Kristina's Thoughts on China

Hi! It's me, Kristina, again. I haven't been very good about writing on this since we got here like I was supposed to. Not doing very good at keeping up with my homework either... but I have been too busy helping with Melissa!(Good excuse, huh?) Hee hee. Any way, I have been learning alot: how to go to sleep with a baby crying, how to make a bottle just right for a picky eater, how to make Melissa laugh. She is really fun and, of course, I love her a whole bunch. It already seems like life wouldn't be as happy (or as loud) without her. It is awsome to have a sister! She smiles alot and babbles alot and loves to play with toys. (Daniel and Timothy, she really likes Blue-Bear and Tiger.) I think everyone at home will like her.

People here in China love babies. It makes me sad for them that they can only have 1 kid. Everywhere we go ladies crowd around her and touch her chubby cheeks and say (with limited english) how cute she is. Once some of our AAC group went to visit a elementary school. The kids were having some sort of track event and thousands of them were sitting in an open courtyard when we came in. Slowly kids turned and pointed at us. Some started getting up and coming over to us and all of them were practicing their English on us. "Hello! Hello, how are you! Where are you from?" Some even asked the adults how old they were. (They must just learn phrases like we do when we learn Spanish or something). And then our small group was enclosed on all sides by kids try ing to see the Americans. This time it wasn't the babies getting rock star treatment. Many places we go, if there are Chinese school children, its like that. They wear uniforms and stay in school until about 7:00 at night. Lots of them want to take pictures with us and some even get autographs. The kids are nicer, though, than some of the adults who just stare at you when you walk by.

Most of the toilets here are a squating kind, so that was new for me, and the crazy driving. These are only some of the many experiences we have had here.

Some things in China are pretty cheap. I just got a green iPod nano for less than 40 American dollars here. (in case any one is wondering, people use yuan here, and so you get about 7.3 or 7.4 of them for one dollor.) A five star hotel room was about 72 dollars a night. Other things are kind of expensive, like laundry service.

We went to a wild animal park and saw some cool animals like pandas. I, and some other people held a really playful white tiger baby. I was sick then (thankfully I'm better now) so it wasn't too fun for me, and Melissa didn't much pay attentiont to the animals, but I think alot of other people really enjoyed it.

We are busy packing for the loooong plane ride back to the US that we will start on tomorrow. My birthday will be on the plane, so one cool thing is my birthday actually lasts two days. (since we will cross the international date line) We will be home soon and I can't wait to not be in a cramped hotel room and have a some good old American cooking.

~Kristina~

New Place, New Bureaucracy

Here are all 11 babies on a couch, not getting along so well. Melissa is the one in the middle, being pushed by Olivia. The girl in the front with blue pants is Elizabeth, who is 19 months old. That is about how old we were thinking our baby might be before we got our referral.

Kristina with two of the Bristol kids. They are from the Western slope in Colorado. This was just before we climbed the 194 steps up a pagoda at the Six-Banyan-Tree Temple.
Some of the families in our group went inside and had their babies blessed by the priest.

Posing with our friend, Jacky, who helped to show us around up in Changsha. We were all feeling good then but now Kristina and John are both experiencing some tummy troubles.
Posing with our 2 daughters. We are missing our boys!

Yesterday we had a 2 hour long paperwork session, in which we went through a whole packet of papers that are required by the United States Immigration Service, filling the forms out one by one.

"I still have a runny nose and I'm beginning to be a little irritated with all these changes. I also have 6 teeth but I'm working on getting 2 more, so Mom and Dad have discovered that I don't ALWAYS sleep through the night."

Yue Yang and back to Changsha

Kristina on the shore of Dong Ting Lake, the second largest lake in China.
































A tiny infant in the Yue Yang orphanage. This was a bright, well-run orphanage that two of the girls in our group came from. There are not as many babies needing adoption as there used to be, but still lots of older or disabled children.
Here's Melissa, getting ready for an outing back in Changsha. She is showing us a wonderfully cheerful, interactive personality. She does have a few little issues that concern us, such as head banging in her crib, her flattened head on one side, and her low weight (16 and a half lbs. at 11 months). Her legs and trunk muscles are weak. We can't erase the first months of her life, but we sure do love her already. We think she will make great progress with us. She is already learning to chew soft food and how to crawl.


Melissa loves her two big brothers! She has been seeing pictures of them.


Three beautiful older children at the Yue Yang orphanage. Kids such as these are catergorized as "special needs" for various reasons. The girl on the left is in this category simply because she was abandoned very recently, as an older child. The cutie in the middle can't walk.



