It is Sunday night already. We arrived in Guangzhou Friday night late. The babies did really well on the flight, fell asleep riding to the motel, and woke up when we got to the room at 11:30 pm. Camia went back to sleep after her jammies were on, but Baylor thought his nap was sufficient, and was not very excited to go back to sleep. At 12:30, he finally decided to lay in the crib and jabber himself to sleep. The rest of us were so exhausted. We crashed as soon as we found a bed.
The babies love swimming here. Baylor keeps trying to dunk his head in the pool. We are not
sure what is up with that, but so far he is still breathing. The pool is lovely. It is perfect when we are bored and hot. Tomorrow we older people are going to try to get a massage. We hope to feel rejuvenated afterwards, or at least energized enough to outlast the kids.
We have met some wonderful people here in Guangzhou. It is amazing to me that some people we meet feel like lifelong friends already. It has been fun to get to know them a bit.
The kids have been great. They have enjoyed
shopping here on the island. They have gotten quite good at bartering, and many shopkeepers give the kids a good deal because they are kids.
They get a kick out of the kids trying to make a deal. They also tell us we are a beautiful family, which I thought already, but it is always fun to hear. They seem so happy and incredulous at our family size.
Several of the shopkeepers remember Lauri and I from last year. This surprised me because of the number of people they must meet every day. It was so fun to see some of the same young girls in the shops. We found our favorite shops are still our favorites.
Today was spent filling out paperwork. This means that we only really have 2 more days here because we leave early Wednesday morning for home. It is a bittersweet feeling. It seemed to take so long to get here to get Baylor, and now that we will be going home, we don't know if we will ever be back again. The sounds and experiences of China will always be in my memory, but not for my babies. Now their home is halfway around the world, but it started here for both of them. I will always be grateful for the ones who loved them first, and made it possible for me to love them forever. I have truly been blessed.

This group picture was taken by Baylor's founding place. It used to be the front gates of a temple. The sign on the right has names of people and amounts of money they donated. At the time, it must have been a busy place.
Von left today for Guangzhou. He will spend the night there and fly out early in the morning for home. Spencer is feeling very outnumbered at this point. He would have been very happy to go home with Von.
After Von left, we noticed that a playground area in the hotel was finally open. We look whenever we walk by, but it is usually closed. Today it was open, so we took the babies in to play. Oh, what happy kids. They had so much fun crawling around
on the toys. The rest of us played mad libs for a
while. I don't know why kids have to go the
wrong way up the slide. It must be a very important part of being a kid.
I am more amazed every day at how resilient kids are. Baylor is coming out of his shell more all the time. He is warming up to me a bit, probably because I feed him most of the time. He let me rock him to sleep tonight. Usually, Von had to do that. Baylor definately has some institutional behaviors that we will need to work on, but all in time. The biting needs to be the first to go. Camia fed him something last night, and he bit her finger quite hard. She was not impressed.
We look forward to going to Guangzhou tomorrow. A change of scenery will be good.
It just gets us that much closer to coming home
and settling in. I wonder often how Baylor will like his new life. It will be so much different than the life he is used to.
I had an interesting phone call last night. The phone rang, so I answered it. A man asked if he could rent me. I wasn't sure if I heard right and said, "you want to rent me?" He said is this room 602? "yes," Then I want to rent you, your name is "sdlfjs". I about died. Then he told me he must have the wrong number, "sorry". It was so funny. We laughed so hard.
Well, it is 9:00 on Thursday night. The babies have been asleep for a while. We are all watching a movie yet again. We are tired, and ready for bed. I pray that Von has a safe and pleasant trip home. It will be much harder without him. Our guide told me yesterday that she was jealous of me because of our many children, and good husband. She said she could tell he loved me. When I asked about her husband, she said she mostly married him because her mother worried a lot that she wasn't married. He was tall and handsome, so she married him. She found that he was tall and handsome, but not a good man, but she must be happy anyway. It made me sad. She seems like such a nice lady. I have been so very blessed. Being here reinforces that over and over. Good night.

I just have to say, sorry for the double pictures. I am not so handy at this blog thing. I will hopefully do better.

We went to the orphanage yesterday. It was a little disconcerting. The place was very clean, almost sterile, and institution-ish. There were rows and rows of little beds in one large room. About the size of the kitchen & dining room. They had their blankets folded and stacked at the top of the bed with the pillow. No decorations, toys, dressers, nothing. Just beds.

The baby area was the same except that the room was filled with cribs. Blanket and pillow still stacked at one end.

There was one baby play room that had floor mats, stuffed animals, about 30 walkers, and play things. There were four small babies in there with the nannies. One baby had deformed feet and hands, but so cute. Another one, probably 2-3 months old seemed perfect. I couldn't tell boy or girl. I thought it was a girl, then I noticed the frontal hair patch, so maybe it was a boy. He smiled and cooed when we held him. So cute. What a sad sad place to have to be a baby and grow up in. They showed us the "crib" room where Baylor stayed, but we couldn't take a picture. So he learned to walk in those walkers and played in that one room.
Today Lauri took a cab to Walmart. It was so much less stressful to go in the morning when there weren't so many people. We did great until we had to pass the meat market 4 times to find what we wanted. The interesting thing was trying to come out onto a street so we could find another taxi. With 3 floors in Walmart, we didn't exactly come out where we went in.
After naps and some showers, we visited a Buddhist temple, which is a lot of monks chanting, and smokey incense. The fun part was when we were walking back, this cute little boy
wanted to see Camia. He was so friendly, and
interested in Camia. He held her hands and tried to kiss her several times. He finally succeeded once. One time he lifted up his shirt to show her his bellybutton. He acted like he found his best friend. It was so fun to watch.
The kids are doing pretty great, but now that we have Baylor, they are ready to get home. Spencer is especially nervous about Von going home tomorrow. He is such a homebody, that the thoughts of his dad going home without him are almost too much to bear.
The weather in the evenings is beautiful. It is clear and clean, so we often go out for a walk around dinner time. Last night, we went to a
restaurant that our guide suggested. It looked a little dicey when we walked in, but the food was pretty good. It was a bit spicey, but when we ate our fruit pizza, we knew life was good again. It was really good.
Baylor seems to be doing well. We notice he gets a bit insecure when we go out. We really noticed this when we went back to the orphanage. It seemed like he totally shut down. I wonder if he thought he was going to be left there or something. Anyway, as long as he has dad or Spencer, he is just fine.

