Last post from China!

We're all packed and ready to finally come home! We have a 4am wake-up call, porter coming for our bags at 4:50, and have to be on the bus for the airport by 5:30. I have really enjoyed my time in Guangzhou, and have made some wonderful new friends, but man--I am soooo ready to see my boys!! I know it is going to be crazy and chaotic as we all adjust to being a family of five, but I am anxious to get home and get started on all of that craziness. I have never been away from the boys like this and it is tough. I miss them so much and don't ever want to spend two weeks away from them again. Until they're teenagers. Then I'll probably be shipping them to China ;)

The White Swan Hotel and Mattel have paired up to give adoptive families this interesting gift. It's called "Going Home Barbie" or "Coming Home Barbie" or something along those lines (It's buried in a suitcase at the moment, and the official title of the toy isn't really that important anyway). I hadn't really envisioned us as a Barbie-type family. Fortunately, Marley's reaction to it was much like mine. "Hmm."



This morning we visited the Chen Family Academy, which is a very old temple/school where members of the Chen family studied for the exams required to become officials in past times. It was really beautiful. Here are some photos:







After that, we wrapped up our 3-day shopping spree, which included the purchase of a carry-on suitcase for all of the souvenirs and gifts. I'm looking forward to unpacking and distributing all of the goodies at home. We did our 'red couch photo' of our travel group. I dressed Marley in the traditional Chinese outfit I bought for her. She looked so cute! It was tough to get all five of the newly adopted kids in our group to sit on the couch--quite a bit like herding cats. Our group consisted of five families. Two couples from the San Francisco area were each adopting their first sons. One couple from Louisiana was here to adopt their fourth child. They have two wonderful sons who are 9 and 11, and a daughter who is 3 who they adopted from China in 2007. The other family was here adopting their fifth child. They brought their 7 year old son with them and he was a riot! Reminded me a lot of Keller, with a very bubbly, funny, friendly personality. One of their other children was also adopted from China. Although we had a relatively short time together as a group here in Guangzhou, I think I have made some lasting friendships for myself and for Marley. Here are some pics of our group. I think it's too cute that Marley is doing her little cheek-rubbing thing in some of the pictures. We had skipped naptime and she was very tired:








These are a couple of random photos from around Shamian Island:







Following the photo shoot, we boarded the bus and headed to the American Consulate to receive our children's visas and attend our oath ceremony. There were probably about 25-30 families there all together. It was a nice ceremony and at the end of it, it became official that all of our children will be US citizens when they land on US soil. When the director said, "It's official," I was surprised to feel tears spring to my eyes and a huge lump suddenly develop in my throat. It has been a long, convoluted and frustrating journey, but it is over. It's official. Marley is forever a Huffman, forever our daughter and sister, and forever a citizen of the US.

We celebrated with dinner at a Chinese restaurant that came highly recommended. It could have been a Saturday Night Live skit. Something as basic as explaining that we needed five separate checks involved about 10 different waitresses and hostesses. Ordering food was a complete farce, and I'm still not sure if my check matched what I ordered. Marley proved to be a very typical toddler in the restaurant--complete pain in the butt! She didn't want to wait for food, didn't want to sit in the high chair (which of course had no buckle to reinforce my urging to stay sitting), didn't like the noodles we were supposed to share, and eventually I ended up following her and pacing the restaurant while we waited for our checks. The steamed egg I ordered for her never arrived, although the waitress nodded and smiled every time I reminded her of it. It was funny, but frustrating, and I think all four families were ready to run screaming from the restaurant by the time we were done.

I hope to be able to keep up with our blog once we are home, but I wouldn't wait by the computer hitting 'refresh' every half hour if I were you! I think that helping our family work through this transition, then resting to recover from the efforts, will probably eat up a good bit of my computer time. And having a completely wreckless toddler roaming the house is sure to make life in general more interesting for awhile.

Thanks for following our journey to Marley, and for all of the support and kind words. Each time I sat down at my computer I had at least one email, blog comment, or Facebook comment from someone half way across the world who was reading the blog and thinking of us all the way over here. It would have been very, very hard to get through this, particularly the dark days last week, without all of that support.