We all tried to get to bed early last night as we were flying out to Wuhan in the morning. Evan slept in
Grampa Glenn's room so that I would have a better chance to "get some sleep" (the best laid plans ....) Gracie had had a busy day and dropped off to sleep at
about 9:00 pm. I updated the blog and got to bed just before 10:00, falling to sleep right away. So far things are going right to plan. I was then woken up by a strange, irregular thumping sound. I rolled over, put on my glasses and treated to another version of
Gracie's late night show. Our hotel room is on the 12
th floor of a building right in downtown Beijing. The wall opposite the bed has a large picture window with a wide (almost 2 foot) ledge on the inside (like all the windows in Beijing hotels, this one was sealed and doesn't open). Gracie had woken up, changed out of her pajamas into her dance outfit, put her hair into 3 pig tails (two on each side and one pointing straight back), pulled back the curtains and climbed onto the inside window ledge - and there she was in front of the window, dancing to the music of the lights of downtown Beijing! I have no idea how long she had been there, but anyone a ground level would have been treated to quite a show. It almost seemed a shame to stop her, but we both needed our sleep. I settled her down in front of a Dora
Explorer video in the hopes of getting her to drop off, but she stayed awake for the rest of the night and made sure that I did too. Oh well, I guess this is father and
daughter time, and now I can always reminder her of how she once performed before the entire capital city of China!
It's pretty clear that the Best Western in Wuhan is adoption central. Here are some shots of the baby stuff we found in our room when we checked in. They are definitely too small for Alice, but not too small for Gracie! Once we checked in we met up with the Ottman's, another couple adoption with Children's Bridge, so we've been teamed up for the Wuhan and return to Beijing portions of the trip. They are Steve and Jane Ottman and they have two older girls from China, Stephanie (8) and Hillary (4). They are adopting a boy from the same orphanage as Alice and will name him Quinn (you'll be seeing a lot of Quinn in the next few posts. We all went out for supper (without our guide) to a local dumpling joint. No one there spoke English, except to say "we don't speak English". But Steve had a book of "useful phases and words" which we used to somehow order 1 dish of tomato and egg dumplings, 1 dish of pork dumplings and 1 dish of mystery meat dumplings. All very tasty. When we got back to the hotel we just crashed. Gracie and I have not really adjusted to the time change yet and both keep waking up at 3 am. We now have a routine where we tell each other stories for a while and then try to get back to sleep. I had very little sleep Sunday night with the big day fast approaching!
