China Trip Day #12 - Free Day in Guangzhou

We had an unexpected guest at our breakfast table this morning.  We had set some food for Matteo at the table and then went to get more for ourselves and came back to a man eating his breakfast at our table.  Despite motioning towards our food already on the table, he made it clear that he wasn’t moving.  I asked the waiter who had seated us there to explain to him that he was at our table, but the man still refused to move and the waiter just gave up.  I was ticked off and in a move uncharacteristic of my non-confrontational husband, he suggested we sit down at our table anyway.  We did exactly that, but the guy still didn’t move, even when his friend came down for breakfast (and sat elsewhere).  I had hoped that Matteo would start oozing food out of his nose, which is a side-effect of having an open palate, but the kid is just too darn well-behaved for pulling off shenanigans like that.   When the guy finished his plate of food, he got second helpings and joined his friend at another table. I have no idea what that was all about!

We decided to meet our guide and the one other family from our agency for an outing to the Guangzhou Zoo. It reminds me very much Como Zoo back home.  It’s not very big, but there’s still plenty to see and its compact size makes it easy to see with kids.  We didn’t see much reaction from Matteo about the animals, but we could tell he was curious about them. 

It was fun to meet another adoptive family and we enjoyed swapping stories as we walked through the zoo.  Their son had also been fostered, but by two families.  One was EXTREMELY wealthy and they know their son has flown first-class and given his obsession with Mercedes Benz and helicopters, they think he’s ridden in both.  Here we are thankful that our son’s foster family showed him how to use a toilet and this family is wishing their son’s foster family hadn’t set his expectations so high!  The second family was from New Zealand, which means that their nearly four-year-old son understands and speaks English!  It was surreal to watch them ask their son questions about what he wanted/thinking/was feeling, etc. and have him answer in English.   

As for Matteo, we’re not sure what he understands and assume the poor kid is downright confused most of the time. Random people when we’re out and about speak to him in Chinese and then Chris and I speak strictly English with him. A lot of the talking we do to him is merely “sportcasting,” like you do with a baby. (“Daddy, Mommy and Matteo are going for a walk.  We need to pack our water bottles.  Here are our water bottles.  Let’s put our water bottles in our bag.  Let’s find our shoes.  We’re putting our shoes on.  Yay, our shoes are on! We’re ready to go!...”) We ask him questions that we know he’s not going to answer and exaggerate a lot of our talk in the hopes that he’ll start to learn words through repetition and pantomime.  Our one-sided conversations sound a little like this. 

“Matteo, are you hungry?  What do you want to eat?  You can have noodles or dumplings?  Do you want noodles?  Okay, let’s order noodles.”

Amazingly, after a week, we’re seeing signs that Matteo is starting to understand some things we say.  We acknowledge that much of his understanding of our directions is based more on his understanding of our routines versus understanding the exact words we say.  Nevertheless, it’s cool when we tell him to get a book for us to read for bedtime and he grabs a book and hops into bed. 

Being in Guangzhou is a lot more comfortable than our time in Hefei.  There are a lot of places to walk to and once we’re ready to go farther afield, a subway stop is in front of the hotel.  The city doesn’t smell (at least not where we are) and I haven’t seen a single skinned animal carcass hanging anywhere.  In Hefei, Chris came back from the grocery store and reported that it wasn’t bad because there were only little animals hanging from the ceiling.  That was in comparison to the random alleyway street markets we passed where the size of the animals hanging from ropes was reminiscent of my father-in-law’s garage up at the cabin during deer season. 

The city is a lot more colorful than the other Chinese cities we’ve seen.  I thought the energy on the streets reminded me of Berlin (as crazy as that sounds), but Chris said the wide, tree-lined boulevards, the crowds of people on the sidewalks and the little storefront lining the streets reminded him of Buenos Aires. 

Even without words, we’re starting to figure out some of his cues and he will even tell us what he wants.  It’s a big deal for us that he will now point to something he wants or even reach for it himself.  We used to have to offer him his sippy cup of water just to get him to drink, but now he’ll grab for it when he’s thirsty.  We have also noticed that when he’s hungry or thirsty, he licks is lips!  That’s when we know it’s time to break out the snacks.  Sometimes he’ll just stare at things he wants.  We try offering him two things and ask him to choose which one he wants in an attempt to figure out what his preferences are.  Often the most indication we get of what he wants is that his gaze will settle on one object.

After one night in our luxurious suite, we traded it in for a less luxurious, but much larger, apartment within the hotel.  It’s huge!  It’s basically four hotel rooms they remodeled into a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment with a large kitchen, living room and dining room.  It’s more space than we need, but what we were really after is the washing machine.  It’s located in the kitchen and the one unit both washes and dries your clothes. It takes over three hours to go through both the wash and dryer cycles, but given that sending your wash out takes 24 hours, three hours is nothing.  The $3.50 we spent on detergent is already a steal before I factor in the $80 dollars (or more) we would have spent to send laundry out. 

It was nice to have a down day in Guangzhou with little on the agenda and a chance to hang out and catch up on laundry because tomorrow is a big day.  We meet Kiera!  I can’t believe we’re going to meet our last child.  I’ve waited so long for this day and now it’s a little bittersweet for me because meeting her officially closes the door on my childbearing years.  We are not going to have any more children whether biologically or through adoption, so tomorrow marks the beginning of a new era in my life.  I’ll never again experience the surreal moment of meeting a new child of mine for the first time.   

I was super nervous to meet Matteo, but am feeling a little calmer on the eve of meeting Kiera, perhaps because we’ve done this one before (and so recently!).   Honestly though, I’ve been nervous to meet all our children.  I distinctly remember being close to giving birth to Oliver and Soren and feeling panicked that I wasn’t ready to meet them even though I couldn’t wait not to be pregnant anymore and having waited for that moment for a long time.