The Hunanese are very proud of their silk embroidery, and rightfully so. In this workshop Changsha, these ladies are working together on an embroidered silk picture duplicating the picture of Chairman Mau in the background. It will take them years to complete it.


Today Kristina tasted a fried Chicken head. Yum yum!! Yesterday, on Thanksgiving, we took a taxi to McDonald's for a hamburger feast. Not quite the same but at least American, and we have lots to thank God for. We pray that you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving time too.

Contrast in accomodations

Deluxe accomodations for adopting parents: Our Hotel in Changsha.









The streets and sidewalks can be dangerous places. On our way out of town this morning, this little crash occured right in front of our bus.
Crowded accomodations in the orphanage that Melissa spent her first 11 months. However, there used to be 80 children in this building and today there were only 15 of them.
Melissa did not express excitement about being back at her orphanage.
Orphanage building, called Xiang Yin Social Welfare Institute, because they also care for elderly and disabled people here.












This is where they found Melissa, early in the morning of December 6, 2007. It is a well-known high school.





Kristina eating a fried chicken claw!

Having a nice cry before bed. It has been an emotional day for all of us.

Video!

More pictures, from Tuesday November 20

Today was a free day, for the babies and families to get to know each other. All of these shots were taken in the hotel room today. She sure is a fun little gal. We heard her cry for the first time today.

Turns out most of the clothes we brought are too big for her. She fits in 6-9 month clothes even though she's almost a year old. She's in size 1-2 shoes.

We'll be away for the next two days and one night as we visit the three orphanages that the babies came from, and seeing the sites where each baby was found. For Melissa it was in front of a junior high school.

We got her!

We got her! She's beautiful. Here are the pictures. We've had her for about 3 hours and still haven't heard her cry. She smiled at DeeDee from the first moment and laughs when I hold her up over my head.

She's pretty tiny for her age, and thin too, but she's very alert, interested in her surroundings, and grabs at everything in her reach. She fell asleep in DeeDee's lap on the bus. She had a nice bath after her nap and now she's eating like a champ. She loves formula, but she gave us some dirty looks over the rice cereal DeeDee tried to feed her.

In China at Last

We left Fort Collins at 10:30 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 16th. We rode on four different planes, lost a day and now we are ready for one sleepless night before our gotcha day. That means that all 11 of the families in our group will drive to the Provincial Office tomorrow and get our babies!

The picture with us on the chairs was taken at the Bradley International terminal at LAX. Hands-down the worst airport terminal for comfort, crowds, expensive food, cranky TSA staff that we've ever seen in the US or abroad!

The video below is DeeDee trying to learn a few Chinese words on the way. Ex: "thank you" = sheeyuh-sheeyuh

"hello" = nee-how


Kristina took this video sitting in LAX, about to get on the 15 hour plane ride to China.

We arrived in Guangzhou around 7:30 am (the picture with the airplane at the top of this post is Kristina and Dee on the tarmac just after landing), went through customs, then caught our final plane to take us to our destination for the week: Changsha (a "small city" with a population of 6 million). We're staying in a very nice hotel, the Dolton. All of the adoptive families are staying on the 30th floor. It seems this hotel hosts a lot of adoption groups because the 30th floor has a baby/toddler play room just for the little adoptive babies. The hotel service people speak english and are impeccably polite and very friendly. The view from our room is quite spectacular at night, with dozens of skyscrapers decked out in high-tech, neon-style light shows.

We went to bed around 8pm Sunday evening (about 5am Sunday in Colorado). John is finishing this post around 5am Monday (2pm Sunday in Colorado). This is the big morning! The next time we post, we'll have Melissa with us.

P.S. We can apparently create and publish posts, but due to technical difficulties, we cannot open our blog page where we're at. Please take a brief moment to post a comment on our blog to let us know you can read this post. Your comment will be sent to us as email, which we are able to get with no problem.

Until next time, thanks for reading, and God bless you!

Referral, Wonderful Referral! by DD

September 20, 2007: Imagine getting these cute pictures over e-mail after waiting for two years!

What a miracle.

We have been busy ever since that day, signing our acceptance letter and getting all our paper work up-to-date. Within 2 weeks of our referral, God had provided most of the baby items we needed, through kind and generous friends. We have had fun rearranging the girls' room, and preparing to go and get Melissa.

