Not the Great Wall but Great nonetheless

Today, while the group was touring the Great Wall, we hung out and just enjoyed life at our own pace. The last couple of days had been very busy and we thought we and the kids needed a bit of down time.

We grocery shopped, spent time at the outdoor exercise park, walked a hutong, ran in the hotel halls, played in our room and enjoyed leisurely meals. I think I mentioned in a previous post that Ren has been copying his sister's every move. It's going to be a great way for him to learn but it also provides us with endless amusement.

Here is Ren stuffing a Kindermusik instrument in his pocket just like Jie-Jie did:

He copies everything: language, movements (even her 'ballet arms'), and sounds. For the most part, Claire doesn't mind but if she is having a meltdown (a frequent occurrence the last few days with all the changes), boy, does she get mad. This example has happened a few times already in the past two days, basically in the exact same way each time:

- Claire gets mad at Ren because she perceives he may want something of hers (even though he is across the room and the object in question is lying neglected by all on the floor);

- She yells, "No!" at him with the sternest of faces;

- Ren copies by yelling "No!" with a proud and innocent expression;

- Claire yells, "Hey, No!"

- Ren echoes, "Hey, No!"

- Claire: "Noooo!"

- Ren: "Noooo!"

- Claire: "NO!"

- Ren: "NO!"

And so on. You get the picture. I feel bad for Claire because she is obviously having a tough time but honestly, it's the funniest thing. Paul and I keep having laughing fits about it in between dealing with the chaos that has become our life. (By the way, Claire is also having a lot of fun with Ren - it's an up and down kind of thing.)

Ren has been on a fluid-only diet for the last few days but against doctor's orders, we started giving him small bits of actual food yesterday and today because the poor guy looks like he's starving! To get a lot of liquid into him fast, we use a straw even if we're giving him soup. Today, we broke the rules again by giving him a bit of noodles with his broth. Here he is feeding himself some noodles using chopsticks:
And here's Claire, copying him for a change but with a slight exaggeration!
Just down the street from us is Paul's new favourite store: the Ocean Liquor Cigarette store, or rather, hut (because it is so tiny). Here Paul has enlisted his daughter to help carry home his beer: Of course, Claire was only too happy to help.

T0morrow, we're off to the Summer Palace with the group. I'll post again soon.

Who is Ren?!

We are still figuring out the answer to this question and I am sure we will be for some time!

For the first couple of days, he was quite withdrawn as I mentioned but we could coax him into smiles and laughter. He didn't make a peep. He didn't cry. He didn't show much emotion at all. After a couple of days, he became a bit more vocal with us. He often will say something like "Dai?" (sounds like dye) and point to things, but Becky didn't think that meant anything in Cantonese. If anyone knows (Kath? Marlene?), I'd love to hear a possible interpretation of it. We thought perhaps it means "What is that?" As of Friday, he is also saying something that sounds like "a-may" very often. No clue what that means and we don't have any Cantonese speakers here to ask. He is now talking quite a bit to himself, as well as repeating words that we say to him. It's great to hear his little voice.

On Friday, we began to see more outward signs of sadness from Ren. I'm sure he was grieving before but he seemed to be holding so much in. Now, his sadness seems to come when he thinks he's been left alone, like when I was in a noisy washroom getting a towel to dry my hands and I couldn't get him to turn around to see that I was only two feet behind him. Although I was only out of sight in that public place for about 10 seconds (and I could see him the entire time), I returned to find him silently sobbing, his face in anguish. That's how he crys. It seems typical of a child from an orphanage that if they cry, they cry only to relieve their sorrow, not also to get someone's attention or help. The moment I pick him up, his face immediately transforms into a huge smile.

He is still doing that hitting thing with the wild smile but now we're certain it's NOT done in exuberance but rather, done deliberately. It always happens when he's apparently very happy when we're having a lot of fun together. I'll have to check my attachment books on this back home but it kind of seems like he's testing us or the boundaries we have for him. Thankfully, he's only hit Paul and me - not Claire. That's another reason why I think it's some sort of test for us.

It's obviously hard to tell what Ren's personality is truly like with all the changes he is going through right now, but our guess is that he's a pretty laid back guy. He seems to pretty much go with the flow. He seems to have an amazing attention span, as he can play with the same thing for a long time. He loves playing with blocks (a huge favourite of his, we think), books and cars. He likes to put things in and out of bags. He's pretty good at kicking a ball around. We think he could play independently for hours, which is another typical attribute of institionalized kids. We let him play independently for a short while sometimes if it seems like he needs some time alone, but we intrude into his little world often and then immerse ourselves in play when we think he is ready.

We think Ren may be a little bit sneaky. One of my favourite memories of adoption day is just after he woke up that day. I could see that he was awake, so I quietly went to his side. As soon as I drew near, he closed his eyes and pretended he was sleeping. When I withdrew, he opened his eyes and began to look around again. Again, I drew near and he closed his eyes. I could tell he needed time to process his surroundings but it was so cute that he was pretending to be asleep that I tried it a few times. The other day at dinner, his sneaky side came to light again when we saw his hand slowly creeping towards Paul's cutlery. As soon as we spoke to him, he withdrew his hand and as soon as it seemed like we weren't paying attention, there went his hand again towards Paul's cutlery. Claire even thought it was pretty funny.

Another cute moment came the other day when it was time to put shoes on again after I had changed his diaper. I had put new shoes on him that day and they were right there beside us. I couldn't believe it when he picked them up, took them over to the area where we had all our shoes, put them down and chose the pair of shoes he'd been wearing the days previous! His preference was obvious!

