Birthday Celebrations Begin

August 18, 2014
The next day was much like the one before. Catching taxi's or buses all over town,walking dusty streets, getting curious stares from all over....eating noodles.. Liam still got car sick. It was exhausting. The combination of hitching rides, being gawked at everywhere we went, all the waiting.. the sitting, standing around and waiting. Jet lag.

Finally, evening rolled around and we caught a van to Liam's friend's house, which is an apartment because everyone lives in apartments in China. He was excited to be with his friends again. It would be the last time for a very long time that he would get to see them.
Jodie cooked a huge bowl of food for everyone with a side of fresh vegetables and a huge bowl of fruit. Have I mentioned how good the fruit here is? So fresh and delicious! I have not been able to eat enough of the fruit around here.
I should also mention we had to climb a million stairs to get to their apartment door. We were all out of breath with hearts pounding by the time we got to the top. It made me reminisce running back at home. I miss running so much. I miss not having a pudgy body from running. Anyways,  we sat around the long

Jodie is the one in blue

table and Charley filled our bowls to overflowing. Even our guide was invited! This was nice because he was able to get us to their apartment and back to the hotel.

Charley is in the back, next to Tim

The Pine's child named David said a (long) prayer over our food. Once it was over, Jodie told me that he said he hoped that Liam understood that he was a child of God and that he is loved very much. I barely controlled keeping the tears from flowing! What a sweet, sweet prayer from a little boy.

David, Liam, Daniel

After we all had our fill of food, the lights were lowered and they brought out a birthday cake for Liam! He was completely caught off guard by this and didn't seem to know to blow out all of the candles, but he caught on quick enough. The cake was absolutely divine! The kids were excited to celebrate his birthday with him and Chanz was excited to get cake! In fact, he had several pieces and kept trying to get me to give him more. It really was good, though.  After all the food and cake, the kids ran around the house like crazy and rough-housed with Tim and had SUCH a good time, it was great to see. We were so happy to offer Liam the opportunity to visit and play with his friends one last time. We also felt it would help him to trust us since he was able to see that we were friends with his other friend's family. What a special time. I couldn't have coordinated this any better myself. God is GOOD!

Once it began to get later (and our guide kept pacing back and forth, muttering to himself and clearing his throat) we decided to go ahead and present him with gifts so we could be on our way. ( I think I was the only one that noticed our guide seemed a bit ticked to be there for so long? It was really annoying and I found it rude, so I didn't hurry *too much)
Once Liam was presented with gifts, he didn't really seem to know how to act! We all encouraged him to open the gifts to see what was inside. His friends had a bag full of different treats for him plus some books in Chinese and some drawing paper. We presented him with an iPad, since we told him in his letter that he could have one just like Chanz. He was really excited to see that he had his very own iPad! We were told that he liked to play video games and we had already seen him play games on Chanz's iPad, so we knew it was going to be something he would love.

 We finally left and headed back to the hotel. Everyone was full and happy, although it was kind of late and we had another long day the next day. I'll skip over those days since there wasn't much going on. I have lots of pictures to document that time on Instagram that will be printed out into an album.
This adoption has been so fun and interesting and just amazing!