The Joys of Technology

Throughout this long wait I have spent a lot of time on-line reading blogs and doing research on adoption and parenting.  At some point I stumbled upon a site called www.redthreadchina.com that delivers gifts to your child and her orphanage in the time between referral (when you get her picture) and TA (when you are approved to travel).  I've been trying to think of as many ways as possible to make this event a little less traumatizing in Tong Min Qiu's life.  Her care is overseen by her orphanage but she is being raised by a foster family in an extremely rural part of China ( I will post more about Tonggu, the Jiangxi province, and her daily life with her foster family as we know it very soon).   They have rarely seen Westerners, and we've been told that if you decide to take the 4 hour bus ride on bumpy dirt roads up the mountain to her village you will be followed everywhere - even into the bathroom (oh, and it's not a Western bathroom).  So, I decided to send a photo album of our family in the hopes that her foster mother will show her our photos and she'll be a little less freaked out when she meets us.  This decision has led to us to Ann - a wonderful woman in China who does all the work of gathering the perfect gifts, labeling photos in Chinese, and translating a letter to our daughter and all her caretakers.  Once she started preparing our gift she made contact with our orphanage and to our amazement sent us updated photos and measurements of Min Qiu.   Thanks to Ann we were able to send a gift but what we got back in return was priceless.