China Day Eleven - My Binary Baby

We had a nice breakthrough this morning.  Today was a free day, so we went to the hotel pool after breakfast, just to check it out.  QingBei saw another family in the pool, playing with their newly adopted Chinese boy.   She didn’t respond, but once we got back to the hotel room, she walked into the bathroom where I had some laundry soaking in the bathtub and she touched the water in the tub.  Then, she started splashing in the water with her hand.  This is huge.   Not only did she play in the water, she gave me eye contact and SMILED, for the first time ever.  She also helped me wash the clothes and hang them out to dry.  After we got the laundry done, she ran over to one of the beds, hit it playfully and started jumping next to it.  This resulted in a massive pillow fight, involving me, QingBei and all the kids, which, miraculously, did not end in tears.  I was just amazed at how gentle the kids were with QingBei and eachother.  QingBei loved it. 

Unfortunately, after that, we decided to go swimming.  She wouldn’t put on her bathing suit, which was fine, so we brought it along with us.  All the kids got in the pool and started playing, but she just stood about three feet back, watching and whimpering.  I finally took her back to the hotel room.  I tried to give her some strawberry yogurt milk, which she really loves, but it didn’t go well.  As I said before, she drools when she eats and we had gone through all her clothes—they were all hanging up to dry.  What she was wearing was all we had left.  So, I tried to put a towel around her shoulders for a bib.  That was a mistake.  I’m not sure what the block was, but all the progress we had made so far seemed to be wiped out once I tried to put that towel under her chin.  She hid in a corner for five minutes and would not come near me for the rest of the day. 

My kids wiped themselves out at the pool and didn’t want to go anywhere for the rest of the day.  Bill found a really nice park about three blocks West and so I ran to it and ran by the lake.  Matt would not come with me, so I had to go alone, but it was easy to find.  It would have been really lovely; the landscaping is phenomenal, the lake was huge and there were tons of old men out flying kites—beautiful kites, if only you could see them through the smog.  If the air was clear, I would have been after the kids to walk with me to the park, as it was, going outside is sort of a downer.  This place is so smoggy all the time, it’s like living in a cloud—not a cumulonimbus or anything, but at least a cirrus.  I have seen a blue sky a few times, but usually it’s grey and anything farther than two blocks away looks cloudy, like you are viewing everything though a dirty camera lens.  I can’t wait to get back to blue skies!!

We had lunch and dinner in the hotel room and I spent much of the afternoon trying to get onto a VPN—Virtual Private Network—so that I could post my blog and get on Facebook again.  I would have preferred to play with QingBei, but she is not having anything to do with me at the moment. 

The beat goes on.