Safe in Guangzhou

Ni Hao from Guangzhou.

We left Lanzhou at 8:00 PM, arrived at the White Swan hotel at around 11:30 PM. The flight went very smoothly except for little Willow's 20 minute-solid, "I'm absolutely exhausted but I can't fall asleep" meltdown! Yes, we were the family that everyone in the back of the plane (we were in the front) is SOoooo thankful was not seated near them! When I (Victoria) tried my turn at calming Willow, Poppy had an impressive meltdown of her own and it was pure auditory bedlam! : ) BUT, other than that we really did have a smooth trip down here (2Hour 40Min flying time).

We already miss Lanzhou and feel as if we have left the "real" China. Almost everyone here speaks at least a little English...Starbucks is just down the street, and today we were taken to the Chinese version of WalMart where we stocked up on some supplies for the week. It is inevitable, but somehow sad to see so much Western culture pervading this area. This hotel is THE place adoptive families from the US stay as they await their consulate appointment, the legal conclusion to the Chinese adoption paper trail. Our consulate appointment is scheduled for May 15th, so as additional paperwork is done in preparation for that, we are in a "waiting" mode of sorts with many other families. There must be a hundred families that we saw today... and tonight we heard many babies crying at bedtime. It is a "deer in the headlights" experience for most families as they work at adjusting to a dearly anticipated, but completely "new" child to them. We have been very blessed to have a mild adjustment period so far with Willow. She is blossoming each day and is a relatively easy child with very little crying except for her pre-bedtime meltdowns. The real challenge today has been Miss Poppy Mae! She is so UNhappy to share her Mommy's affections and is acting out with determination. Please pray for our patience, as well as for Poppy's heart to open a bit wider to her new little Mei Mei (sister). We trust that all will settle with time and although we still feel stressed at times, the 22 years of parenting experience comes in handy as we know so assuredly that "this too shall pass".

We can't wait for you to meet our little Willow! She is adorable (may I say as her proud Mama that her pictures simply do not do her justice!) and such fun! How these little munchkins can have their worlds turned SO upside down and adjust with such relative ease, I will never quite understand. But, we thank our Lord who has heard our prayers and has seen fit to bless us with a low-trauma union with our dear girl. He carves out our character through trials and through joy and we rest in His sovereign wisdom and ways.

Annie and Austin, we miss you so much! GBC friends and family, we love and miss you all. Mom and Dad Kruggel, we can't wait for you to meet your new granddaughter...you will fall in love again!

It is a humbling and awesome privilege to be used by the Lord to give a home and a family to such a dear wee one.

With love and gratitude of all sorts,

Victoria

Zaijian to Lanzhou!

It's just about time to say "Good-bye to Lanzhou". In just a few long (I'm sure) hours we're off to Guangzhou, a southeastern city in China (this is the city where we picked up Poppy a little over two years ago) where the U.S. Consulate is located so that we can obtain a passport and visa (among other things) to get our little Willow-tree into the United States. We have a late hotel checkout, will grab a bite to eat, visit the famous Yellow River and other sites in Lanzhou, and then head to the airport. Our flight leaves at about 8:00 p.m., and arrives around 10:30 p.m. or so. We suspect we won't get to our hotel room until about midnight, so that might make it difficult for us to post a blog entry at that hour. So here's our final entry from this absolutely wonderful city in Gansu Province.

There are so many things about this place that we love. We love the people most of all; they're kind, considerate, inquisitive, patient, courteous, hospitable, sacrificial and charming. We've found these beautiful character traits to be consistent throughout our journeys in China, but particularly here. We Kruggel's have a lot to learn from these gracious people. We also love the relative cleanliness of the city; this includes the streets, sidewalks, parks, etc... The terrain is also quite varied. Scalloped hillsides, the rushing Yellow River and the moderate temperatures (which will no doubt drastically change when summer hits) make this place very desirable. Finally, congestion is so far less than some of the other areas of China we've visited; it makes this place very livable. Most of all, we love this place because it's the birthplace province of Willow. We don't know when, if at all, we'll be back. It's sort of sad to let it go.

We leave with fond memories, grateful to our sweet Jesus that the kindness of God has granted such wonderful experiences thus far. The prayers and support of our friends and family from all over have been soothing and uplifting gifts.

We came to Lanzhou with four of our family members, and we now leave with five, soon to be reunited as seven. The family portrait above is obviously missing our lovely Austin and Annie, but it's a joyous reminder of family treasure we have here. A few other photographs below are from our day yesterday.

Huitoujian! ("See you later.")

Tom (for all of the Kruggel's)

Only in China!