Today is another beautiful day in Kunming. The babies slept all night, so that helps a lot. We found that Baylor and Camia pretty much like different things. Camia likes rice, noodles, beans, and Baylor likes everything but those things. Baylor is babbling all the time now. He is saying ma ma ma, and lots of other sounds. I am quite surprised. He is a happy little guy. He has definately been around kids a lot. He knows how to hang onto his toys when Camia gets a little grabby. Baylor is wearing size 12 month clothes, which is too bad since we brought 18 month clothes. Good thing we brought safety pins. All in all, things are going very well here. Today we will visit the orphanage. From all I have heard, this is the wealthiest orphanage, so the babies are very fortunate as far as food and caregivers. We are going to go out this morning for some exploring.

Today we were finally able to meet Baylor.
He is so cute.


We walked into a government office, and there was the most handsome little guy sitting in a chair. We were in love instantly. He only cried a little after I held him. He liked playing with a small toy car and telephone. We were all pretty teary. Baylor seemed to be fairly calm after the first few minutes. He took right to Spencer, which melted our 14 year old's heart right away. It seems like when there is a fairly loud noise, Baylor turns his head towards the sound. I don't know if this is significant, but we can always hope.
Our guide, Lisa, is very nice. She said Baylor's eyes look like us a bit. All I know is, he is finally with his family. I am amazed yet again at how fast we can totally love a new one. He has the cutest smile, and we have heard him laugh already. Right now he is asleep on our bed. He was tired.
So far we have loved Kunming. The city is very beautiful and clean. Our motel is great. Later today we are going to walk around the park and look at the few shops around. The weather is very moderate. I expected it to be humid here, but it has been perfect.
Our guide took us to a restaurant yesterday, and I was very proud of the kids for trying the different foods without complaint. Ther were troopers. We tried octupus, bean curd, chicken with head and guts, yummy beef, white carrots fried in something that reminded me of fried zucchini, shrimp with eyes and legs still attached, fish, yummy noodles, and some kind of bitter thinly sliced green stuff. Lisa was sad we couldn't eat all the food. Such waste.

Here we are in Hong Kong!

This is Katie. Everyone else is busy figuring out our flight stuff. Anyway, here we are in the Hong Kong airport after a long 14 hour flight. Everything went well on our flights though and Camia did great, so that's something to be grateful for. It's weird trying to get used to the time change. It feels like nighttime on Friday but it's actually early in the morning on Saturday.
So we have a 6 hour layover here and then we will board another plane for about 3 hours to get to Kunming, where we can finally get Baylor on Monday! I can't wait, I'm soo excited!

About Baylor

These are our first pictures of Baylor Thomas Bean. We don't know how old he is in these pictures, but right now he is 16 months old. His Chinese name is Pan Chun Wang. He lives in an orphanage in Kunming, Yunnan province, China. We haven't received any updated information or photos, so we will be surprised at how much he has changed. Baylor was born with Bilateral Microtia, which means his outer ears didn't develop correctly. His medical reports indicate that he has moderate hearing loss. We won't know how his inner ears developed until we return home and get him tested. We hope that eventually we will be able to improve his hearing through surgeries and or hearing aids, but for now, we are all learning sign language as that will be his main form of communication for the time being.

We are so excited for Baylor to be part of our family. We first learned about him in November of 2006. We are leaving for China in 4 days. We will take our 4 children, my sister, and her daughter. It is hard to believe that after all of the waiting, the time is really here.


About us

We have 3 biological children:
Katelyn, 16 years
Spencer Von, 14 years and
Rebecca Paige, 10 years.
In June of 2006, we were able to adopt Camia Lei from Nanchang,
Jiangxi province, China. It has been an amazing experience watching her grow and bless our lives. Camia is 23 months old, so Baylor will be 6 months younger than she. It will be fun to watch these two babies grow and learn together.

Spencer has wanted a younger brother for a very long time. He was beside himself when we began talking about adopting Baylor. We have been very blessed as we see the Lord's plan unfold in our lives. He continues to guide us to these little ones who need to be a part of our family.

Travel Itinerary

Aug. 9th : Leave Salt Lake at 9:26pm. Fly to San Francisco, Hong Kong,
then to Kunming, China
Aug. 11th: Arrive in Kunming at 2:55pm.
Aug. 12th: Go to store for needed items, visit flower and bird market.
Aug. 13th: Meet Baylor in Civil Affairs building.
Aug. 14th: Notary.
Aug. 15th: Minority Nationality Village.
Aug. 16th: Half day tour to Yuan Tong Temple.
Von leaves for home.
Aug. 17th: Get Baylor's passport and fly to Guangzhou.
Aug. 18th: Medical appointment.
Aug. 19th: Guangzhou zoo.
Aug. 20th: Visa appointment. River Cruise.
Aug. 21st: Get Baylor's visa
Aug. 22nd: Leave Guangzhou at 8:20am. Arrive in Salt Lake at 3:42pm.