A better day all around

This is Scott again. I want to say hi to all my friends and family who are following us through this blogsite. We are really having a fantastic time here. I just got back from taking my morning walk. Every morning at 0430 I have to get up and go for a walk as the sun is coming up. All of China has one time zone only. Think about that for a minute! Still gets dark around 8:30 p.m. though. It is so wild to see all the people in this huge city getting up and doing their exercises, walking their birds (that's not a typo btw), performing tai chi or this crazy kung fu that I haven't figured out yet. These are old, very old men doing this and they are amazingly fit and fast. Saying ni hao (hello) usually gets you an earful of Chinese that quickly degenerates to hand gestures and smiles once they realize you don't speak the lingo. They do appreciate the effort however! I just saw a man on a very small motorcycle with 25 crates, (I did count them) filled with live chickens at a traffic light. You just don't see that everyday. He had them stacked on his back seat and draped off the sides in this amazing structure that must have taken a Rubik's Cube master to set up! Great fun, all of it. Every experience here has been a good one.
Tracy and Kortnie had a better day yesterday. She's letting her in a little bit at a time. She still wants me nearby but will let me walk away a bit and stay with Kortnie. She just wants to know I'm somewhere in the vicinity and will occasionally look around for me. We went to the Civil Affairs office yesterday. It's official, she's ours! A very happy day that very well could have gone the other way. You see, we didn't know that she had to agree to the adoption. Yep, she had to verbalize this to the clerk at the Civil Affairs Office before we could adopt her. Given her fears, the sense of loss in regards to her orphanage friends, family, nannies, etc. we didn't think it reasonable that a nine year old little girl could be rational enough to make a decision of this magnitude. The Chinese government thought otherwise. Tracy refused to agree to the adoption and began crying. Our world really started to crumble at this point. I felt so sick at this point and didn't know what to do other than attempt to be supportive to Tracy and Kortnie. In the end (I've given away the ending, I'd be a horrible mystery author) she did agree. This was two hours later, after all the other families had completed their paperwork and gone back to the hotel. She is a wonderful little girl. She is so incredibly intelligent and curious about everything. Especially if it is electronic in nature. She showed her grandpa Fred how to utilize some of the functions of his digital camera that he didn't know existed! You have to be careful what you leave lying around, she will take it apart to see what makes it tick! On an aside, before leaving for the Civil Affairs office (the site where I had my massive heart attack) Kortnie and I pulled out all the money we were going to have to pay to the officials, orphanage director, etc. Tracy's eyes popped right out of her little head. It was almost like the cartoons when the eyes pop out with the springs behind them and the cartoon character has to pop them back in! Too funny!! That could have been what sealed the deal in the Civil Affairs office, knowing that her new parents were wealthy by Chinese standards and could afford her penchant for shopping. She definitely has the shopping gene in her. I'll let Kortnie explain all that in another post. I'm blathering on at this point. We are going to to the Confucius Temple here in a few hours, but I'm going to go downstairs to the gym and get a workout in. I really love not working btw, it will be all too short-lived I know! Bye for now,
Scott