Taiwan: Ying-Tzu Mia

We have been together 5 days now, but I am going to back up to Friday and Monday, two days we spent in Taichung picking up Ying-Tzu and meeting her birth family.  I thought I would be a lot better about keeping up with the blog on a daily basis, but we are finding that our little energetic 5 year-old is taking every bit of energy we have!  hmmm, how quickly you forget what five is all about!  Plus our go to "use your words" that we would say with our first 2 kids when they were toddlers having fits of frustration does not really work ;-)  We are finding humor in trying to communicate, and luckily she is too.  She is an incredibly happy little girl considering the huge change she is going through and the frustration of having a new family who understands so little of what she says.  I am so sad thinking of all of those hours of intense spanish practice I did when I should have been practicing Mandarin for the last 2.5 years, but we did not know our journey would lead to a mandarin speaking little girl.  Ironically, as Ying-Tzu is practicing her English when we get home, Jillian has elected Mandarin as her middle school language, so she will take it every day at school starting in August!  And Ying-Tzu and I will be enrolling in the chinese school to practice our mandarin on Saturdays.  She learns incredibly fast.

We traveled to New Hope, the social welfare institute that has been working with Ying-Tzu for the last year.  Her social workers cared for her well and we credit them with preparing her as well as possible.  Her foster mother also seemed to care deeply about her.  The meeting with the birth family was enlightening.  Our families will always have her uniting us.

Ying-Tzu with her foster mother whom she lived with for 5 months

The wall that adoptive families sign at New Hope.  We all signed... note they taught her to write "Mia", which we have chosen as her middle name.  She may choose to use her middle name in school.

Birth father, Johnny, Jillian, Steph, Bates, Ying-Tzu, grandmother, brother & Aunt all together after an emotional meeting.  Ying-Tzu is holding her beloved snoopy