China is such a fascinating place! We all love how different it is from the US...the food, the language, the history, the cultural do's and dont's...! We have had several local people simply walk up to us and pick up the girls, touching them here and there, commenting on their skin, their eyes and how we don't keep them warm enough because they can see some skin on their legs! Willow doesn't seem to think it strange to be plucked up by a stranger, but Poppy keeps looking at me like..."aren't you going to do something about this?" : ) I just reassure her that it's OK (because it really IS...).

On the lighter side, as we were sitting down to order our dinner tonight (an interesting task with a huge language barrier), and as Tom is flipping through his Mandarin-English translation phrasebook with one hand and holding Willow with the other, he notices that Willow has had an "explosion" in her pants that was now ON him! He quickly passes her on to Barret who happened to be closest to him and continues on in his efforts at ordering. Poor Barret is mortified (as only a teenage boy could be...) at what has just been handed over to his care! "MOM!" I sweep in to the rescue doing what any Mom worth her salt does best... poop patrol! I grab the wipes (worth their weight in gold in China!) and head off to change a squirming toddler while standing in a "squatty-potty" bathroom shouting back to Poppy who is chasing behind me..."Do NOT come with me Poppy... go back to Daddy NOW!" One small oversight on my part... I hadn't put any extra diapers in the diaper bag. Well, suffice it to say that I may have a new segment/episode to suggest to Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs" when I return! (The picture of Tom pointing to his shirt is, well yes, poop...isn't he a proud Papa??)

Well, if you are still awake, thank you for checking in on us today! We feel very dependant upon, and grateful for each of your prayers.

Warmly in Christ Jesus,

Victoria

Can't think of a title!

Hey everyone! This is Barret and my mom is making me do a blog entry.

Well today was another fun day in China. I got to sleep in a little so that was nice. After that we got to explore a nearby museum, one of the 10 best museums in China. It was really neat and I enjoyed it a lot. After we got back from the museum, I went straight to a basketball court where I showed up some Chinese teenagers (haha, well not exactly). I enjoyed playing with them and if I may so myself, I wasn't too shabby. So ya, it was a fun day.

Almost everyone I have told so far that I was going to China asked me how I was getting out of school, so I will just tell everyone. I got all my teachers permission, they cut me a little slack, and it will still be very hard to catch up but it is worth it I think. As you may know, there is a Spanish family here and I am enjoying speaking to them with my skills from Spanish 1, woot woot! Because of this, I am putting off my Spanish homework (I feel it is enough to speak with. :) All I gotta say is that it is really unmotivating to do Spanish homework in China! So that's that. Some things here in China are not bargains. We wanted to buy Poppy an ice cream bar...10 bucks. My dad and I played a 45 minute game of ping pong...8 bucks. I mean, you gotta be kidding me! I guess we make up for it though with 6 dollar shirts and 3 beverages for $1.75.

My new little sister is just amazing. Willow has really liked me since we got her so it is nice to be able to love her knowing she does as well. She is very cute, inquisitive, smart, playful, and as long as she gets her way she is very happy. We have a lot to work on with her stubborn self but she is great!

Well, maybe I will post one more time in the next few weeks. I miss all you guys and especially my friends. Can't wait to come

home but I am really enjoying my time here and not wanting to come home for finals! Although I'm getting like almost 12 hours of sleep every night, I'm kinda tired so... see you later.

Barret

Our Little Peanut

Wow...did Poppy grow overnight? There's nothing like a "new" baby to make your other youngin' look so big SO quickly!

We were very thankful to enjoy another peaceful night of sleep with our Willow. (By contrast, another family in our travel group, from Spain, has had a really rough time with their new 12 month old who has cried the better part of the last three days, poor folks!) Today we visited the Lanzhou Zoo and adjacent park. It was really lovely and the animals were really easy to see as they were not engulfed within a 2 acre environmentally correct habitat. Poppy loved seeing the tigers, bears, including a panda, baby foxes and some stunning birds. But the most spectacular attraction appeared to be, well, US! :) Our double stroller with our 2 girls attracts a literal crowd. I don't think we have ever felt quite this level of celebrity status before! We have had crowds of about 30 Chinese folks gathered around us staring, chattering, pointing... most smiling, some looking perplexed! Some of them follow us for up to 5 or 10 minutes as if they can't quite get enough of this bizarre spectacle. We experienced this on the train as well. As the only foreigners on the 20 hour ride, our presence in the dining car packed in the crowds! They are all curious about Poppy and where she is from. Her features are markedly different from the features of the northern Chinese and they are quite taken with her high forehead, her full lips and her round eyes.

We are really enjoying Lanzhou. It is a city of 2 million as opposed to Beijing at 17 million and it feels less crowded. Barret also noticed that they don't speak as quickly as the people in Beijing. We are here with 2 other families, the family from Spain and a family from Houston, both are very pleasant to spend time with.

