Forever Calli Faith Day!

Li Xiao Fei, Calli Faith Dane, is ours forever!! Today was the day that we made it official, by taking an oath and signing papers to complete her adoption. What a big day! We are no longer her temporary guardians, but her parents. Yay!!

We had fun getting her dressed in "normal" clothes this morning, and I loved getting to put a big bow on her head!

After breakfast we came back up to the room to get ready and I put her in the Ergo. She did fine, but it didn't last long. We got downstairs and were waiting for the rest of our group in the lobby and she decided she wanted Daddy again. We'll keep trying!

We went to the civil affairs office here in Fuzhou first, where we completed the adoption. We answered some questions, like why did we want to adopt, and why from China, would we always love her and take care of her and never abandon her, and what was our plan for raising her and caring for her.  

 Then we signed our names a bunch of times and then put our thumbprint in red on top of our signatures. Then we had to put Calli's hand in the ink and put her handprint on the paperwork. She wasn't too thrilled about that!

 The workers from her orphanage were back today to do their part of the paperwork as well, so she was upset when she couldn't go to them. We've had a little setback in my attachment with her today and we wonder if that is related to her seeing them again. Even though it's been a setback, it's still not bad at all - she still comes to me for food and water. We have so much to be thankful for!

This is the room where we officially became her parents!

 

Our first picture with our third daughter! So happy!

After that we had to go across town to a notary to do more paperwork and more signatures. We took a picture next to the Chinese flag here. :) Fei Fei is smiling!

 

Next we went to Wal-Mart! We got diapers, bottled water and a few other things. We laughed about how we just had one of the biggest moments of our lives and then we celebrated by going to Wal-Mart!

After lunch at the hotel, we came back to the room for naps. Calli fell asleep pretty quickly on Randy and slept for about two hours! We were all so ready for a nap. Now we are heading to dinner!

 Happy Forever Family day, Calli Faith! We love you and are so thankful that you are now a part of our family FOREVER!

Sisters

Kendall and Cooper got to meet their new sister last night! We were able to Skype with them Sunday night, early Sunday morning for them. They woke up extra early just to see her! They were pretty quiet, but very attentive.

After we Skyped, Calli sat in my lap to eat some pizza and drink some water. This was progress from earlier in the day when she only preferred Randy.

Her sisters were pretty excited about meeting her! She isn't going to know what hit her when they finally get to meet her in person - they are so excited to love on and play with her!

 I have some great videos, but the internet is super slow here and they aren't loading. We will keep trying, or we will post them when we get home. Just know she's really cute and really smart and we are loving every minute!

 

Calli Faith is Here!

We have our sweet girl! At 3:30 this afternoon we left our hotel room, got on the elevator and went down to the 3rd floor of our hotel, to a conference room. There we met our guide and two other families who were meeting their children for the first time as well. One family already had their son, so we sat down to wait with the other family. We had barely introduced ourselves when Li Xiao Fei walked in with her two orphanage workers! They handed her to me and she immediately started crying. :) One of the workers had a juice box of milk for her, so I opened it, put the straw in, and gave it to her. She immediately squeezed a ton of milk all over both of us! It felt so good to hold her, even though she was bundled up in so many layers. Randy started filling out paperwork and I worked on trying to keep Calli happy. She kept her eye on the orphanage director the whole time. We could tell that she loves them, they love her, and they took great care of her!

 

 When the milk was such a disaster, we gave her some crackers, kind of like goldfish. She loved those and let me feed her some and fed herself some.

 

This is some of the paperwork Randy had to fill out.

 Before we left, we took a picture with the two orphanage workers. The one standing next to Randy is the director of her orphanage and the one next to me is a helper. They were super nice and told us that Xiao Fei is so smart and has a good personality. We asked them if we could come visit the orphanage this week and they said yes!

Back in the room, we sat down to play with toys we brought. We are so in love with her!

After a little bit, she stood up from me,  turned around, and backed up against Randy and sat with him! And she hasn't left him since. In fact, if I come near her, she starts crying. Randy had to hand her to me at one point this afternoon so he could go to the bathroom and she cried the whole time. I said, "You just met him!" She is definitely already a daddy's girl - but I'm also hoping she lets me get close as she starts to feel more comfortable.

