Last Post from Beijing.

Aujourd’hui c’est Vendredi le premier Février 2008, notre voyage pour venir chercher notre fils est terminer. Le début d’une autre histoire commence, celle de notre famille qui inclut maintenant deux beaux enfants. Nous sommes vraiment choyées d’avoir eu la chance de pouvoir venir ici, en Chine afin d’avoir nos deux perles rares.
Notre voyage aura été une très belle aventure avec pleins de belles histoires à raconter. Nous sommes content de rentrer à la maison et de pouvoir partager le tout avec nos familles et amies.
Nous partons de Pékin Vendredi à 5 :30 pm, et arriverons à Vancouver Vendredi à 12 :30 pm pour ensuite décoller de Vancouver à 5 :00 pm et arriver à Edmonton à 7 :20pm.
A plus tard.
Dawn, Éva-Lynn, Samuel, Jean-Pierre.

Well, we leave for home this evening. Our flight leaves Beijing at 5:35 tonight (travel gods willing). We fly to Vancouver and then home, arriving there at 7:20 pm the same day that we left. This makes it look like our trip will only take us 2 hours, but it is a little longer than that. I think from here to Vancouver is 11 hours. We have 4 hours to do immigration, customs and get checked in for our domestic flight and then a 2 or 3 hour flight home. Since our little man falls asleep anywhere and everywhere (he fell asleep as I carried him through the Forbidden City and he fell asleep as Jean-Pierre carried him through the Yashow Market) and he doesn’t seemed too bothered by flying, I’m not too concerned about the flights home. Of course the other reason I’m not too worried is that since Jie-Jie prefers to be with Jean-Pierre when we are doing something new or unknown I won’t have to deal with too much of the behaviours that may or may not come up J.

And so our voyage to Samuel ends and the Samuel we imagined during the wait has vanished into the real, living, breathing, laughing Jie-Jie. He is a child infinitely more joyous, more loving and more wonderful then we could have ever conceived of. This trip has been a truly magical adventure, only made better by having shared it with both our children. It is common knowledge in the adoption community that the time in China is just survival. The child is traumatized, the parents are traumatized and no one is really able to do more than just make it through each day until you can get back home where you can start getting to know your real child and being building family relationships. We just did not experience that this time around. Our family and our son have been doing so much more than surviving, we’ve been thriving. It truly seems like Jie-Jie has always been with us. All the huddles that we jumped on our way to this little man were so, so worth it as they brought us to our sweet son. Couldn't not post this picture. (J-P)