She was found on Dec. 5, 2006, in front of a middle school in Hunan Province. The doctor who examined her believed this was the day of her birth, because of her freshly cut umbilical cord. She has been at the orphanage since then, and was given the name Luo Xiang Wen. All the children at her orphanage are called Luo Xiang but the name Wen means peaceful and scholarly. Melissa is the Greek version of the Bible name Deborah. My middle name is Mae, which means great one, or in Chinese, beautiful. So we finally agreed, after much dispute, to name her Melissa Mae-Wen Hunt.

We are now scheduled to leave for China on Nov. 16th and will be there for 2 weeks. We will be traveling with 10 other families who are also getting their little girls through our adoption agency, AAC. Morgan, who will be our guide, has already been extremely helpful. We will fly from Denver to Los Angeles, then on to Guanzhou, and up to Chang Sha in Hunan province. The first week is spent on Chinese paperwork and, hopefully, visiting the 4 different orphanages that our girls are from. The second week we plan to be back in Guanzhou for processing at the American Embassy so that Melissa will be an adopted American citizen when we come back to the U.S. on November 30th.

What an exciting trip we have ahead of us! Please pray with us for our boys who will stay behind with friends and relatives, for our safe travel with Kristina, and for little Melissa, who we already all love. We'll try to keep you up to date with pictures and stories of God's amazing provision.

SISTER TO A SISTER! by Kristina Hunt ,12year old

Many people have asked me, the new sister of Melissa, what I think about our family's adoption so I will tell the whole story.

When I was about 6 or 7, mom said, joking, "Maybe we could adopt a little girl to be your sister, Kristi!" I liked the idea of getting a sister to play with and share a room with. I already had 2 brothers to have fun with, but I thought that it might be nice to have a sister to do "girlie" things with. But at that time, adopting was not taken very seriously for us.

Then when I was 8 and Mom and Dad talked a bit more seriously about adopting , I thought differently and didn't like the thought of not being the only girl any more. Kinda like how a long-time only child might feel if its mom was going to have a baby and it wouldn't be the only child any more.

But I think God changed my mind because at 9, when we started the process, and still now, I completely can't wait for us to get our sister. After starting the process, Mom and Dad filled out a ton of paper work (my hand would hurt) and we had our home study. The social worker came. The questions she asked us kids were like "Do you want a sister?" or "Do you think this is a good family for a baby sister?" or "What would you do if your sister made you really mad?" Then we got to the waiting part of the adoption process and my only thoughts were 'why does it take so long?'; but after the waiting is over, it is totally worth it.

And now the fun begins. We have enjoyed going to a baby shower in our honor, having an on-going name war with the members of our family deciding on a name for our sister (we finally decided on Melissa), getting really cute baby cloths and stuff and setting up my tiny room for two. And then Mom and Dad decided I get to go with them to China! I was soooooo exited. I have never been out of the USA before. Mom and Dad decided this when our adoption agency said it would be nice to have a helper along to hold the baby, and do little things when the parents are busy. I will be needed to help keep this site up-to-date so you will probably hear more from me while we are in China.

I'm so glad to be doing this adoption!!!!!! Sure I'm having to give up some stuff like having my projects out (which there are many of) and having the space in my less-than-big enough-for-one room to myself, but what we are doing is so much more important than having everything the way I like it. I get to be a sister to a sister!

I encourage any families waiting to pick up a baby or thinking of adoption, especially the kids, it is a really great way to help a child who otherwise may have a very unhappy future if they don't get to be taken into a good family who cares about them.

Until next time, God Bless You!

~Kristi

Born in our Hearts

Contributed by DeeDee:

About eight years ago, I was asking God if I could have another baby. John was not so sure we needed more than two, our delightful girl, Kristina, and our wonderful boy, Daniel. I took a nap after my quiet time with God, and as I woke up, I distinctly heard, "You WILL have more children."! Of course I didn't tell John that God had told me that. He'd think I was crazy. You might think so too, and maybe I am. But John did agree that another child would be alright.

Fast forward to when our 3rd child, Timothy, was two, and my motherly instincts were again tugging at my heart. Timothy was smart and fun, but God seemed to be reminding me that we could love another one too. I knew there were lots of children out there in the world, needing homes. I kept finding James 1:27 in front of my face, "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress..." It became a source of tension in our marriage. I was antsy. I also felt like we should be serving God overseas. John was not hearing any of this from God.

In a wise Christian counselor's office, we were advised that one of us was wrong! God would not be telling a couple different things about their future. He advised us both to pray for unity and clarity on these two issues. So we did. And God changed my mind. He made me see that, at this time in our lives, we do not need to serve Him overseas. He has plenty to keep us busy right here in Fort Collins for now. But on the adoption issue...I even started asking God to just take away that desire in my heart for adopting a child. But every time I would ask for that, ten minutes later, I'd find myself thinking about how we could make room for a little girl in Kristina's bedroom, or dreaming of Timothy and Daniel playing with her.

