Krueger Adoption Trip: Christmas Eve

At the Zoo

Merry Christmas! That’s what we hear from all of the hotel staff. We love that even though they don’t celebrate Christmas here, they have no problem wishing us a Merry Christmas.

Today was a great day. We went to a fun zoo here in Guangzhou. The animals were very active and all the kids had a lot of fun watching them. We were at the lion exhibit when they started to roar. There were several of them and they kept roaring back and forth for about a minute. I’d never heard anything like that. Amazing.

This evening we went out for a nice Christmas Eve dinner with another family. This has certainly been the most memorable Christmas ever!

Our guide picked up the children’s Chinese passports today from the US consulate with the US visas in them. Now we’re allowed to leave China and come to the US. Susan will become an American citizen when she goes through immigration when we land in Newark.

We leave the hotel Christmas morning at 6am (5pm Christmas Eve on the east coast), drive to Hong Kong, board a flight at 11:15 am, cross the dateline at some point making it Christmas Eve again, keep flying east and at some point we’ll be back on Christmas day yet again. We have a layover in Newark and then home to Boston sometime around 7pm! Pray for happy kids, and parents, sleep, smooth flights… Thank you!

Thaddeus and Ivan Feeding Giraffes

I’m including a photo of the hotel bathroom. It’s a beautiful hotel but I’m a little confused about why they use a glass door for the toilet area. At least in our room there’s another solid door that closes off the whole bathroom. Another family had a room that just had the glass bathroom door. Strange. I’m also including a picture of the squatty potty that they had at the zoo (and all over China). No complaints about the hotel bathroom!

Sorry if I ruined the Christmas mood. To fix that, I’ll also include pictures from the photo shoot that we did with Susan in her Christmas dress.

Susan is chattering more to us now. At the beginning she wasn’t making any noises other than crying, screaming for her foster mom and foster grandma, and the occasional giggle. Now she’s making normal baby noises and is imitating sounds we make. She called Todd ba ba once last night, which is Chinese for daddy. So fun.