Right now, we think he is equally attached to Paul and I - no preference towards either. I'm pretty sure he knows we are somehow special now - not simply strangers - and he does seem to be trusting us to some extent but I think it'll be some time before he fully trusts us. Attachment will take time and effort, but we'll get there. In the meantime, he's a fun, sweet, cuddly, laid-back, entertaining, and engaging geezer. We really look forward to all of you back home meeting him.

Oh, I should also mention that Ren's health seems to be okay and we saw a good sign of improvement today. It'll be an ongoing issue but his medicine seems to be helping and we're getting a better idea of what is 'normal' for him. For our friends who have offered to move up medical appointments for us, we are actually seeing Dr. B. on the 10th (only a few days after we return home) so we're good on that front. Thank you so incredibly much for your offers to help!

The Beijing Zoo

Yesterday we had a good time at the Beijing Zoo. They now have quite a few pandas (quite a few were brought in before the Olympics) and they were fairly active which was fun to see.
Claire had a great time running around. She was pretty entertaining for us and the rest of the group, I think. Ren was confined to the stroller for the entire event - unfortunately for him, but fortunately for our arms. He walks fine but with a fairly clumsy gait and he's not great with stairs; I am sure we'd never keep up to the group if we let him walk.

Our family with our guide, Vivian:

We toured more of the zoo than we saw last time. Last time, we pretty much only saw the pandas and the big cats. This time we also saw birds, the elephants, lemurs and monkeys. I'm probably forgetting some animals. Even more than the animals, I enjoyed seeing the Chinese families at the zoo. I saw lots of grandparents with little kids holding huge wands of cotton candy. You could tell it was a special day. We saw lots of little girls with fake curly hair: pigtails, ponytails, etc. Now Paul wants to get some crazy curly hair for Claire or else cut a lock of MY hair to use in hers. I think he's losing his mind. The kids are napping right now (it's Sunday at 2:45) so I'll finish this post now and will do another if I have time.

Flight and arrival in Beijing

It was yet another day of firsts for our Renners on Friday with his first flight and first visit to Beijing (many more to come, I am sure!).

I'm happy to report that he seems to be a good flyer. He and Claire were really great on the flight and had a fun time amusing each other, Paul and me and basically everyone around us on the plane. (And holy moley, were we stared at on the plane! Not for a second or two but some people literally stared for a half hour at a time!)

Settling in with the travel Aqua Doodles:

To sweeten the first-time flight for Ren (and to keep the kids happy), I gave them both lollipops. Terrible stuff, I know, but I'm letting a few things slide on this trip! The really sweet thing, though, was that Ren kept offering licks of his lollipop to Claire:

Livin' it up in Beijing on a Friday night:

We are supposed to tour the Great Wall tomorrow (Sunday) but we've decided to do our own thing instead. It would be a very long day due to the long drive and a few stops for shopping along the way. Since we wouldn't be physically able to make it far on the wall anyway with these two hooligans, we'd find ourselves waiting around a lot trying to entertain them. We'll be taking it easy tomorrow, so I'll try to post again then, this time about how our little geezer is doing.

Last day in Guangdong, continued

On Friday morning, we toured the Chen Clan Academy which is known for its brick, stone and wood carvings on the actual building and the various kinds of carvings within (ivory, bone, etc.) It's a gorgeous compound with beautiful courtyards. Besides the Academy itself, one of the highlights was walking up to it through a park where people were involved in all sorts of activity: calligraphy (using water on the pavement), some game resembling hacky-sack, aerobics and something kind of like ping pong (?). Anyway, it was really fun to watch. I seriously could have spent hours sitting in that park people watching if I didn't have two toddlers to run after!

The exterior of the Academy:

Brick carvings on the outside:

One of its many beautiful courtyards:

After that, we walked around Shamian Island, a small island in Guangzhou (accessible by bridge) that is mostly pedestrian-only. It's home to the famed "White Swan Hotel", the place where all the Americans stay when they are adopting from China, because the U. S. embassy or consulate is on the same island. Carolyn and I of course had to visit the White Swan, which is practically the stuff of legend in many of the adoption blogs we follow. Sadly, it was underwhelming, but perhaps that's because we approached from the back and never even saw a sign for it until we spied the name and logo on a parking cone!

My gang in front of the waterfall at the White Swan:

Last day in Guangdong

It's Saturday night in Beijing and time to catch up on blogging!

We've had a very busy few days. On Friday, we spent the morning sightseeing in Guangzhou with our little Guangdong group, followed by a yummy lunch. We packed up our things early that afternoon and soon we were headed off to the airport to catch our 6 pm flight to Beijing. We arrived at our hotel in Beijing around 11 pm, got some sleep and began the rush of activity all over again today: citizenship photos and paperwork, group photo, group lunch and trip to the zoo, followed by a photoshoot of Ren in the same style we had done for Claire two years ago. So now I'm wondering, where do I begin to catch up in terms of blogging?!

I guess we'll start with our little Guangdong group, touring around Guangzhou on our last day there. I have pics of the actual sights we took in but I`m guessing you want to see people first, sights second!

One of my favourite sights: Paul with the kiddies! Here, they`re watching some folks play a kind of hacky-sack game with something that looks like a badminton shuttlecock.

The Guangdong group:
The Guangdong kids plus a Xinyu gal thrown in for good measure:

Claire leading us all on a parade on Shamian Island:
Carolyn and Marvin have been incredible to travel with again. It is so good having friends here to talk with about the heavy topics of adoption. It's been a good week for us, but a tough one in some ways, and our travel mates have really been there for us. I just hope we've been as good to them as they have been to us!

A little walk around our hotel block

Right behind our hotel, there's an interesting little street of shops. Paul had to take a picture of this shop selling only silicone. This is a shop for his dad, Walter! Other sights:

An efficient three-story parking lot:

"Peekaboo!"