 

We slowly peeled off layers. I'll post a picture of all her clothes she came in later, but she had a coat and two shirts on, as well as two layers of pants! She loves the stacking blocks we brought for her. Thanks Pops! 

 

The videos we took are taking a long time to upload, so I will keep working. I'm going to go ahead and post this now though because I know people are waiting! :) We'll get more videos up soon. We're so thankful for your prayers on our behalf and for Calli. Continue to pray that she will relax, feel comfortable, and let both of us comfort her. We're so thankful for you all!!

 

 

 

 

 

Where Baby?

It took about 34 hours to get here from the time of our wait for our first flight until the time we were settled into our bed in Fuzhou. 4 cities, 3 flights, long layovers, and a not so great airport experience in Beijing, and then we were here - the city where will meet Calli in person for the first time.

My mom and dad (Gigi and Peeps) got Calli a new stroller that is light weight and folds up very compact.  Perfect for air travel!  We gate checked it at every airport and pushed it around empty for hours.  Countless security personnel, airline agents, and even Chinese customs and immigration workers would look at Ashley, look at me, and look at the stroller with our carry-ons rested inside and ask - "Where baby?"  One person even said, "No baby?!"  Time and time it was as if they thought we had forgotten something important and they were reminding us.  The empty stroller even sparked a conversation with the agents in the United Club (yes, we were in the club thanks to Kent Evans - man it was nice in there!).  After we explained the empty stroller and explained that yes we had two biological children, and yes we were going to bring home our third daughter that we are adopting from China - the very interested and thoughtful agents wished us all the best.

Where is baby?  She is waiting.  Did we forget her?  Never.
How could we forget her?  All 34 hours she was on our minds.  Every time I opened and closed and gate checked the empty stroller I was thinking about it being filled - with Calli Fei Fei.  She has been on our minds since before this process started in January 2012.  Fei Fei has been on our minds since we first laid eyes on her back in November, when we received an update in December, and our final set of pictures in March.  She has been on our minds everyday for months.  And now we are here!  We are grateful for all the prayers for safe travel and all the prayers for our meeting tomorrow.  I spend a lot of my time in meetings.  Tomorrow is one of the most important meetings of my life.  27 hours from right now we will have a meeting in a hotel conference room where we will hold our daughter for the very first time.  I've done this twice before (in hospitals).  The circumstances are different but my heart and stomach feel the same.

We are here baby!  Safe and sound, thank God!

Calli's Quilt

“In China, when a baby is due, friends and family offer swatches of cloth and good wishes to the new mother so she can sew a “100 Good Wishes” quilt. The red thread used to stitch it is a traditional symbol of the connection between those destined to be together. Adoptive parents from the United States have embraced this tradition, which busies their hands with a project and soothes their hearts while they wait.” (From Waiting For May by Janet Morgan Stoeke)

 

About a month ago, I decided I wanted to make a quilt to take with us to China for Calli. I had read about this Chinese tradition, so I decided to make one of these for her. Here is the email we sent to our family:

 

To our family:

We need your help with a project we are working on for Calli Faith. We would like to create a traditional Chinese “Bai Jia Bei,” or 100 Good Wishes quilt to take with us to China when we pick her up. Our hope is that this blanket will be something she can attach to, feel secure with, and in the long run she will come to understand that it is made up of fabric given by members of her new family who love her and have prayed for her for a long time!

So if you would like to, please send us a swatch of fabric along with a short note to Calli or prayer for her written on an index card size of paper. We will cut some of the fabric to include in the quilt and then we will attach a small part of the fabric to the card and create a book for her showing where all the pieces of her quilt have come from. The fabric can be something that has been meaningful to you, us, or our family, or it can be just something you like!

The catch is that we would love to take this with us when we travel to China, hopefully in early April. So we need to begin collecting all the swatches and notes soon. If you would like to mail it to us, you are welcome to do that, or we will be in Ft. Worth the weekend of March 15^th, and if you can get them to Alisa, Anita, or Lisa before then, we’ll be seeing them that weekend and can get them then. Thank you so much for helping us with this! We are excited to bring Calli home to her new family and teach her all about the history and legacy of our sweet families. We love you!

 

We started to receive scraps of fabric from all our family members. It was so fun to see what everyone sent and to read the notes they wrote.

 

Once we had all the squares cut, we laid them out to start arranging them.

 

I included some fabric from my wedding dress...

