Goin' to China for a Kid part one

Now that I got your attention...did you know that we actually went to China and got Annie? Recently I have been looking at the pictures and re-living those 3 weeks. We actually went to China with 13 other families that we had gotten to know via email for about 12-14 months...from all over the United States: Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New York, Connecticut, Florida, Texas and Oregon. I think I remember them all. Some of us keep in touch frequently via email and every couple of years we have a reunion so the girls can remember each other.

Recently one of the Moms in our travel group died on New Year's Day. She left a husband, a couple of older children and 2 Chinese daughters close to Annie's age. So in an attempt to remember our trip, I decided to tell some of our story, before I get too old to remember (LOL).



Here we are on the tour bus in Beijing, 2 days before getting our sweet Annie, August 9, 2002. We toured Beijing for 2 days before flying to ChangSha in the XiangTan province, where Annie was in the orphanage waiting for us.






Great Wall of China, needs little explaination. It was spectacular and VERY hard to climb. the steps were very uneven, and some were quite tall, especially for short legged Chinese people. But just the fact that it is so very old and still intact is quite amazing.







This is one of the temples we explored. There were LOTS and LOTS of Chinese people there....all the women had umbrellas to keep them from getting sun. It's considered taboo to be tan, only outdoor farming poor working people are tan. Since I am a good 4-6 inches taller than most of the women, I was continually POKED by the umbrellas. I got really tired of it by the end of the day. The people looked at us Americans, and asked to take pictures with us, especially those families who had American-looking fair haired children. Isn't that funny?





This is the picture the adoption agency sent us of our sweet Annie. She was somewhere around 2-24 months we think. She was 27 months old when we finally got her. Notice her RED cheeks, Red ears and LAYERS AND LAYERS of clothes. The people believe that they will get sick if they don't wear lots of clothes. We were told they bathed them twice a day in strong soap...thus the red cheeks. We discovered tha she had lots of respiratory issues and pretty severe asthma once we got home to TX, thus the red ears.

Did not matter, she's still the best thing Brandt and I ever did together.