Day Two - Tuesday, April 16, 2013

We got up and took Elora to breakfast.  She is sooo cute when she eats.  No matter how many meals we have, I just love watching her eat.  I can't refrain from taking pics and video when she does it.  It is especially cute when she is using chopsticks.  She is very impressive with them.  Like Mr. Asher, she eats just about everything and a lot of it.  Occasionally it is funny when there is something she doesn't like, because she just removes it from her plate.  Sometimes neatly, and sometimes not so much :).  Poor thing, her and Heidi are always having the local food and trying new things, and sometimes I just don't eat and she looks at me so concerned like, "What is he going to eat?"  There is a long Koi pond right down the middle of the restaurant, and she loved looking at it.  She kept repeating some word over and over.  Probably something to do with "Look!" or "Fish!" but sadly I have no idea.

At this point, Elora was starting to warm up to us.  She is very good about holding our hands to go places, which we like.  Before coming, we had this fear she may just run off everywhere.  She also is excited for me to carry her, which of course I do happily!  We aren't certain if she really likes me, or she just likes the free ride.  Either way, I'll take any opportunity she gives me to love and cuddle with her.

It is actually very interesting, because we have talked to many adoptive parents, read many materials, and have watched DVD training videos about all of the adjustment/attachment realities that come with adoption.  In other words, even though she is playing along, I am not delusional enough to think she really loves me like I love her just yet.  And I was skeptical about a long period in China, but I must say I am very much enjoying the quality time with just Mom and Dad and her.  I think this time she is getting as the center of attention is huge in terms of her getting to know and trust us.

Even though she seems to have been really well taken care of, she definitely has some trust issues and that is understandable.  When we give her food or drink, there is no getting it back even for a second.  She eats and eats and drinks and drinks everything like she has never had things before.  She likes to hide things, too. She loves to grab the remote and watch TV.  When she is done with the remote, she will pick up the bed sheet and hide the remote under it as though she is afraid I will take it away from her.  The other day, when she was done playing with one of her toys she hid it underneath a couple of the couch pillows.  I have a feeling when we get home, we will constantly be finding little treasures Elora has tried to hide away from everyone :).

Anyway, we met Mr. Li at 9 a.m. and he took us to the same place we met Elora the day before.  There we had a brief interview, where we said we would never abuse or abandon Elora.  We also had a family picture taken.  The photographer was pleased with the picture.  He showed it to us, and my eyes looked really goofy (yes, even more goofy than normal).  I had this feeling the picture would come back to haunt me somewhere, but I didn't ask for a new one.

There was a lot of waiting in this area.  Elora wound up with my camera.  Another thing she puts a death grip on when she has it.  She is almost violent in the way she snaps picture after picture.  She bounced all around the room taking pictures of all of these other families.  Everyone thought she was so cute, though, so no one seemed to mind.  I have no idea how many she took, but many of them have part of her fingers in the frame :)

After these meetings, we went to the notary office for another interview, which was a little more in depth about our general background.  One of the questions was our impression of Elora.  Our impression of her is great!  She amazes me over and over each day, and honestly I just keep thinking we need to just try not to mess her up...lol.  There was a lot of waiting there, too, before our interview.  We wound up being one of the last ones to go from the giant bunch of us there adopting.  One remarkable thing about our wait was that we saw that not all of these children are becoming Americans.  There were several different nationalities there speaking all different languages.  Rather ethnocentric of us to think that it would just be a bunch of Americans, but the diversity of those adopting wasn't something that had occurred to us before that day.

We were done with the official stuff after that, and got back to our room around noon.  I knew that I was going to hit the Pizza Hut for lunch.  Heidi knew we would be going to a nice Chinese restaurant the next day, so she decided her and Elora would eat with me.  It is right up the street from the hotel in a very large mall.  It was interesting to see the menu there, as it had several different tabs for various food types like Rice.  They had all kinds of foods, in fact it was difficult just to find the pizza...lol.  Heidi even found escargot in the menu.  Heidi found just plain old pepperoni pizza, and as she put it, "You could hear the choir singing in Greg's head" when she found it.  Heidi got a salad, and I also got waffle fries.

The pizza was pretty good.  The only difference from home was that it had very very little sauce.  The fries were good.  Elora looooved the pizza.  Heidi gave her some of the salad and she promptly pushed it off of her plate.  She wanted no part of it.  I gave her a fry dipped in ketchup, and she gave it to Heidi.  Elora didn't want the fry either.  Later on I offered her another, and she ate it and liked it.  She really liked dipping it in the ketchup.  She would dip it, and then just nibble off the piece with ketchup on it.  She dipped each fry like  a dozen times and savored every little morsel with ketchup.

We found it somewhat tricky to eat at a restaurant with her right now.  For one thing, she was doing that stand up in the booth and look at people behind us thing that Asher likes to do.  With him, though, we know how to tell him to sit down, or if we have to kind of push him back to sitting no one thinks much of it.  Not being able to speak her language, and feeling already like everyone was looking at us, it was kind of a no win deal.  We didn't dare want to just sit her down and make her mad, but you don't like it to look like your kids are just misbehaving and you don't care.  It doesn't help that we clearly are different than everyone else, so that makes it all feel awkward.

It was also funny in that she sucked down her lemonade really fast, like our other kids sometimes do.  But we have no idea about refills here, or how to ask for them, so we didn't want her to not have her drink for her meal.  So we slid it away from her and told her she could have it back when her food came (which of course we know she didn't understand).  We have still never seen her cry, but she looked extremely pouty at this maneuver and gave us the most pitiful look.  Another juggling act, because that seems to be a healthy boundary and you don't want her totally spoiled, but you don't want to hurt her feelings and have any setbacks with her trusting that we care greatly for her.  So of course she got her lemonade back pretty quickly.  In case it isn't apparent, this dad is having great trouble denying this princess anything as it is. :)  I don't stand a chance between her and Princess Madeline.

After Pizza Hut, we bought some more snacks and headed back to the room.  The girls ate some noodles for dinner, this time Heidi had made sure not to buy the too spicy kind.  I let Elora see my tablet, and again she amazed me.  Her foster family must have had these gadgets, because she opened Angry Birds right up and went to the first level and started launching birds.  And this wasn't just random lucky buttons, this was definitely the actions of a girl who had played this before.  Everytime she cleared a level she would give me a high five.  Heidi taught her that, and she loves doing it.  She like bends down and jumps launching herself into the air for her high fives.  It is so cute.  She likes to high five strangers on the elevators, too.  I'm not certain they all like it but most of them play along.

Then Heidi conked out on us at like 6 p.m.  Elora and I still called back home and did our Skype call.  She was so cuddly last night, and couldn't seem to get enough of hanging out with Dad.  She was also extremely giggly.  I couldn't really even have a conversation on Skype with Grandma and the kids because she was so crazy.  After the call, me and giggly girl went to bed, too.