 ...and from my yellow blanket I slept with growing up. Randy put some fabric from his favorite Garfield sheets in the quilt.

We love the way it looks! And each piece is special to us. My plan is to put a separate scrap of each fabric next to the note for Calli from whoever sent that piece into a book. Then she will know where each one came from and be able to always read the notes from her new family! There are pieces in the quilt from all our parents, all three sisters, Gracie, Evy and Oliver, all four of our grandmothers, Randy's papaw, Randy's aunts Brenda and Kathy, my aunt Donna, Michelle, and my Great Aunt Doris. My granny sent tons of scraps from clothes she and mom made for Alden and me when we were younger. Lindsey helped me get started and let me use some of her fabric, so there are a couple of pieces from her quilting stash that I loved. Then, Kendall, Cooper and I went and picked out some new fabrics that we loved to represent Calli's new home with us. The girls also helped me pick out the backing, a soft pink flannel.

So, this was my very first quilt. I have never made one before! I even had to relearn how to use a sewing machine. Growing up, I used to sew with my Granny in the summers on her machine, but I haven't touched one since probably middle school. I had a lot of fun relearning how to sew and also learning for the first time how to quilt!

 I had lots of help along the way from my mom, my granny, Debbie Erskine, Kathy Pickering, Tammy Flack, Carlette Madary, and Lindsey Hiatt. I was so thankful for their experience! It is for sure not perfect - very far from it - but it's finished and I am pretty proud of it. Jen Armstrong said she'd help me bind it when I get home, and she told me that the quilter's motto is "finished is better than perfect." That definitely applies here!

The girls had fun "helping" me along the way, too. And on Monday, two days before we left for China, I finished! Here is the finished product. I can't wait to wrap Calli up in it and snuggle with her! Tomorrow!!

Kendall and Cooper fly to Ft. Worth!

Yesterday began our journey to China and to Calli! Well, our physical journey - we feel like we've been on this whole journey for over a year now!! The girls were so excited because they were getting to fly to Ft. Worth with us where we dropped them off to stay with all the grandparents for two weeks.

We were pretty much packed and ready to go by Tuesday night. Wednesday when the girls woke up, they had some breakfast and then took baths before their big flight. Kendall drew this picture and I loved it - that's all four of us, then an airplane and then that's Calli on the far left. She said, "We're going to get her!"

Michelle met us because she was taking us to the airport and we all went to Chick fil A one last time before we left.

 Look at all that luggage! Three suitcases going with us, two carry-ons and a stroller, and then one suitcase for the girls and a carry-on apiece. Not too bad for two weeks around the world!

Michelle drove us to the airport and took one more picture of all of us before she left. Thanks Michelle!! We love you!

I wish I could even convey how excited these two were. They were so funny - they were just giddy. Cooper kept screaming with excitement all the way up 288, "We ah-wuh getting CLOSER!!!" They were so excited.

Our flight was delayed two hours! Kind of crazy to have a 2 hour delay on a 1 hour flight. That was just more fun for the girls, because it gave them more time to run around the airport, see all there was to see, watch the airplanes come in and out, and play with all the goodies they brought in their backpacks.

 Mrs. Melissa and Mr. Paul even brought them lots of fun things to do on the plane before we left on Wednesday! They had fun coloring and playing on their Leapster.

Snuggling under Calli's quilt. More on this in a later post - but I was super excited to finish it in time and very thankful for all of the family and friends who helped put it together!!

Finally on the plane! I think this picture pretty much sums up Cooper's excitement.

We started out sitting 3 and 1 but then decided to sit 2 and 2: Cooper by the window with me and then Kendall by the window in front of us with Randy. They did great on the flight! Never got scared, loved looking out the window, loved the tray table, and spent more time coloring. They were really so great the whole day and we had so much fun on our adventure!

 Last night we had dinner at Pops' and Kiki's, Gigi, Granny and Papas came by to see us, and then we put the girls to bed and went to bed ourselves. We had to leave their house at 3:30 this morning, so it was a very short night. Now we are in Chicago on a 4 hour layover, waiting to board our LONG flight to Beijing. Our next post will be from China! Let's do this!!

We're Coming to Get You!

Kendall asked if she could make a card for Calli yesterday. This is what she wrote. I love it!

It's today, Calli!! We're coming today!!!