Six days ’til China: Flat cookies, crap itineraries and misspellings

I don’t like to drink during the week. I have the alcohol tolerance of a 10-year-old these days, so two glasses of wine = a headache in the morning. However, I currently have what may be my second glass of La Crema Chardonnay next to me and I am throwing my rules out the window, damn it.  I’m leaving for freakin’ China in six days, and it’s just no time for teetotaling.

So, my floors got finished and my ceiling got patched. (And there was much rejoicing.) And I had my friend’s adorable little girl over for a long-promised play date. We made chocolate chip cookies and talked about dolls and Disney movies. It was lovely, although our cookies turned out flat. I usually make perfectly fantastic cookies: plump, buttery, slightly crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside. But this new, commercial-grade oven can’t produce good cookies. I’m puzzled.

Before this play date, I ran thousands of errands.  Staples, Trader Joe’s Walgreen’s, Cost Plus, Party City, Ulta, First Tech Federal Credit Union and then Homegrown, to get lunch. Because it was suddenly 1:30, and I’d forgotten to eat.

I’ve been bedeviled by these gift bags we’re supposed to bring for the orphanage workers. People have told me to include local stuff, if possible, and chocolate, and lip gloss, so I’ve been driving all over creation picking these things up.  We’re also putting together a little book of laminated clip art to represent stuff like “bed,” “potty,” “eat,” and, presumably, “stop doing that” for our Mandarin-speaking child.

We’ve been counseled that the first meeting with Kid X will likely be super stressful. In Ethiopia, we met with Bini every day for progressively longer periods of time before taking custody. In China you meet at some drab government building in a room filled with other people doing the same thing, and poof! The child is yours.  People in the know have suggested bringing something sweet for that first meeting (sugar: the universal language), so I’ve got gummy bears. Also, two squishy toys. One for Bini, so he can make it look interesting, and one for Kid X.

Our adoption medicine doctor from the University of Washington wrote us a prescription for Zithromax, in case of bacterial infection, but we also have to buy a few OTC items: Eucerin cream, in case of eczema or dermatitis; Nix, in case of lice; Kaoelectrolyte, in case of diarrhea. Kid X gets his medical exam four days after we take custody, and the shit could quite literally hit the fan in the interim.

We also (finally) got our itinerary for travel today. You know, six days before we GET ON A PLANE. I am not happy. The hotel in Beijing looks shabby, although other parents in my China Adoption Facebook group defended it, so I may just be a snob. However, we were talked into flying to Beijing instead of Shanghai by our travel agency because we could take the awesome bullet train from Beijing to Xi’an. Oddly, they have us going to the Great Wall in the morning, and then hustling back to catch a plane to Xi’an. Huh?

The itinerary also has us taking custody on March 8, and our case manager told us that the earliest we could expect to do that would be the 9th. So we planned for three days in Beijing, to get acclimated. Of course we want to take custody as soon as we can, we’re just puzzled by the change.

And finally, we have no information on what kind of rooms we have — just that we HAVE them. It matters a lot to me whether we have a standard, smoking room with two twin beds or a larger accommodation, which we’d requested. Our agency had us fill out this whole form listing our desires and needs, and it appears that … no one read it.

Hey, thanks for listening.

Non-sequitur of the day: I have been misspelling the word “euphemism” for my whole life. I’m mortified.