My Flower Blooms

Have you ever watched a flower bloom in time lapse photography?  Tate has been my little blooming flower yesterday and today.  He is smiling and engaging us in games of peek-a-boo.  He is jabbering and pointing and laughing.  We see little develish smiles when he is getting into things forbidden.  He has said Mama (be still my heart!).  He waves his plump little hand and says bye-bye.  Today he added a new word to his English vocabulary: no no. 
He is being enudated with new sounds and sights, probably more in the past few days than he has had in his lifetime.  We have taught him how to climb on playground equipment and slide on slides.  He has been to restaurants, two hotels, a river boat dinner cruise, Wal-Mart, Shamian Island stores, and been a passenger on taxis, buses, and an airplane.  All this for a kid who spent most of his life in an orderly orphanage, mostly in two rooms.  I don't think he has ever seen a bathroom with tubs or western-style toliets or forks or blue eyes before.  I can't even begin to imagine how many new things we have exposed him to or will in the coming weeks.  But he is taking it all in and processing it quickly.

To Tara and I, the last few days have been fairly calm and slow-paced.  We've enjoyed walking around Guangzhou and Shamian Island.  We found our way to a sea food restaurant that offered to serve you any creature that even got close to water.  Most of the meals were waiting in tanks in the front of the restaurant for you to choose from, including a tank of snakes.  Most of the meals came to your table with head on.  If you don't make eye contact with it, the food is quite good.  We had a lot of fun ordering our meal by pointing at pictures on the menu.  No one spoke English and the menu was not in English.  It took several waitresses and the manager to get our order.  Why didn't any of the Mandarin that George tried to teach me stay in my head?

Tonight we went on a dinner cruise down the Pearl River.  The food was just okay but the view of the city lights from the river was pretty nice.  Apparently the government spent billions of dollars (or maybe yuan?) decorating towers and buildings with colored lights.

Tomorrow is our consulate appointment, which means that we are almost done.  The last thing will be to get his visa for entry into the US and then we will be heading back. This trip has gone by quickly for me but I will be glad to see my family at home again.

I will add pictures later.