1 year anniversay-Gotcha Day

(Kai earlier this summer with the classic bump on his forehead! He is always moving!)

Tomorrow is our family’s one year anniversary of Kai’s Gotcha Day. It is one of those things that remain so filled with emotion that it becomes difficult to write about accurately. Everything I write lands on the page sounding overly emotional or then, not passionate enough.

I will never forget that hazy day, zipping through the depths of Guangzhou at 2pm in the afternoon after waiting around the White Swan hotel all morning. We stayed in our room as much as possible. Parents with new babies crossed our path everywhere. It freaked me out actually. No matter where I looked, Caucasian parents, most much older than we were, pushed tiny Chinese baby girls around in the strollers. On the street the stroller vendors called out, “Oh, such pretty baby!” to all the new parents walking past, hoping the flushed faced parents would step into their shop to make a purchase.

Here we were in China, in this grand hotel, wandering amidst this strange land of the Chinese baby girls, and we planned to adopt a little toddler boy. No tiny little bundle of pink for us. How would the transition go with a toddler versus a baby? We could only wait and see. I kept scanning the multicolored strollers for other boy s or at least another toddler.

During our entire stay at the famous White Swan, we only saw another two or three little boys. Out of all of them, Kai certainly stood out as the happiest and the loudest. By the end of our 2 week stay, he secured the role of “Norm” from Cheers. The entire breakfast buffet staff knew him, all of the families from other agencies greeted him by name and every street vendor outside of the hotel stopped to talk to him in Cantonese. The shop keepers smiled wide grins and told us how lucky we were to get a boy. One woman stopped us on the street to talk to Kai. “He is so handsome,” she told us scanning his face approvingly. She was an older woman with gray streaks in her black hair. I smiled with pride, until she continued, “His mother must be missing him.” While it shocked me at first, I appreciated her honesty. Yes, his mother must be missing him. The shop keepers wanted to sell us their goods, this woman wanted me to know that we received quite the treasure, a treasure another woman paid a high price for us to have.

Early on, we realized that Kai possessed spunk and energy by the tons. Each morning he would grin and call out “Hello!” in his raspy little voice, delighting those around him with his quick uptake of the English language. During the first two days he mastered, hello, bye-bye, and thank you. Other parents could not believe how well adjusted he was, how gentle he played with the other babies, how quick to play a game of catch and laugh uproariously at the slightest attempt to make him giggle.

Those 17 days in China changed all of our lives in so many ways. This weekend we will celebrate our family and Gotcha Day by delving into a few family art projects, eat some pizza, make a cake, and enjoy some outdoor gifts for the Big Sister and Little Brother.

A year later, Kai is still a cheerful kid in addition with a high volume knob. He has come such a long way from that first day, learning so much with such determination. We all have. Happy Gotcha Day Kai-guy!

(I have a video clip on our gotcha day I am trying to post, I will try to get it up tomorrow!)