In China
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Sunday, March 17, 2013 Ellie: Our Precious, Precocious Princess in Pink Yesterday’s entry focused on Sammy, so today I will focus on Ellie. Let me start with a statement both obvious and wonderful: I love this little girl. She makes me smile. She makes me laugh. And if I think too long about her, she can make me cry. There are only a handful of people on the planet who have that effect on me – three of them are sleeping in the other room and the other four are just waking up on the other side of the planet. Until all seven are back together, I confess that there are probably more tears on their way. Where Sammy is shockingly tough, Ellie is shockingly smart. I know that every new parent thinks their child is a genius, but most of them are wrong. I should have extra credibility on this issue because I cannot claim genetic or parenting credit for her intelligence… at least not until I have been her dad for a full month. One way her intelligence shows up is in her amazing language skills. She has been in our family for eight days and already has a ton of English phrases… while her 40 year old Father continues to use “Xie Xie” (Thank You) as almost his only Chinese expression. I am basically using it as a universal greeting like “Aloha” so it means “Thank You”, “Please”, “Excuse Me”, “Please pass the fried rice”, and “Where are the restrooms?” depending on what pantomime accompanies it. So rather than try to find the words to tell you about Ellie, I will let her words speak for her. I am going to share a few of her favorite English phrases, as I think each one tells you a little bit about her: • “No Thanks” – Ellie learned very quickly that we are not very receptive to “No!” but are surprisingly malleable when it is followed by “Thanks.” She now uses this phrase several times a day. One example is for certain vegetables at the dinner table. Another example is when I am looking for a show on TV. Whenever I stop on a sports channel, she politely looks up and says “No Thanks” until I move onto a channel that she wants… which almost always involves a Chinese cartoon featuring a “Happy Goat.” • “Yesss.” – This is usually spoken in a near-whisper and is frequently followed with a big smile. This is what she says when I finally stop on the “Happy Goat” or decide to offer her something more appealing than broccoli. There is something amazingly tender in her sincere “Yesss”… so it has earned her more than a few extra treats. (Like “No Thanks”, I fear that she will be surprised when “Yesss” quickly loses its supernatural power over Daddy in the US.) • “Mama, time to go down.” - This is not a common phrase, but it does speak volumes about Ellie’s amazing language skills and quick grasp of English. On the day we were leaving Changsha, the phone rang. Before we could get there, Ellie answered it. We then heard this side of the conversation, “Hello.” “Yes.” “OK.” “Mama, time to go down.” The guide was calling to tell us that it was time to meet in the lobby… She explained this to Ellie in Chinese and Ellie translated it for us. Based on this incident, Anne is convinced that Ellie is better at taking phone messages than I am. • “Bobby WaWa” – While this is technically a Chinese phrase, it s root is close enough to the English version that I included it on this list. “Bobby” is how Ellie says “Barbie.” “Wawa” is apparently the word for doll… and Ellie loves her “Bobby Wawa.” She is a girly girl. She likes to play with her two Barbie dolls… dressing them up and doing their hair. Given how excited she is by the two Barbies we have with us in China, I cannot wait to see her expression when she sees the box of ~20 of them upstairs and the dollhouse in the basement. I think she is going to LOVE having two older sisters. • “The Pink One” – This is how Ellie selects clothing for the day. Given the choice of two outfits, she will always choose the one with the most pink. I know a certain older sister who has the same taste in clothes, so I can only imagine what their room will look like if they ever end up sharing in the future. • “Blessed be the Name of the Lord” – This is Ellie’s favorite song, and we frequently find her singing it to herself. I love Matt Redman’s version of this song, but it pales in comparison to the sound of it being sung by a 3 year old former orphan in China. While I am sure she has not internalized it, there are some beautiful parallels between the song and her story – calling out God’s presence and holiness in both the good and the bad: in both plentiful and wilderness, in both sunshine and suffering, when God gives and when God takes away. In all this, the song (and our prayer for Ellie’s heart) calls out continued glory and thanks to God.

"The Pink One!" "Yesss!" (Daddy edition) "Yesss!" (Daddy's video game edition) "Yesss!" (Mommy edition) "Wake up? No thanks." Daily "Ellie and Sammy love each other" picture

I hope these snapshots give you a sense of the amazing little girl that she is. I hope you start to see both her extraordinary intelligence and her extraordinary heart. Both are far beyond her years (with the disclaimer that we have almost no authoritative way of knowing how old she really is…. Perhaps she is just a very short 14 year old.) I talked a bit yesterday about how much she loves Sammy. She definitely likes to help him, mother him, and occasionally boss him around….which surprisingly almost always works. There is no question who wears the pants in their relationship even though she is almost always in a pink dress. We have also seen Ellie’s tender heart in how she has grieved. Ellie has expressed a lot more grief than Sammy. A couple of days ago, she just started crying. When we asked what was wrong, she said through her tears, “Mama. Baba.” and it was clear that she did not mean Anne and me. She was remembering and grieving for her foster family, more evidence of how well loved she was there. Anne then sat holding her for a couple of hours. They looked at videos that her foster family had shared with us, and Ellie told Anne who each person in the video was. When Sammy and I came into the room, Ellie and Anne were hugging each other and crying. I fell a little more in love with both girls that day. In the world of adoption, one of the great fears is that these children never learned to attach, never learned to love or be loved. Those precious tears are evidence that Ellie has done both. And while we hate the loss and the grief, we are thankful for the answered prayers that those tears represent… and we love that she’ll never have to cry those tears for her new family. We’re here to stay… (To be clear, I mean this in a figurative sense. If we actually stay in China any longer than the next 6 days, I will likely go into some kind of MSG-induced lunacy. I miss my kids at home. I miss my bed. I miss both Steaks and Shakes.) SPECIAL PRAYER REQUEST: For each of the next three mornings, we have to go back to the medical clinic for a series of tuberculosis tests. These are extra tests beyond the normal TB screening because of Sam and Ellie’s condition. Of the three tests, we are really concerned about one of them… the sputum screening. If Sam and Ellie cannot produce a sufficient volume of sputum (the technical term for coughing up a “loogie”), then they will have to be intibated while awake and have samples aspirated from them. This is one of the ridiculous requirements imposed by the US government for immigration into the US. It is also one of the ways where adopted kids are treated differently by our government than biological ones. So we have two very odd prayer requests: 1. We pray for passing (negative) test results both for the kids’ health and for ease of visa processing and returning to the US on Friday. 2. We pray for huge volumes of sputum from both kids, all three days. We may be the first parents to ever encourage and provide training to their new children on how to cough up and spit out “loogies”. We are willing to spend the next three years undoing this training if it works for the next three days.

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