Home at Last!

Sunday 9:00pm

Thursday in China went well, we didnt really have a lot of time to do much. We took the red-couch picture and then we had to check out of the hotel and head to the US Consulate to pick up Saiya's Visa. After that, Connie took us to the train station and we left GuangZhou for Hong Kong. Saiya did great on the train. She loved to look out the window and read through the magazines. Then she discovered a new game. She took Chris's book, randomly picked a page and had me start to read to her. Then after about a paragraph, she would take the book back, flip to a different page and let me read some more. This went on for about an hour and a half. She loves being read to! I think she is going to pick up english very quickly!

Friday we spent wandering around Hong Kong. For our last day, we took it easy. It was the one day we were in China where we didnt have to be anywhere or meet with anyone. So we wandered through the shops and restaurants near our hotel and stumbled upon the Hong Kong Science Museum. We took Saiya to the museum and she LOVED it!! She had a blast there! The museum was huge with lots of things for her to play with and experiment with. She was a little young for understanding most of it, but she had fun nonetheless.

Saturday was the LONGEST day ever... Because we didnt sleep on the plane, we were up for over 24 hours straight. Enough said.  Immigration was a bit of a hassle as we were told that we could be processed all together in the US Resident Line, which was not the case.  Saiya had a bit of a melt down while we waited in line, not that I can blame her.  We were all very tired and exhausted from the long flight and now we had to wait in line... twice... and then go through Customs.  So, yeah, we had to wait in yet another line.  If I were her, I would have done the same thing.

Saiya did great on the extrememly long plane ride.  We really didnt hear much out of her besides the little songs she sings to herself.  She watched several disney movies (without the sound because she refused to wear the headphones we brought for her) and colored and played.  None of us slept on the plane, which was a good thing and a bad thing.  Good because that means we sleep the night through and will have little to no jet-lag, bad because we were all CRANKY!  Haha, especially little Saiya.  But she loves Auntie Tami, she cried when she left for the night.

Today was our first full day home.  We landed in Orlando last night at 8:15pm.  After an hour ride home and a quick bite to eat at McDonalds (Chris was in Heaven!) we finally got home around 9:45pm.  We came home to a spotless house (thanks to my loving sister!) and balloons and a cookie-cake for Saiya that said "Welcome Home".  We spent a little bit of time introducing her to the animals.  She didnt really like being on the floor with the dogs (I think it had something to do with them being eye to eye with each other), but she slowly got over her anxiety and we finally went to bed around 11:30pm.

We decided to put her in bed with us as that would be the easiest thing to do and it was late, we were all very tired, and all we wanted was sleep.  She insisted on sleeping on my left, which put me in the middle between her and Chris.  I knew that was a bad idea from the start, but she threw a fit when I tried to move her to the middle.  So I let her be.  Around 6:30 this morning, I woke up to a *SPLAT*.  Yup, she rolled off of the bed and right onto the floor, landing in a face-down froggie position.  I jumped out of bed and picked her up.  She was still ASLEEP!  Talk about your heavy sleeper!  I put her in the middle of the bed and she only woke up and started crying after a few minutes when she realized her poor little nose was bleeding.  It wasn't broken or anything and she calmed down quickly after we got her all cleaned up.  She refused to lay back down on our bed though and decided it was much more fun to bounce around and crawl all over us while we struggled to fall back asleep.  Since we were all awake anyway, we decided to crawl out of bed around 7am this morning.

We made a run to Walmart this morning to get some essentials for Saiya and pick up some food.  Saiya likes to help Chris push the cart, so it took us a little longer than we planned because her little legs can only go so fast and she can barely reach the handle.  But she was having fun, so we went with it.  We had lunch, and tried to put her down for a nap in her room, but she wasnt having any of that.  She cried and whined for about an hour (although she stayed on the bed).  We gave up on the whole nap idea and let her play in the living room.  I went to take a nap for a couple of hours and she did great with Chris.  She even let him take her outside for a short walk.  After my nap, I took over while Chris went to lay down for about an hour and a half while I made dinner.  She played in the toy room.  She finally discovered the goodies in the toy-box.  :)  We gave her a bath, I trimmed her hair and put her down on the mattress we put on the floor in our room.  She fell asleep almost immediately.  Poor thing was so tired.  I'm just glad I dont have to worry about her tumbling off of our bed again.  I like the idea of having her on the floor much better.