Details on Gotcha Day

First time we saw her! Running around like a wild child- perfect for her crazy brothers!
Making friends over Cheerios

Cheerios, Goldfish, Yogurt Puffs....She didn't care! She loves to eat!

Airplane them in!
Checking out her home city with Baba. (Daddy)
She let me take her clothes off, change her diaper, and get her dressed immediately. All smiling and interacting! She had no problem with eye contact, and is very much a little social butterfly.
At lunch. She let me feed her anything I could get my hands on, and I wasn't fast enough. Eric finally held her for a few minutes so I could get some food in:-)
Gotcha Day Details:
Eric and I were up at 6am, which is the latest we've been able to sleep since arriving in China! We got on the elevator to go to breakfast, and there was a couple that looked American. Turns out it was a family I'd emailed with a couple times, that I'd "met" on an online message board for Adoptive Chinese Families. We had breakfast with them, which is a buffet in our hotel. We're staying at The Dolton, which is an interesting place. It's historically been the place for all adoptive families to stay in Changsha, and has a really ornate and fancy lobby. But the rooms look like they are in a HoJo. They aren't bad by any means, they just aren't what one would expect after seeing the lobby.

Anyways, we came back to the room to unpack and organize, with plans to meet Shirley at 10am in the lobby. We got all that done and got ourselves ready, then headed down. At ten after Shirley still wasn't here and I was nervous.....turns out she was just in another part of the lobby. I told you it was huge! It was a quick ten minute ride to the civil affairs office, and we headed up the the third floor. When the elevator doors opened, it was so unbelievable. There was that gold lettering I've seen in a million other gotcha day pictures. We had no idea if she was already there. We immediately heard babies crying and kids talking/yelling/playing. We passed a couple carrying their crying baby out, and we recognized them from the buffet. As soon as we passed them, we could see into the room. THERE SHE WAS. I immediately recognized her face and her jacket. She was running around the room! We walked in and our guide and the orphanage staff were talking, and we just walked right up to Tessa. She just kinda looked at me, but didn't cry. I was kneeling in front of her, and they told me she was hungry. We quickly got out the Cheerios, and that was all it took! We stayed right there on the floor for a few minutes, her eating the Cheerios out of my hand. Then we moved to a bench, and she kept right on eating. She didn't care who held her between me and Eric, as long as the food kept coming. And she drank two entire sippies of water. I don't think she'd had breakfast. We found out she just went back to the orphanage this morning, and that she's been in not one but two different foster families since she was 13 months.

We were only there about 45 minutes, and came back to the hotel. She did great in the car, and played peekaboo with Eric! She laughed out loud for the first time in the car, and we were melting. Our guide said she's never seen a child act this way, that it's only been tears she's seen. We went to lunch at 1230 after playing in the room a bit. She loves to play and giggle. When we came back from lunch, I changed her diaper and we crawled in bed for a nap. She's still asleep two hours later!

Uploading pics is being a pain, so I'll try to get the rest up later today.