Taiwan Day 11 "AIT"

Last night we found out that Evan is a migrating sleeper. He started out sleeping horizontally across the bed, ended up head toward the foot of the bed. Good thing the bed is nice and big. I took the bed guard position to keep him from falling off. We were told that he's used to sleeping with his foster mom and dad. That's going to have to change once we get home. Hope it won't be too tough. 

Today is AIT Day. We had an 8 am appointment with the American Institute in Taiwan to be officially approved to bring Evan home. We got there in plenty of time. Followed the direction to get our documents checked and such. There were two other families there for adoption. One of them was the lady we met at St. Lucy's the day before. We swapped stories about our first day with the kids (both our kids were in foster families). I knew it was normal, even healthy, for the child to miss and grieve for their foster parents, it was still good to know that we were not alone. We were at AIT for 2 hours. It didn't seem long since Evan kept us pretty busy. He came to us yesterday with a cold, so lots of boogers… eek. I had wet wipes ready. And each time I would wipe his face, he would grab the tissue and take it over to the trash can. Hey, that's a pretty good habit. Hope he keeps this one up. He's been pretty good at taking his medicine too. Sometimes needed a bit of cajoling and always lots of praises. But I'm pretty impressed that he's quite a brave little soldier. When he takes a tumble or bumps his head, his eyes might get a bit red and he looks for comfort sometimes, but he hasn't cried or hollered or anything.

He fell asleep in the 15-minute cab ride back to the hotel, which meant slightly recharged batteries that didn't want to go down again. We played in the hotel room, hoping to tire him out some more. But no… So we took a walk to a little park nearby and got on the slide (nothing else to play with) and walk through the market (nothing fun to buy today). We then went over to my parents house where hubby sort of made him take a nap. He put up a bit of fuss but was down for 1-1/2 hour. Not bad. Mom's finally home from the hospital. She got to meet Evan for the first time. He seems to be the type of kids that needs a bit of "warm up" time. He just glared at her at first and didn't want to smile. My mom went about her business making phone calls. After she was on the phone for a while, Evan voluntarily hopped up on a chair next to her. I'm thinking maybe the Dog Whisperer's way of "No touch. No talk. No eye contact." could actually apply to toddlers? Let them come to you. Or I guess if you have toys or treats, those would work with them too. ;o) An hour or so in and Evan was laughing and running around.

In the evening, we had some more street food, oyster omelets, stinky tofu, etc. I had my first experience of really feeding a kid while trying to eat myself. Hats off to all you moms and dads out there. It does not make for a relaxing meal. But it went fine. Evan's a pretty good eater, even when I accidentally gave him a bit of noodles that was too hot. It was obvious that he had some difficulty but he was a good sport and managed to swallow it. After that, I blew at it till I got dizzy. 

Sorry I haven't posted any pictures from Gotcha yet. Sis has most of the pics and we haven't had a chance to download them. Tomorrow, brother and his family will be arriving. It's going to be a pretty noisy, chaotic few days I'm sure.

Shark fin soup, I think. It was mom's first request after getting out of the hospital.