Thursday, June 25 - Civil Affairs Office, and Liaocheng

This was a long and stressful day!  We knew it would be, because we did all this before when we adopted TongJie, so we were prepared for the stress and we did a pretty good job of taking everything in stride I think.  We started at the Civil Affairs Office and completed the formal adoption, so we're now officially the parents of Ezekiel ZeYou!  Then we went to the notary, and then it was time to travel to Liaocheng, which is about an hour and a half away, to apply for Ezekiel's passport.  When we did this with TongJie in 2012, we went from Hangzhou to Wenzhou by train, which was about 4 hours each way, and it was a pretty miserable trip with him crying most of the time on the train.  This time we went in a van, it was a much shorter drive, and Ezekiel slept a lot of the time.  Once at the police station, the passport application process went much smoother than we expected (whew!).  It wasn't too crowded, which was nice, especially when it came time to take Ezekiel's photo.  We knew this was going to be stressful, because we'd heard a lot of "horror stories" from other families who have adopted children from China with albinism.  Apparently many of the passport photo takers in China don't know how to take passport-worthy photos of people that don't have dark hair, because the blond/white hair is reported to be "too bright" and requires a lot of extra attention.  With Ezekiel, the hair didn't seem to present much of an issue, but the difficulty was with getting him looking at the camera with his eyes open.  They must have tried at least 20 photos, with a break in the middle to let some other people get a quick photo taken because a line was beginning to accumulate.  Poor Ezekiel - the light hurts his eyes, and every time he looked, there was a blinding flash right in his eyes, so of course he didn't want to keep opening his eyes and looking.  Also, they were trying to hold things up near the camera to catch his attention, but he can't see that far away, so of course he was not interested.  Finally, Cindy turned on some music on her cell phone and that caught his attention long enough that they could snap an acceptable photo.  We got to go to Ezekiel's orphanage before heading back to Jinan.  It was good to be able to look at the place where Ezekiel spent the beginning of his life.  This orphanage, although clean and tidy, did not seem to be as well-to-do as TongJie's was.  Ezekiel seemed to be in kind of a daze the whole time, so it was hard to tell what he thought about everything.  TongJie had a great time in the orphanage, checking out all the rooms they showed us on the "tour" and playing with the toys.  We had been worried that TongJie might have a difficult time going to the orphanage but it didn't seem to bother him in the least.  He did a pretty good job all day today, until we got back into our hotel room around 6:00 and he finally just kind of lost it - both kids were screaming and crying at the top of their lungs.  TongJie was grieving the loss of being the only child, and Ezekiel was confused and grieving the loss of his only home and family that he's known in his short life so far.  We're hoping it will get better after a few days, but really today wasn't too bad, all things considered.