We're Here!

We left our house at 3:00 a.m. Friday and finally arrived in our motel room in Guangzhou around 2:00 a.m. Sunday. I know it used to take months to make a trip like this so I shouldn't complain, but yikes, it seemed endless at times!!! We can only hope that the novelty of the return trip helps Joshua to endure it well! (Novelty, and lots of food bribes, toys etc.!!!!) With no sleep for 48 hours, we had NO trouble falling asleep last night, even in the very "firm" Chinese bed! We had no major problems other than for a few hours we had doubts about getting our flight from Shanghai to Guangzhou. You don't need to understand the language to know that when they start to call other people over to the desk, start making phone calls, the tone of the voices escalate and you hear the words "uh oh" repeatedly that there is an issue of some sort! After being sent away without a boarding pass once and told to wait 3 hours to return, only to have the same scene repeated, we were a LITTLE tense, but it worked out eventually. Apparently, e-tickets are new to China, FYI!!!!! After a seven hour layover, during which we were having a hard time staying awake despite the concern over getting out of the airport AT ALL, we finally boarded the plane, only to sit at the gate for an hour.... My hat is off to those of you who travel for your jobs--I am not sure I could do that regularly! :>) :>)
We have had contact with Mary, our guide, and we will meet her tomorrow morning for a briefing, and we will go meet Joshua at 2:00!!! We had LOTS of time to study the little boys we saw at the airports and imagine what Joshua might be like....... We had an email right before we left from an American woman who has a ministry to the orphanages in the city, and she says Joshua looks nothing like his picture--she even doubted that the child they pointed out was him!! Assuming that she was introduced to the right boy though, she did say that he was vey friendly and happy, so another layer of intrigue is added until we meet Joshua in person! We have noticed that the little boys here sound VERY much like Jeremy, which was kind of surprising considering he is speaking English and of course they were speaking Chinese. It made us miss him and the and the girls already!
No pictures today--sorry! You wouldn't want to see picutures of us today anyway! :>) :>) FYI, I have noticed at times that some of the lines of the blog are missing or cut off, but if you hit refresh, is seems to to take care of it.
Tomorrow evening I will hopefully be posting pictures of our new son on "gotcha day"--hard to believe!!!!!!!!! Until then....