Xi'an - Day 6 - A day to relax...sort of...

Today we finally had a "free day" - meaning no scheduled tours or adoption meetings. We were more than ready for the break!  Miss Lia had quite a meltdown around 2 am overnight, and we were awake for over an hour rocking her and trying to console her little breaking heart. It was very sad, but I also think it was a bit of an emotional breakthrough for her. So needless to say, we were thankful for the ability to sleep in a little bit and not be dragged all around town today.

Hands still "holding" her bottle - too cute!

We got down to the breakfast buffet at the hotel and met up with our new friends Reese and Rachel, and their baby, Grace. They live nearby us back home, and it looks like our daughters will have the same cleft surgeon and treatment team, so it will be nice to have another family in town and playmates for our girls. Their baby also has a bilateral cleft lip and palate, but she has not had her lip surgery yet. She is a tiny little peanut with a huge wide grin - a very happy little girl and just adorable! They are great people and we feel so lucky to have connected with them on this journey.

Bedhead...and her morning bottle

After breakfast, the dads decided they would make a taxi trip to the big grocery/department store to purchase more supplies. Unfortunately, seeing Steve walk out the hotel room door without her set Lia off on another meltdown. She probably wailed brokenhearted for 40 minutes while I rocked her. Finally I pulled up some pictures of Steve on the laptop and kept promising her over and over that he would be coming back. It ended up being a good thing, because at some point she turned a corner with me, and started trusting me. She was actually smiles and giggles for quite awhile after that. The "dad trip" took longer than they expected, so I fed her lunch and put her down for her nap and Steve came home while she was asleep. Boy was she angry with him when she woke up! It took a good hour before she would look him in the eye or interact with him again, but she finally gave in and was back to smiles after a bit.

After naptime, we took a walk with the stroller to a nearby shopping area, which she seemed to enjoy. Everywhere we go, we get stopped by people, either practicing their English with us, or playing a sort of game of "charades". They ask if Lia is Chinese, and where we are from. They say she is a "lucky baby" and we tell them, no, WE are the lucky ones!!!

We met up with Reese, Rachel, & baby Grace for a jaunt over to the nearby Dumpling House for dinner. For $24 (and no tip), the six of us had two different kinds of sweet & sour chicken, egg fried rice, steamed pork dumplings, fried pork and chicken dumplings, and four warm canned Cokes (no ice). Each plate of dumplings has like 20 dumplings on it! The plates of chicken and rice were piled high...family-style. We could hardly make a dent in the piles of food in front of us - we seriously could have fed an army!  At home we would have paid well over $150 for that much food.

Tomorrow is another free day, thank goodness. I feel like we came a long way today in terms of earning Lia's trust and hopefully tomorrow we'll see even more improvement. She is a little sweetheart, and I can tell there is a tender heart inside her just waiting to open up completely to us. We already see glimpses of her little personality here and there, and more and more each day.