DAY 11: Fly to Guangzhou

We woke up bright and early and our luggage was picked up at 6:45 am so that we could make our early flight to Guangzhou. The flight was Tonito's first airplane ride!!:) He did awesome and loved looking out the window, coloring, eating some of the food, and goofing around. His friend Drew however didn't have a very fun first flight- he was reaching for boiling hot tea, and it fell onto his leg and burned him really bad. The burn is bigger than my hand on his thigh, and he obviously cried the rest of the fligth in extreme pain. It blistered, and when we got to Guangzhou, the doctor at the White Swan Hotel had to cut off a lot of the skin (sorry for TMI). Poor Drew!!! So Tonito went back and held his hand for a while and was talking to him through the seats, and then when he had to come by me to sit down for the landing, he was telling me all about it (although I only understood "Xin Suo"- Drew's Chinese name). Here is a picture of Tonito's first plane ride (with the ubiquitous lollypop- I will try to break that habit at home!!) and the snow covered mountains while flying over near Tibet.

Guangzhou is what used to be known (to English speakers) as "Canton.." (ie Cantonese restaurants, etc). It is the complete opposite climate (WARM and WET) and color (GREEN!) than Urumqi. The vegetation is beautiful and the humidity reminds me of Mexico on the beach.

We are staying at the White Swan Hotel, which has become quite famous among the adoption community!! Even more famous than the actual hotel itself, are the photos taken of squirmy, adorable babies on one of the red couches in the lobby. (We will take our "red couch picture" later this week!)

We checked in to the gorgeous hotel, located on Shamian Island, and then we all had to meet to have the babies' pictures taken for their US visas. Then, we all walked to a nearby Thai restaurant- CHI families FILLED the tables. You scanned the room and saw so many white parents holding and feeding Chinese babies, toddlers, and older kids- it was so cute!!!! We had 2 families join our group of 4 families to share Elsie, our tour guide. (CHI groups families together with tour guides). Now we added 7 year old Tyler, and I think 6 year old Elise.

Tonito has been having some pretty typical food issues- hoarding, overeating, etc, and last night he ate waaay too much and ended up throwing up several times. Poor guy. He cannot manage his food intake and we are doing our best to help but we are not good at gaging when he is really full (since he always wants to eat and eat). We really are doing our best, but still making mistakes. So yesterday was gorging and today he barely ate at all. At dinner he wanted nothing except the rice/shrimp chips (you know the kind they sell at Thai restaurants?). I didn't want him to only have those, so we took them away, and then he wouldn't eat anything else- we offered noodles, rice, chicken, veggies, etc. He did have a large glass of soy milk though (he LOVES soy milk, but not regular milk so much according to his reports and our experience. I wonder if he is a little lactose intolerant?) I know we shouldn't offer so much because he is not used to the abundance of choices, but then at the same time I didn't want him to have a meltdown tonight because he is hungry. Well, he may still wake up hungry because we couldn't get him to eat anything. A lot of the families of older kids are having similar issues, and we are all hoping tht once we get home on a regular schedule (without a huge buffet of food choices) things will get better and he will be able to regulate his eating better. I know the candy will stop since I never have any at home!

After dinner we walked around for a while- this island is 100% catered to adoptive families. The stores have strollers for us to use for free, they all sell baby clothes (mostly for girls though!), baby toys, they do laundry for very cheap, and sell a lot of Chinese traditional-type gifts that adoptive parents would love to buy for their new kiddos:).

The picture looking out the window is from our hotel room, and then the waterfall picture is in one of the lobbies.