It's Official

Hi everybody!  This is Crystal today.  It's almost 1:00 on Tuesday afternoon and we're spending the rest of the day hanging out in our hotel room.  It's rainy today in Hangzhou.  Last night, we were finally able to get TongJie to sleep (in his crib!) around 10:30.  He woke up once and cried shortly after midnight, but I held him for awhile and he went back to sleep right away.  He slept clear until 6:30 this morning, so we were quite impressed!  We had breakfast at the hotel buffet and TongJie seemed to love everything we gave him: cheerios, canned pear, watermelon, bread pudding, and pancake.  We can't really tell if he distinguishes one food as being better than another - he just eats whatever we give him with great relish.  After breakfast, we went back to the Civil Affairs Office for the official adoption ceremony.  Yesterday we were given custody of TongJie, which needs to take place for 24 hours before the actual adoption.  So this morning around 10:00 was when we became the official parents of TongJie.  He was sleeping, as you will see in the picture.  He seems to have an ear infection, so after an email conversation with our doc from UW Medical Ctr, we decided to give him the antibiotics that Dr. Davies had prescribed before we left.  He took the first dose this morning with no problem and after his nap at the Civil Affairs Office seems to be feeling a little better.  We've been seeing a lot more laughs and smiles last night and today, and I finally was able to get a picture where you can see his beautiful smile (and he's wearing his new guitar shirt from the Stromings).

We've found that TongJie loves the stacking cups that we brought that were hand-me-downs from Drake and Levi.  When we get them out, he's entertained for a long, long time.  Jeff just fed him some oatmeal for lunch and now he's back to playing with his "magic cups," as our guide called them, while sitting on Jeff's lap.  We're glad that he seems to enjoy being with us and wants to be near us all the time.  We think that he can walk, but we haven't really seen it.  He does stand and take a few steps while holding onto one of our hands.  His legs probably aren't very strong right now.  In a lot of ways, he seems much younger than 20 months, which is what we expected.  He makes a few babbling noises, but mostly he's pretty quiet.  

Today we don't really have to do anything, so we'll just stay here in our room.  Tomorrow is going to be a really long day.  We have to leave early, around 6:15 am, to take a bullet train to Wenzhou, where TongJie's orphanage is so we can apply for his Chinese passport.  We'll need his passport so we can apply for his visa at the US consulate next week.  The train ride to Wenzhou is about 3 hours one way, so it's going to be a long day!  We might not be able to update our blog or check our email tomorrow, but we should be able to on Thursday.

We still can't see our blog because we can't access Blogger, but the comments are linked to our email so we've been getting the comments people are leaving and that's really fun!  Thanks to all of you for your kind comments, emails, thoughts, and prayers!  Attaching some pictures from last night and this morning - most of them should be pretty self-explanatory.  I couldn't resist taking a picture of "Mr. Ron" with TongJie while he was napping, plus another picture of Ron reading a favorite book of his (notice the title of the book), ha ha!