Sarah spent 18 months in the home of a wonderful foster family! I will always treasure the few moments that we got to spend with them when we were in China to get Sarah! We have some contact with this wonderful family and we look forward to one day seeing them again when we visit the birth-country of our daughters.
We didn't have a wonderful foster family for Lily. Lily spent the first 11 1/2 months of her life in an orphanage. We were blessed with a great travel group. We were in Guangdong the entire trip and had plenty of time to hang out at the end of the hallway on the seventh floor! We still do our best to get together every year for a reunion!
Red Couch photos are popular for US families that adopt from China. Many groups line their little ones on the famous red couches of the White Swan Hotel to capture that moment. Since Sarah was part of a special needs program and we were the only family from Guangxi Province, we didn't connect with a larger group. The larger group resembled, in many ways, our first travel group. They were together the entire time and got babies from the same province. We still wanted a Red Couch photo!
What a challenge it was to get twelve babies to sit on a red couch and get a good photo! This photo captures the difficulty in such a task! This was November of 2004. Lily is the second baby from the left looking like she is going to lose it any moment.
I'm not sure if everyone seeing this photo will appreciate it, but my friends in the picture will!There were many differences in our two trips to China. One began with anxiety that comes with unknowns because we really didn't know what to expect. We spent hours planning and packing for our trip. The other began quite laid back because we had "been there, done that." We waited just days before the trip to plan and pack!
One resulted in a lifetime connection between twelve families here in the US that will always be connected to us because we experienced the joy of seeing our daughters together at the same moment on the same day. We call these girls "Lily's China Sisters." We love these families! The other resulted in a trip that was more of just "mom, dad and Sarah." Through that experience, we will have a lifetime connection to a wonderful family in China that loved and cared for our little girl until we could get to her. We call them "our family in China."
Two different girls. Two different trips. Two different experiences. Two Alexander blessings.
2 comments:
I love how you put this Kathy. I think for so many families the expectations of what they want their trip to be overshadows the fact that in every sense of the word this is a journey, not scripted, not to be taken lightly, but to be taken for what it is and how it enriches our lives. LONG sentence there.
Anyway, I also feel our journey with Madeline differs from the "norm", but is in no way diminshed due to that fact. Madeline has two travel sisters, several "aunts/cousins" that waited along the way to get her, and wonderful China family, and of course the family that thought they couln't make it another day everyday in the wait (US).
Thank you for being one of those aunts! I consider you as such and hope Madeline can meet her "cousins" someday sooN!
I LOVE the red couch photo...who would have known when that photo was taken how connected ALL the Sisters in that photo would really come to be. What a beautiful memory!!!
Love,
Diane and JOY :)
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