Day 2 With Maizie;The Adoption is Official -- June 12, 2006

Today we finalized the adoption of Maizie under Chinese law. She is officially ours forever. The adoption took place at the same office that we met Maizie at. It took about two and half hours to complete the paperwork and the “interview” process. We had to promise to never abuse or abandon Maizie and to give her a good education. The actual paperwork and interview process only took about a half hour. Most of the time was spent waiting around in a play room with other adoptive families. Maizie was the most active of the newly adopted babies. She really enjoyed cruising around in the walkers. She would ram her walker into the other babies’ walkers and laugh. Here’s a picture of Maizie in a walker (the two girls behind her are a set of twins that a couple from Minnesota adopted).

Here’s a photo of the chaos in the play room while the families were waiting to finalize their paperwork.

Here’s a photo of us during the interview process.

On our way out the office building, we ran into the director and several nannies from the Jiang Cheng Social Welfare Institute where Maizie was adopted from. They were bringing 5 or 6 more girls in from the Jiang Cheng SWI to meet their new families.

After finalizing the adoption, we went to have Maizie’s passport photo taken. She fell asleep in Carrie’s arms in the cab ride to the office were the passport photo was taken (they don’t use car seats in China). She both plays and sleeps very hard.

We then came back to the hotel and finally got Maizie to finish off a bottle of formula (in fact she drank almost two bottles). She went down for a nap at about 1. We woke her up at about 3:30 as her normal schedule is to nap from noon to two and we didn’t want to deviate from that too much and also didn’t want her sleeping all afternoon and being up all night. I’m sure that waking a sound asleep baby from a nap breaks a cardinal rule of parenting, but we did it any way and she wasn’t too cranky about it.

Right now, we are just wandering around Shamian Island some and hanging out in the room to get to know Maizie better. Maizie enjoys looking out the window. We stand her up in the window sill and she is able to support herself and stand on her own by putting her hands on the window (we of course stay right there in case losses her balance). She also likes balls. She was fascinated by the Christmas ornament style balls hanging from the ceiling in the playroom and really likes the small beach ball we brought for her. She is taking bottles of formula and juice, but hasn’t eaten much of the rice cereal or fruit that we have been trying to feed her with a spoon. She still hasn’t fussed very much; we are keeping our fingers crossed that this continues. Finally, her rash and dry skin seemed to improve quite a bit after we rubbed her down with tea tree oil after last night's bath and we are hopeful that this will clear up shortly.