We learn more about our little Willow by the hour. She continues to warm up to us and we are enjoying her so very much! Bath time is a favorite time for Willow and she has NO fear of the water! She loves being bounced by her big brother, riding on his shoulders, etc. (All this would have been too much for Poppy in her first few days with us!) It is really difficult for Willow to eat a decent volume of food due to her cleft palate. It is easy to see now why she is such a little peanut. It makes us anxious to proceed with her palate repair at Children's Hospital as soon as we can when she has settled in at home. She simply needs more food and more nutrition in order to grow well. She is a very active peanut however and I will not be resting at home anytime soon! :)

She WILL find and grab anything within her reach and I will need to be on my toes so much more so than with Poppy...this will keep me young, right folks????

Well, hope this wasn't too long..., thanks again for your encouragement and support!!

With love,

Victoria for the Kruggel's

Wu Hui Xuan Feeling Like a Kruggel

What a day! Oh, what a day! After just 24 hours we've watched this little Willow sapling blossom into a yearling with vibrant color and life. There's nothing weeping about this Willow. With Poppy seeds scattered around her trunk, the pair are making for an unbelievable landscape of beauty. The timid, fearful girl we met yesterday is now beginning to show us what she's really made of; laughter, song, inquisitiveness and determination. Barret's still her favorite comforter, and it's a real joy to see the two of them bond as they are. Today I (Tom) received several kisses, which was the furthermost thing she wanted to do with me last night. Poppy and Willow occasionally hold hands, which would make any parent's heart melt. And Victoria's best mothering gifts are flourishing to their fullest. Yes, Wu Hui Xuan is really starting to feel like she's part of the Kruggel family, already.

Some quick reflections on the last 24 hours since our last blog entry:

• Willow slept through the night (as did Poppy) and didn't wake up until 6:30 a.m. This may have been one of our best nights of sleep since coming to China. Unbelievable!


• We enjoyed a traditional Chinese breakfast buffet this morning, and Willow loved her native congee very much.


• We went to the Civil Affairs Office and started the long, local paper trail process of officially adopting Willow into our family.

- We came back to the hotel and I spent a good part of the day trying to frustratingly blog some streaming videos (while the girls napped; what a cute sight that was) only to discover that I think it's virtually impossible to do so in Lanzhou. We also had some wonderful chats with our Austin and Annie (we miss them so).

- The rest of the afternoon we walked around Lanzhou, receiving some of the most glaring and direct stares we've ever experienced in our lives (very culturally acceptable here). It was actually quite interesting to watch people go out of their way to come and get a close look at us.

- And dinner with the other adoptive families this evening was fabulous.

The girls are back down for the evening, sweet as can be, after getting their bath together (so sweet). Tomorrow we're off to the zoo and a local park.

So, for now, some more pictures of our last 24 hours are attached. We hope you enjoy them, and we continue to thank you for your prayers and e-mail encouragements; they're wonderful!

Gratefully in Christ,

Tom & Victoria (and the rest of the Kruggel's)

No Longer An Orphan

Wu Hui Xuan is now Willow Rae Hui Xuan Kruggel, just like that! After 20 hours of traveling across China by train and seeing some absolutely unbelievable sites (while also having a blast; all four of us crammed into a bite size cubicle with bunk beds), we arrived in Lanzhou at about 2:30 p.m. and were swiftly whisked to our hotel. By a little after 4:00 p.m. we were greeted with little Willow (right in the hotel), who was not too pleased to see us (as you can see here). We immediately interpreted that as a pretty good sign overall, and proceeded to gently draw near her; both Victoria and I were pretty captured by the moment and almost moved to tears. Barret was our photographer, and Poppy was bouncing with joy yelling, "Can we keep her? Can we keep her?" ("Yes, Poppy, we can keep her.") Willow was very cautious of me (Tom), but gravitated right to Barret (and he's so good and gentle with her). Some paper signing and a few photographs later, we were up in our room for an quick bathing with the two little girls (seen here). It was in the tub that we really began to see Willow come alive. She smiled, laughed, played with toys and relaxed in our presence. We ate some dinner, put the girls in their matching jammies, and we're off to bed (completely wiped) with a calm bond of love in our family that causes us to just say, "Ahhhh, thank you Jesus."

We'll write more later, as we just have to get some shut-eye (tomorrow's a big day). In the meantime, your prayers were heard and they've been answered. As I write this blog entry and get ready to sign off, there's a quite in the room as the three girls are sleeping together, and Barret's out like a light. I'm a very content man.