John is a good man. He provides for us well, and takes that job seriously, so I can't blame him for being reluctant to add another mouth to feed. He did agree to pray though, and he prayed especially hard on one particular business trip, because he just wanted to get the thing resolved. He was unaware of his little wife at home, asking God to give him a dream to show John His will. (God has done that before, for our family. John had a dream about Kristina before she was even conceived! ) Well, this time, God----- did it again! John's dream was of us sitting in a hall way, waiting. He says he could tell that we were overseas because there was a door at the end of the hall that was raised up off the floor. He is an engineer and these details are important. So the door opened and a little girl was brought in and we were hugging her. Does that sound convincing to you? Well, it wasn't quite convincing enough for John. He thought maybe it happened because he had just been thinking about it so much.

I gave up. "It's in your hands, God, and I'm not getting any younger," I told my heavenly father. I do love the children I already have and they do keep me busy.

So when we went out on a date a few weeks later and John casually said, "I think we ought to go for it," I didn't even know what he was talking about. He had decided that Christians should not make decisions based on fear, and that was what he was doing when he kept saying no to adoption. He told me that he could see that God had put such strong feelings in me that it was as if I was already pregnant, and John just had to decide whether to accept the new addition to our family or not.

Well this has been one looong, expensive pregnancy! Next time, more on our two years of waiting and how we finally got our referral.

Patience and Paperwork

Contributed by DeeDee

WARNING: Do not let this process scare you if you are thinking of adopting! We got through it and so will you.

August, 2005:
The Hunt family started the application process to adopt our little girl. Gathering up information for our dossier to send to China was no small task: originals of birth certificates from Washington D.C. (since John and I were both born overseas); marriage certificate from California, references from three different sources; notarized letters stating why we want to adopt and why I am a stay-at-home mom, from my doctor explaining that I have a hearing loss but my hearing aide makes up for it and I really can function quite normally, and from the police department explaining that my husband had a DUI when he was in college but he really has been a good boy since then; financial statements; 5 page autobiography questionnaires; home study with 3 visits from a social worker, whose job it is to probe into your most private life to determine whether you will be good parents or not; fingerprints in 2 seperate locations; physical exams for the whole family; and of course, writing a few checks here and there! Whew. Now we wait.

January, 2006:
John and I had adoption training at A.A.C., our adoption agency. A total of 20 hours is required before one finalizes adoption. This was fun, and we got to meet some other adopting families, as well as some children with parents who had recently returned from China or Korea. We were prepared to go to China some time in the fall of 2006, as that is about how long it was taking for Chinese adoptions at the time.

August, 2006:
It became quite obvious that we would not be going to China yet, since the process had slowed down and there were several groups in front of us that had to go first. John had been keeping his work schedule clear but then he filled it up for the rest of 2006, and tried to keep it clear for early in 2007.

December, 2006:
I was depressed. For the first time since we were married (19 years), I decided not to send out Christmas letters to our friends because I didn't want to have to explain that our adoption hadn't happened yet. Tears would immediately gush down my face when a song came on the radio, singing about a little girl in China, waiting for her forever family to come and get her. As we prayed for her, little did we know she had just been born to a mom who was unable to keep her.

Spring, 2007:
It was obvious that John could fill up his work schedule again, and try to keep it clear for the summer instead. "Have we made a mistake, God?" I asked. I am not Sarah and John is not Abraham of the Old Testament, who had a child in their old age. Some days, when the house was a mess and my 3 kids, a dog, and a cat were keeping me very busy, I really had to question my sanity in proceeding with the adoption. But ...He who began a good work in you will carry it onto completion...Phil.1:6

After 18 months, our approval from the Immigration Department was about to run out, which would mean we would have to re-do a whole bunch of paper work. God knew we needed confirmation to hang in there with this process. I opened up the mail one day in April to find a generous check from some Christian friends who felt God urging them to encourage us with our adoption! I started understanding that God has a special plan for this one little girl in China, and He was not going to give up on it easily.
Summer, 2007:
We didn't really take a family vacation, hoping our next big trip would be to China, but John finally gave up on trying to keep his schedule clear for a certain time. Maybe we would just have to wait until after the Olympics were over.

September, 2007:
Suddenly and surprisingly, as God likes to do, He started to make things move. Tune in next time...