Thursday, July 19

The flight was tough because we took off from Detroit around 7:30pm on Monday night and Samantha stayed awake all the way until Tuesday morning at 5:00am when our next plane took off. We have all been trying to adjust to the new time schedule. We arrived on Tuesday morning at 5am and checked into our hotel. We took a little nap and then started exploring. We love our hotel and the pool is great! We have all been swimming and are so glad we looked for a pool with a hotel. I think I might try taking Ty swimming today, can you do that? I don't know...everything is an experiment so far so why not swimming too. We tried to stay awake for as long as possible on Tuesday but were exhausted by the time we climed into bed.
Our driver came at 8:00am to drive us to Taichung, which is about a two hour drive. We stopped to pick up our social worker, Samantha, from the office of TWCA and then drove a short distance (3km) to the place where Ty was living. The foster care worker was standing at the door holding Ty and it was amazing to see him. He was a little shy at first but as you can see from the videos he did great. I could tell he was a little scared and unsure but he never cried. The foster care worker said that he rarely cries and is always happy. Hooray for us. It was immediately apparent that he has been taken care of wonderfully in his home. Let me give you some examples from the sheet of directions that the worker gave us. "He likes the temperature of the room between 25-26 degrees C and the foster mom feeds him water with a spoon instead of a bottle". Wow, we've got a lot to live up to. We've tried to keep with his schedule but things haven't been working as planned. I think he is just overwhelmed and will fall back into his routine when he is more sure. I would like to share some lessons that I have learned so far, remember this is my first experience with a baby. First, when a baby wakes up in the middle of the night crying he probably wants a bottle and don't try talking him out of it-he doesn't care if you're tired. Secondly, if one person is holding the baby and the other is trying to make up the bottle the person making up the bottle should try and hurry even though 'he' is sleepy and the person holding the baby shouldn't shout out 'helpful suggestions' to hurry up the person making the bottle. It never goes well. Ty was supposed to sleep until 9:30am today but instead he woke up at 6:00am but that's all right, Samantha was up at 4:00am. Ty is currently back to sleep in his crib and Samantha is in the pool. He is such a good baby! He is happy and talks all the time. The only time he has cried since we picked him up was during the night as previously blogged. He can creep around on the floor so he is very busy too. I'll upload some pictures. Thanks for all the kind words about the videos, Brent did a great job.