"(Q-Boo,) you look sad."
She just looks up at me with her big brown eyes.
"Are you feeling nervous about the trip?"
"Uh-huh."
"Well, come tell me what's going on."
I pull her up into my lap.
"What's wrong, babe?"
"I've never seen her before."
"I've never seen her before, either. My tummy feels kinda nervous, too. She's never met any of us before, I bet she's feeling really nervous, too."
"But...what if she doesn't like me?"
This pretty much sums up Q-Boo's experience. She needed so desperately to go with us (I realized this even more as time passed,) but she had SUCH emotions about the whole thing, to the point that we ended up taking her to a counselor after we got back. "No, this isn't the child that we adopted. This is her sister." "Yep, not surprised," said the counselor, "She's processing her own adoption through this one." <sigh> It's all so hard but I think she found some healing and some closure through it, as well.
2-12-16
Five.
Five.
2-13-16
Four.
Four.
2-14-16
Three.
Three.
(And, for a little extra flair, Q-Boo has been diagnosed, today, with pneumonia. Yay.)
2-15-16
Two.
Two.
2-16-16
One!
2-17-16
We boarded the first of many planes. Ugh, this trip. No matter how many hours that the tickets say, it always takes about thirty-six hours from start to finish. It's long and boring and exhausting. It's some, much harder, version of: get up early, rush around, wait, wait, wait, walk, walk, board multiple planes, sit, sit, sit, try to sleep, try harder to sleep, give up, sit, sit, sit, walk, lug heavy luggage with shaky-need-rest-muscles, keep up with important paperwork, deal with immigration officials, navigate in foreign place without knowing the language and with a brain fuzzy from lack of sleep, walk, walk, walk, catch taxis, walk, walk, fall onto horizontal surface across the world from where you started.
We boarded the first of many planes. Ugh, this trip. No matter how many hours that the tickets say, it always takes about thirty-six hours from start to finish. It's long and boring and exhausting. It's some, much harder, version of: get up early, rush around, wait, wait, wait, walk, walk, board multiple planes, sit, sit, sit, try to sleep, try harder to sleep, give up, sit, sit, sit, walk, lug heavy luggage with shaky-need-rest-muscles, keep up with important paperwork, deal with immigration officials, navigate in foreign place without knowing the language and with a brain fuzzy from lack of sleep, walk, walk, walk, catch taxis, walk, walk, fall onto horizontal surface across the world from where you started.
Poor Q-Boo, as hard as this is normally, had just started an antibiotic for pneumonia. I am still shocked that the doctors let her leave the U.S., but they were all "Yeah, she can go. This antibiotic works really well." And, all I could think was, "Hmmmm, based on your nonchalance, I don't think you've made this trip..." I didn't want to go without her so we bundled her up and hoped for the best. She started out this exhausting trip already exhausted. Get comfy, babe. We're going to be here a while.
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