Returning Home: January 16-17

THERE'S nothing better than coming home from adopting a child, but there are few things as challenging as the process of returning. Our itinerary had us leave Guangzhou on Friday evening, arrive in Los Angeles late Friday afternoon (a couple of hours before we left China, thanks to the International Date Line), and take the red-eye from Los Angeles to the East Coast, arriving very early Saturday morning, January 17.

We are thankful that Sydney slept almost the entire 12.5 hours from Guangzhou to Los Angeles. We managed to get discounted business class seats for this leg of the journey, and the extra space was worth every penny we paid. Getting out of the Guangzhou airport and navigating the Los Angeles airport turned out to be the most difficult aspects of the journey; in Guangzhou we were tied up by bureaucracy, but in Los Angeles we were befuddled by lack of clear signage and direction.

Sydney also slept about half of the journey from Los Angeles to the East Coast, for which we are thankful as well. And she behaved well enough that few surrounding passengers noticed her presence, except for her cuteness as she walked with dad down the aisles of the plane!

Recovery from jetlag, and from the colds we developed in China, took a little over a week. But the journey gave us memories to last a lifetime, and a wonderful souvenir of the trip! Although tired, we immediately began discussing the possibility of adopting a second child. Certainly our willingness to do this again, as tired and jetlagged as we were, bespeaks the wonderful time we had.

Sydney has both attached and bonded to us. She continues to adjust and amaze us with her intelligence, survival instinct, and voracious appetite. We learn as much from her as we hope she learns from us. She has visited Grandy and Nana, her paternal grandparents; Grandma, her maternal grandmother; her paternal aunt and uncle; and her paternal great-grandparents Nannie and Papa. She has visited, and will continue to visit, friends and family throughout the country and across the globe -- she's had so many supporters along the way who we want her to meet personally. If you are a friend or family member, we hope to visit you soon, too.