Une Envie de Sel

 

It's our anniversary!

...I know. 

Not the most glamorous of shots. We had just rolled out of bed a couple of mornings ago, both still in our pjs. 

Mike hugged me, and Q - needing a piece of the action - slipped in between. Peanut butter to our sandwich, as we like to say.

 

This is a better shot of us - taken by my mum a few days ago at the lake. Q still had tubes in her nose. 

 Our wedding day, five years ago! Those are not our children, btw. They are our nephew and niece, ring-bearer and flower girl at our wedding!

 

On horseback, just before the ceremony, September in the Vail Valley.

 

But I can't really talk about our anniversary without talking about our adoption of The Q, because we married with the idea of adoption in mind. We had already been together four years when we wed, and our main motivation for making it legal was the right to start our legal adoption process. This is us in Beijing during the days preceding our first meeting with the child who would be our daughter. 

 

And here I am with Q in my lap on adoption day, holding up our adoption certificate along with Ms. Tang, director of Q's orphanage. 

Mike feeding Q on the streets of Guangzhou during our first days as a new family.

 

Returning from the spice markets off-island in Guangzhou. 

 

My new daughter inspecting my jade necklace.

This picture makes me sad. In the French restaurant in Guangzhou, waiting for our coffee. She looks so wan and lost. A tiny child, just a month short of her first birthday, out of her environment for the first time in her short life, in the hands of total strangers, and trying to figure out her new life.

This picture makes me even sadder. This was on the main island, Guangzhou. We had stopped in a cafe to buy her an icecream bar...trying to make her comfortable. She is holding her ears and trying not to cry, because for the first year of her life she had not been outside her orphanage. It was a great deal of stimulus, noise and light. She was with new people whom she did not recognize. She was also very sick and weak. She had had intestinal parasites for probably most of her young life. She also had a rollicking sinus infection that had moved into her ears. I can hardly stand to think how hard this transition was for her. How scared and disoriented she was at this moment. Poor little creature.

I

But oh, how far we have come! 

Here is Q today (literally), a few days after her 4th birthday, two weeks after her third major surgery, on her way to a party in her new Anais & I tulip dress. 

Wow.

Happy anniversary to my beloved husband and daughter. 

How far we have come!!