Maddie meets part of the Family...

Here is a picture of Daddy with Maddie and Cousin Molly - obviously very happy!

Yesterday, we drove on up to NJ where Maddie met her Pop pop and Mom mom, Aunt Kristy, Uncle Chip, cousins Cole and Molly as well as Aunt Tina, Uncle Kevin and cousins Guilian and Gavin. It was a long day but very very good day! Maddie loves her family and did wonderfully.

Maddie has done really well with meeting new people...next we need to meet Nana!!!

It's Official...She's walking

Yes, things have just gotten much, much more interesting at our house as of today. Madeline is now officially walking at exactly 15 months of age. It only took 1 week from her first day of crawling (Easter) to get the walking thing down. (We both knew she was sooooooo incredible!) She has been toddling about while holding onto our fingers or cruising around the coffee table for a while. It may also have been some newbie parents making the "mistake" of cheering her on when she'd toddle between Mommy and Daddy back and forth...but now, she's doing it all on her own! This new Mommy now has to do much more securing of items around the house now that she is mobile!!!

We took a short video of her first "official" day of walking unassisted. You can see it here:

http://www.skalizar.net/Photo%20028.avi

Happy Easter

We've been home for a week or so now. Maddie's doing fine, we still aren't over the jet lag. Here are a couple of pictures (now in full resolution!) for those of you still waiting for your chance to meet Miss Madeline. She is dressed in one of her traditional outfits for Easter. First we see her with a coy smile with one of her accessories.



Next up, a more serious pose (ignore the drool, she was making fishy faces at Mommy).

Home in Delaware!

Man does it feel good to have that behind us. The plane coming back was even more uncomfortable than the one going over. They had these stupid humps at the base of the arm rests that jabbed me right in the kidneys. So I spent most of the time either standing in the back of the plane or twisted in an uncomfortable position in the seat. Maddie slept though most of it, it was a piece of cake for her. Kim nodded off a few times but we had to take turns making sure Maddie didn't wake up and roll out of the seat.

The flight from Chicago to Newark was delayed, that makes 2 delays and a cancellation during our trip. Not of very good track record. But we made it back home and it feels really good. Kim is trying to get Maddie to sleep in her crib here at home. It is near her bedtime in China even though its 7am here. For some reason, even though I was dead on my feet in Chicago, once I got outside at Newark and smelled the fresh(?) New Jersey air, I got my second wind. The drive home from there was very easy and uneventful. Thanks again to Kim's family for dropping us off and picking us up (and for stocking up on a few essentials so we didn't have to stop at a store). Maddie couldn't wait to get at the little yellow school bus, it was almost identical to her favorite toy at the White Swan playroom. She finally got tired of waiting for me to extract it from the packaging and started helping tear it open. Next up was bath time, in nice clean American tap water. Daddy also enjoyed his first shower in over 2 weeks where he didn't have to seal his mouth shut. Now he's about to go sleep in his nice soft American bed. Did I mention that I'm really glad to be home?

Last post from China

Well, here we are, midday on the last full day. We leave tomorrow morning, on schedule for those of you meeting us at the airport. We'll call if things change once we get under way. After I posted yesterday, I finally figured out how to get to the comments and read them, we appreciate all of them. We'll be creating a much more detailed journal of our trip with many more pictures once we get home, probably posted on our regular website, but we'll post here too to let you know where it is. Here are some pictures for today.


First we have a sample of the view from our room here at the White Swan. This is one of the boats that cruises around in the evening. They are all lit up in neon colors, as is the other side of the river.


And this is what my favorite beverage looks like. Diet Pepsi or Pepsi Lite as they call it here. You can see they still use the old style "pop tops".



And our favorite asian princess in one of her new outfits. Also standing (unsteadily) on her own 2 feet down the play room. It was hard enough trying to capture her standing and not holding onto something, much less get her smiling at the same time...



That's it. We're going the American Consulate this afternoon to swear Maddie in as a US citizen, a 2.5 hour round trip for a 1 minute ceremony. Then we have to get all of our stuff, plus Kim's purchases, packed up for the long trip home. See you all back in America.

Greetings from Guangzhou

Our flight from ChangSha was uneventful. We are now at a very nice hotel, the White Swan. And we finally have air conditioning again! And that's a good thing because it's hot and humid here. Temperatures average in the 80s in the afternoon, which wouldn't be too bad, but the humidity averages around 90%. There's a constant haze of pollution and fog. We haven't done a lot since we've been here other than the required stuff, like passport photos and medical exams for Maddie, etc. Kim went on a tour, but we've skipped some other things like zoo trips and shopping trips. Kim has had a cold for several days and she just went to see a doctor and found out she has a throat infection, so we won't doing much before we leave I don't think. Also, computer access is more expensive here, so I probably won't do many more entries. And I still can't read the blog, even though I can post. Must be the Great Firewall at work...

I tried to upload a 3 minute movie we made with the digital camera, but it was going to take over an hour to upload. So we'll just go with another picture. This is from the group photo session on the Red Couch at the White Swan.