12/31/2001 - 1st Day with Anna

We had Anna in our hands on 12/31/.01 at about 10 am. She is more beautiful than her picture. Our adoption agency did great job to make the receiving baby process ceremonial. We have 8 families all together. Two of the babies including Anna came from Huainan and all others from Chuzhou orphanage. All other babies are younger, 12-14 months old. The two Huainan babies are older, Anna is 20 months and the other is 22 months old. The babies from Chuzhou were obviously are doing much better than those from Huainan. At 12-14 months of age, most of them start talking and they are more alert too.

Anna looked smaller and weaker than we expected. It broke our hearts to see that she is about the same size as other 12-14 month olds and she could not even hold a bottle by herself. She could take only a few steps humbly and she could not speak a word or understand anything we say even in Chinese. We don’t know if she was just never taught how to do things or she was just too shocked to do anything. She cried just a little at first and then bonded to Berthold while Sue was doing all the paper work. Today is Berthold’s birthday. He was so thrilled to have Anna in his arms. Toby and Joshua were our photographers. They did great job.

Anna opened up to us after we feed her two bowls of rice cereals in our hotel room. She was hungry. She had only half piece of cookies in her hand when we got her. She would not let it go. At dinner, she ate a big bowl of steamed egg and a lot of noodles. She is a great eater – fits our family well.