I hope this post goes through. Aside from quickly writing this and uploading some photographs, I cannot even view the blog myself due to internet connectivity weakness. Because I want to make sure this entry gets posted, I'm unable to creatively capture all that's happened in the last 36 hours, but hope to do more of that in later posts. Please stay tuned.

We love and thank you all,

Tom, Victoria, Barret, Poppy & Willow (and Austin & Annie)

Excitement in Cali!

Hello Family!

It is 12:30 am here in Lafayette...Austin and I are just about to hit the hay(it is so comforting to have him home...even just for one night), but we just had to post something on the blog to say that we are SO SO excited that you will be receiving Willow in just a few short hours! We love you guys so much and will be praying for you and Willow as we close our eyes tonight. Our bodies are not there to be with you, but our hearts ARE and we are rejoicing with you in this amazing moment!

Excitedly anticipating our new sister's arrival,

Annie and Austin

xoxoxo

p.s. Barret-Austin says that he loves your guitar and that he brought home that pedal thingy for ya! : )

It's Really Happening!

This will be our last entry before we lose connection with all of you and head off to Lanzhou. The next time you hear from us we'll be with our little Xuan Xuan Willow and Poppy will have a Mei Mei (little sister). We've heard that internet receptivity in Lanzhou can sometimes be difficult, so we'll do our very best to make contact just as soon as we possibly can, however may be "radio silent" for just a little while.

Many of you have written us notes of encouragement to our various e-mail addresses, and we're enjoying every single one of them. It's difficult for us to respond but please know that we're receiving them, reading them and cherishing them.

We read this morning from Isaiah 41:4, "Who has performed and done this, calling the generations from the beginning? I, the Lord, the first, and with the last, I am he." We leave you with this comfort as were comforted.

We love you,

Tom, Victoria, Barret & Poppy (and Austin & Annie, and soon-to-be Willow)

48 Hours Before

Rise and shine came a little later for us today (4:45 a.m.), just in time to see the dawn of a new day. By the end or our day, we would enter into the 48 hour countdown toward the dawn of a new family member joining the Kruggel's.

We decided to spend our last full day in Beijing at the Summer Palace, a summer destination for the Empress during the Qing Dynasty. She had this phenomenal getaway developed as a mirror image of some of her favorite sites in China. Since it was an extended Chinese holiday (Labor Day), the crowds were unbelievably thick. There were a few moments there when we thought we may have seen the entire 1.3 billion person population of China in one place. We often felt entirely out of place as obvious foreigners pushing a double stroller with only one (Chinese) cute girl in it. Not only were we a spectacle, but the double stroller in a country with a "one child policy" was probably quite a site for the locals. Some of the pictures you see here are of our day in the Summer Palace Park (known in China as one of the most beautiful parks in the world).

Poppy was a charm most of the time, but when she gets tired she gets crabby, just like most of us. But the quote of the day had to be when Poppy, at the climax of one of her remarkably crabby moments with tears streaming down her face said (after being given an ice cream by our sweet friend Madam Cui), "Momma, ice cream make tears go away." Yes, ice cream can soothe a lot of childhood ills at a time of crises, and even some adult ills (seen below right after getting her ice cream, and Momma's looking pretty relieved too).

Tomorrow we'll get up, run a few errands, do a little shopping, and then wait at the train station for our 20 hour train ride to Lanzhou where we will encounter the beautiful metamorphosis of our family forever, a change of our choosing, but a change of no choosing at all for little Xuan Xuan. What a miraculous mystery adoption is.

"Wan an" ("Good night") from Beijing,

Tom

The Great Wall

There's a reason why they call the The Great Wall "great". We've always known it is one of the seven wonders of the world, and we had seen it before at different sections, but never had we hiked to it from a valley floor with such verticality and to a section that has not been restored. When we reached the summit (seen here) we could see the millions upon millions of large stones that entomb the perfectly carved and placed side walls, and then marveled at how anyone could haul these stones to such ridge lines hundreds upon hundreds of years ago. That is why it's a great wonder, and to know that we only stood on one point of hundreds of miles of this great wonder caused us to ponder all the more. What made the trip extra special is that we enjoyed getting there with one of our great friends and Hines' colleagues, Mr. Huang (also seen here). Poppy, Victoria and one of our other terrific Hines' friends, Madam Cui stayed at the valley floor and experienced some real rural Chinese culture that few foreigners get a chance to see.

Several times throughout the day Poppy asked if we were going to bring home Willow today. A day must seem like an eternity to her at this age (oh to be young again so we could think of days as lasting as long as children do). One thing's for sure; we're one day closer to meeting her and loving her into our Kruggel family.

As always, to those of you praying for us and sending us warm greetings/encouragements, we thank you. We're signing off for the day and will visit some local sites tomorrow before heading to the market for some shopping.

Warmly in Christ,

Tom