Six years ago today in China

[This is attempt at a post number two. Blogger is functioning far worse than usual (which is saying quite a lot), and after about five hundred words everything I had written completely vanished, despite it being saved regularly. Am I happy about this? No, not at all. I think the first draft was better.]

Due to friends sharing pictures, I realized that today is the six year anniversary of meeting R. for the first time. It also means that on the seventh, we had the six year anniversary of meeting Y. for the first time. Six years has that both too short and too long feeling about it. It feels as though it has been an eventful six years.

I know I have quite a few new readers here. What you may not know is that a week before we were due to travel to bring our daughters home, my father unexpectedly passed away. My mother's first words when I spoke with her (a friend had called to break the news) was that he would have wanted us to travel... so we did. I was grieving, our new daughters were grieving, we were all in a state of shock. Being not inexperienced adoptive parents, we knew this was not going to be easy. I'm glad we didn't know exactly how not easy it was going to prove to be. Some things you just don't want to know in advance. We have all come a long way since those early days six years ago, but I am so glad that we don't have to relive some of those first years. 

For those who have never read about our journey, I'm going to link to the posts I wrote while in China. I am only going to hyperlink to the first word of each post, though, because I think that's what caused Blogger to implode the first time I tried writing this. 

1. We've Arrived
2. Wow. Just Wow.
3. Toto, We're Not in Kansas Anymore
4. We Now Have 11 Children
5. Welcome to the Silk Road... the land of metal detectors
6. Unexpected Gifts
7. Notes from the Road
8. An Even Dozen
9. Early Days, or the Universal Language of... Barbies
10. A New Day and a New Pair of Shoes
11. Dozens and Dozens of Fish Pictures, and a Few Dumplings
12. A Subway, a Park, Two Passports, Another Trip to Walmart, and Chinese Take-Out: We Hit Our Stride
13. An Inauspicious Welcome
14. Off the Beaten Path for a While Before Being Loaded on the Roller Coaster Once Again
15. Two Little Fish Eat Hummus in China
16. And We Still Haven't Found the Statue of the Five Goats
17. All We Have Left to do Is Wait
18. Ending on a High Note... Or Continuing Our Tour of China's Dead People
19. Home Sweet Home



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