We Don’t Need That Money Anyway

Thu Sep 28, 2006 at 11:18 pm | 1 comment

Eliana will start dance class on Monday.

The new lady who now keeps Eliana in the afternoons has a daughter Eliana’s age in dance class. On Mondays, I have to go by the dance studio to pick Eliana up because her friend’s class starts between 5 and 5:30. We never really had a desire for Eliana to get involved in dance but it’s one of those deals where we said, “Well, since she’s there...and besides, we don’t need that money anyway.”

She’ll be taking ballet and tap. Tonight she wanted to try out her tap shoes which Carmi ordered online.

Referral Watch #2

Mon Sep 25, 2006 at 4:47 pm | 0 comments

Two proud families with our agency just received referrals from CCAA. Our agency sent out the following message this afternoon:

The China Center of Adoption Affairs announced on their website that this referral period covered families with log-in dates from 7/23/05 to 8/9/05. So if you can bear to do the math, it looks like the current wait time for a referral is 15-16 months. (I know how discouraging this must seem to those of you who have long waits ahead of you. Perhaps we can take some comfort in seeing that the CCAA covered a slightly longer period of time in this referral group than they have in many months.)

This referral period covered a span of 18 days which is, indeed, a tie for the longest referral period since January of this year.

Referrals to August 9, 2005

Sun Sep 24, 2006 at 6:57 am | journey to karys | 0 comments

The CCAA website has been updated and the new cut-off date for referrals is August 9, 2005. This batch covered a period of 18 days.

Eliana’s First Cavity

Thu Sep 21, 2006 at 9:23 pm | 3 comments

Eliana has been to the dentist a couple of times with Carmi in the past for cleaning. This morning, I took Eliana to have a cavity filled.

We have a dentist in our church who is just a super guy and especially good with kids. He worked very well with the Empress and I have to brag on her. She lay very still the whole time and never once whined or offered to cry. What a trooper!

That’s the good news.

Bad news is that she chewed on her bottom lip while it was numb and her poor lip swelled up during the course of the day. She looks pitiful and I know it must hurt but we’ll have to ride it out. Hopefully the swelling will go down by the end of the weekend with consistent doses of Benadryl.

Eliana has two other lesser cavities that I scheduled for fillings next Tuesday (Sep 26th). At this point, we may think about rescheduling to a later date.

Panda, man exchange bites

Wed Sep 20, 2006 at 2:14 pm | 0 comments

From the CNN website…

A drunken Chinese tourist bit a panda at the Beijing Zoo after the animal attacked him when he jumped into the enclosure and tried to hug it.

I’m so glad that I don’t drink!

Click for more...

BEIJING, China (AP)—A drunken Chinese tourist bit a panda at the Beijing Zoo after the animal attacked him when he jumped into the enclosure and tried to hug it, state media said Wednesday.

Zhang Xinyan had drunk four pitchers of beer at a restaurant before “stumbling to the zoo” nearby and stopping off at the pen holding a sleeping 6-year-old male panda, Gu Gu, on Tuesday, the Beijing Morning Post said.

“He felt a sudden urge to touch the panda with his hand” and jumped over a waist-high railing down into the enclosure, the newspaper said. “When he got closer and was undiscovered, he reached out to hug it.”

Startled, Gu Gu bit Zhang in the right leg, it said. Zhang, a 35-year-old migrant laborer from central Henan province, got angry and kicked the panda, who then bit his other leg. A tussle ensued, the paper said.

“I bit the fellow in the back,” Zhang was quoted as saying in the newspaper. “Its skin was quite thick.”

Other tourists yelled for a zookeeper, who soon got the panda under control by spraying it with water, reports said. Zhang was hospitalized.

Newspaper photographs showed Zhang lying on a hospital bed with blood-soaked bandages and several seams of stitches running down his leg.

The Beijing Youth Daily quoted Zhang, a father of two who was visiting Beijing for the first time, as saying that he had seen pandas on television and “they seemed to get along well with people.”

“No one ever said they would bite people,” Zhang said. “I just wanted to touch it. I was so dizzy from the beer. I don’t remember much.”

Ye Mingxia, a spokeswoman for the Beijing Zoo, confirmed the incident happened but would not give any details. She said Gu Gu was “healthy and uninjured.”

“We’re not considering punishing him now,” Ye said in a telephone interview. “He’s suffered quite a bit of shock.”

China has more than 180 pandas living in captivity. A 2002 government census found there were just 1,596 pandas left in the wild.

But state media has said a new study by Chinese and British scientists has found there might be as many as 3,000.

In 2003, a college student trying to take a photo of a panda in the Beijing Zoo jumped into the enclosure and broke his bones in the fall, the Beijing Morning Post said.

It did not say which panda it was or if it attacked the student.

Click to close...

The Thermometer Verified It

Tue Sep 19, 2006 at 8:58 pm | 0 comments

This morning, Eliana groggily stumbled into our room and pulled herself up into the bed about the time I was ready to go and wake her up. I hugged her and she felt unusually hot. When I pulled back, her cheeks looked flushed and there was no doubt that she had a temperature after feeling her forehead. The thermometer verified it...101 degrees.

Carmi went to the office because she needed to take care of some work this morning so I stayed with Eliana through lunch. Mom came over, ate lunch with us and remained until Carmi came home around 2:00. When I left the house, Eliana was tucked in snug-as-a-bug on the couch and settling in for some quality time with Gran’mommy.

By the time I returned home, Eliana was waking up from a good nap and seemed to feel fine the rest of the evening.

That was a quickie.

December 2005 out of the review room

Tue Sep 19, 2006 at 7:06 am | journey to karys | 0 comments

The CCAA has finished reviewing adoption application documents registered with their office before December 31, 2005.

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