gloves and go through that door finally. He showed me that he had to go potty by grabbing himself and having a pained look on his face. He may have been saying the right thing too, but I had no idea what that was. I took him to a public potty, or otherwise known as 'squatty pottys'. The boy had to GO! He had long underwear on first, then big heavy wool pants, and then snow pants over the top of those. In China, the kids all wear three or four layers in the winter and two to three layers in the summer. By the time we got done pulling his various layers of pants down, he was in full on panic mode with his new Baba, but he held it! Good boy.

From there, we went down to the bus again to go get adoption photos taken. This is for some final adoption stuff so it was only the parents and the new kiddo to go inside. The grandparents of one of the little lads and the two big brothers had to stay on the bus.

Next, it was on to the notary to sign a little more paperwork. Again, only for the parents and new kiddo. By this time, Caleb is accepting us and is being very well behaved. He was a little reluctant going up the four flights of stairs. I couldn't help but wonder what must have been going through his head. Another new set of people? More changes? He was very happy going back down the steps holding my hand. While we were up there, the orphanage director told us that "Rongbo's foster mom called him crying hard and wanting to know how he was doing". It's great that he had somebody prior to us that loved him.

Back to the bus and the trip back to the hotel. He was happy and playing with Robby, mimicking stuff that we're doing to each other, hugging, kissing, games of got'cher nose and so on. He's cute.

Once back to the hotel, the walk to our room was fun. He has a fun little walk too, kinda bouncy.

The three families went to dinner together last night at a dumpling restaurant that Echo lead us too. It was good and out of the the 32 dumplings at our table, Caleb probably had about 10 of them. The boy can eat! We walked back to the hotel and played until around 7:30pm when we tried to get him to bed. We all ended up falling asleep together by about 8pm. I got out of bed at 10pm to shut the lights and computer off and fall back into bed.

Caleb had a rough night and because he was positioned immediately next to me in this California king sized bed, I too had a bit of a rough night. I would guess that he woke up around 100 times and would look me straight in the eyes and then go back to sleep. Those little episodes would last about 10 seconds total, but I'm not exaggerating on the number of times. He also had a bad dream and woke up thrashing about. I was trying to comfort him but eventually had to fully wake him up to get him to settle back down.

This morning about 5:30 am, he woke up sobbing and occaisionally crying pretty hard. It's a great thing for them to be grieving at this point because it's an indicator that they were well cared for. That in and of itself is a blessing. These little guys are something special.

Prior to breakfast, we wanted to get him out of his pj's and into some clothes that at least make it look like we're bundling him up (to the locals, that is...). He can dress himself and when momma tried to put a sweatshirt on him that he didn't want, he freaked out, pulled it off and put it on the bed. She got him another shirt with a zipper, instead of pulling it over his head, he gladly put it on and then folded up the other sweatshirt and put it away in his drawer!

We went down to breakfast and again, he ate big! They say that it is up to the parents to shut them off at some point because they've never had the opportunity to really fill up on food so they will gorge themselves if left to their own judgement.

Caleb had a bowl of congee, apple juice, some bacon, ham, and sausage I cut up for him, a bite of Robby's pancake with syrup and whipped cream on it, and some other things that I can't remember. He was very happy at breakfast and has been pretty happy all day. He's currently mad at me because I'm attempting to make him take a nap. I'm also a little nervous that he hasn't pooped for us yet. They say that these guys often get constipated as a result of their changing lives, and I believe it. Everytime I try to get him to go poo, he ends up pointing to me and saying "baba". You see, call it coincidence or whatever, la ba bah is the mandarin Chinese word for poo, baba is the word for daddy.

Caleb's about out now. I think he would be if I could get Robby to stop flopping onto the bed with his football. I say that in a joking way as Rob has been absolutely great with Caleb and really well behaved overall. He makes a daddy proud!

Momma is out with some of the other people from our group currently. They were taking laundry to be done, completing more paperwork and going shopping. I feel like I already wrote that paragraph in here once but with both boys pulling on me, two ds's going, football and soccer ball flying by my head, and a bout of naughtiness from Caleb, I'm sure there will be some other errors in here as well.

Overall, things are going great. Caleb is adapting faster than I would have expected. Robby is as good of a big brother as I would have guessed and we are all quite happy.

That's all for now. I will try to post more soon as I have some video I would like to share, but I may not be smart enough to post it successfully.

Bye from Changchun!