Day 5: Party of Six-introducing the Mandarin Tornado

Our “Mandarin Tornado,” as we have already nicknamed her, has quite the personality.  She is absolutely adorable. 

We arrived at the Hefei Adoption Registration Center at about 9:30 a.m, where we and 5 other families waited for our girls, all between 3-5 years old, to trickle in from the various city orphanages.  Zoey arrived at about 9:45.  She walked in with 2 women-I am not exactly sure who they were but I think one was the orphanage director.  The women were very sweet with her.  Instead of bringing her to the crowded connecting rooms where everyone was taking pictures and the kids were crying, they guided her to an office across the hall.  We had more room and she wasn't distracted by the other girls' tears.  

   

Poor kid-she did fairly well, better than I expected.  There were some tears when we walked into the room, but some Littlest Pet Shop figurines, a Mickey Mouse phone and some lollipops helped.  I was so glad that the women stayed with us for a while-they sat with us talking to her and letting her warm up to us for over an hour. They would take turns going out of the room and coming back, and I could tell she knew their every move.  Jenna, who had been excited and not nervous or emotional about meeting Zoey, turned into a blubbering mess when Zoey started to cry.  It really was so sweet.

They sent her to us with a bag of stuffed animals and a photo album.  The album has about 30 pictures of her from birth to now-amazing.  There is a picture of her foster mother in it.  I didn't get the disposable cameras back that we had sent in a care package, but this was even better.  

Zoey was very shy and quiet at first.  Jenna started drawing pictures on the mini magna doodle, and she began to smile at her.  When the ladies left, she cried and cried.  She wasn't hysterical, but she couldn't stop sobbing.  She fell asleep on the bus during the quick ride home.  By the time we got back to the hotel, we had her giggling a bit again and it was Jenna's hand she took, and mine she shooed away. 

I let the two sisters go upstairs while I stayed in the hotel lobby with Jane to finalize the paperwork for tomorrow.  When I arrived at the room, I could hear a lot of giggling-this is what I walked into: 

Although Zoey refused to let us put even one bow in her hair, she thought it was a complete riot to put the bows in Jenna's and my hair. 

She has quite the giggle-one of those belly laughs that is completely contagious.  Her face just lights up when she smiles.  But you can tell she is grieving.  She'd get very calm every once in a while and you could feel her sadness-but it didn't last too long.  Nothing inconsolable-more like a fade into sadness, then she'd come back.  

She likes the iPad.  Likes hitting the buttons more than playing or watching anything on it.
At one point we went out and took a walk-we found that she doesn't walk, but likes to skip everywhere.  She moves like an athlete-very coordinated.  She is a riot-was all over our stuff in the hotel room, looking at things, pulling this and that out of drawers and shelves-she is not one you want to leave alone for any great length of time.  We gave her a big book of stickers-she removed them row by row, in order, and placed them on the paper in similar groups.  She is excellent at coloring inside the lines, and when we "helped" her color, she'd gently remove a color from our hand and replace it with the one she wanted us to use. 

Later on in the afternoon we took a walk to the mall with Tim, Lisa and their new little one, Chloe.  Zoey was a hoot.  She giggles and giggles.  She gets very serene when you discipline her, but she bounces back quickly.  We let her pick out a princess cell phone, a toothbrush and a little doll at Walmart-she hasn't put them down since.  The cell phone we had to extract out of the pockets of her jeans before she went to bed.  

I am not sure if you can tell what she has on in this picture, but under that yellow coat was a set of pajamas, a full-length knit one-piece overalls-like contraption, and quilted jeans.  It was almost 70 degrees in Hefei today, just fyi, and that yellow jacket is fleece-lined.  I could not get her to change into anything we brought.  She removed the jacket on occasion, but even the shoes she didn't want to remove.

We Skyped Bryan, Megs and Sam just before dinner.  What a ham-she waved and said "Hello" over and over, and blew them kisses.  She was giggling and laughing and they loved every bit of her.

Nighttime was a little traumatic.  We tried to give her a bath, but it ended up being more of a sponge bath, since she screamed and refused to get into the baby bathtub the hotel provided for us.  We do not have a tub-but a walk-in shower, which is part of the problem.  She did not like it AT ALL.

To traumatize her even further, I had Jenna hide her smelly clothes while I washed her down.  When I tried to put her in new, clean pjs, she wanted NOTHING to do with it.  She would yank them back off immediately.  I finally gave up and she crawled under the covers and is still there now-I did get some pants on her after she fell asleep, but she woke up and removed her shirt and began crying again.  We'll work on that tomorrow.  That is really the only time the language barrier was a problem-I couldn't tell what she kept saying to us, and she didn't understand us.  She wouldn't be a Bucklew without a stubborn streak in her.  Welcome to the family.  :)

All in all, what an amazing day.  I think she is a very lucky girl-she was cared for so well by her foster family.  She is bright, sweet, friendly, cute, and OURS.  Tomorrow we finalize the adoption paperwork-they'll be one less orphan in the world!