Words cannot describe today! Our flight left Beijing at 12:30 p.m. It was a great flight because it was mostly our group heading to Nanchang! We talked the entire two hour flight. We got to Nanchang around 2:30 or so....hot and humid....my favorite kind of weather! After we got our luggage we headed to our hotel, the JenFeng, in the heart of Nanchang. The hotel is very nice and very clean. However, none of the staff speak English. They keep telling us our guide's room number to translate. We had about 40 minutes at the hotel before we headed to the Civil Affairs office to pick up the babies!

It was so hot in there....no air conditioning at all and the windows were closed. Everyone looked like giant sweat balls! They started almost immediately calling out our numbers....we were family number 5!

When they handed Elizabeth to me, we both just started crying. She looked at us like we were weirdos and then just sat quietly in my arms.

All of the babies were dressed in a long sleeve, long legged onesie and a heavy sweater and pants. They looked so hot. Some of the babies started to scream and screamed all the way back to the hotel! Elizabeth just stayed quiet.

Once we got back to the hotel, we immediately took off her clothes to check her out. She has a lot of mongolian spots and very bad eczema and diaper rash. We have three nurses, a GI doctor and a paramedic in our group. One of the nurses said to put hydrocortisone cream on her, which we did. The poor thing just keeps scratching. After we played with her for a while, I started her bath. The hotel has little plastic tubs in the bathroom. I put some lavender baby wash in the tub and put her in. She screamed at first, but then started to enjoy it. I washed her up and wrapped her up in a towel. After we creamed her up and diapered her, we put her in a nice pair of pjs. She seemed very relaxed and content. We put her in the crib and she played with some of her toys for a while, while we tried to straighten up. About 9:30 p.m., I gave her another bottle of water and she fell asleep in my arms. She slept straight through to 7:30! I actually had to start dressing her while she was asleep!

God has blessed us so much with this beautiful child!

Love Cathy & Guy

Next....Adoption Day: November 9th, 2005