Our last full day at the orphanage

Monday was our last full day at the orphanage with the kids. It was a great day. We spent the morning in the room with the babies and younger kids - a majority of whom are still sick with various colds. I immediately went in and started trying to interact with Jordan. She was sitting on the floor with another little baby in the attached room where the cribs are. I picked out a white bear with wings from our beanie babies stash and gave it to her. And then I handed out beanie babies to the other kids too. Jordan seemed to like hers - she was holding on to it as best she could. They changed her diaper and then brought her out into the other room and put her in the chair at the kiddie table - there are two chairs with arms on them - and these work well for the babies - cause they can't fall out. So I went over to her and started trying to interact with her. She had a little bottle in her hand that looked like a pill bottle - empty of course - and she was having fun rolling it back and forth with me. Even saw her smile a few times while doing this. The team started bringing out the crayons so I grabbed a few and a piece of paper - wasn't sure if she'd be able to color or knew how. But she lit right up - she did a page full of dots and loved holding the crayons. She kept adjusting them and then they'd drop on the floor and she'd look at me with a "please help" look and I'd get under the table and pick it up and give it back to her and she'd give me a huge smile. It was so adorable. We did this for over an hour. One of the little girls who is probably about 4 kept coming over and trying to steal Jordan's beanie baby - of course, I was protecting it for her. I have a feeling it got stolen as soon as I left the room though. I decided to try and see if she'd let me pick her up - and to my joy - she did. She didn't cry at all. I was so happy. But I also had a wet leg - cause I sat her on my leg. She had a wet diaper. One of the girls in there changed her for me and handed her back to me and I walked around with her for a bit sort of rocking her back and forth and talking to her. She was loving her beanie baby - I think she might be teething cause she kept wanting to chew on it. I sat down with her and she started to sort of snuggle up with me - I kept talking to her - obviously in English so I'm sure she didn't understand any of it. But I wanted to speak blessing over her so I would tell her she was beautiful and God loved her and she was a daughter of the King and I also did a lot of praying for healing for her. She was coughing a lot with that nasty cold all the kids seem to have. So I just kept praying over her for healing. I snapped this picture right before they came in the room to tell us we had to go to lunch - I so didn't want to put her down. Frank finally came over to me and said "put the baby down Autumn" and we both laughed.
We went to lunch at a local restaurant and then came back in the afternoon to play with the special needs kids. We gave them beanie babies and played with balloons and so many of them were opening up so much more than usual with us - this lady in the picture with me is one example - she is a 40 year old lady with down syndrome whose family pays the orphanage to care for her because they can't. She kind of keeps to herself but this day when we went in there she totally opened up and was even giving us hugs. Christine snapped this picture of her hugging me. It was so neat to see so many of them open up. There is one kid who gets pretty aggressive - he hits and kicks. He came up behind me and kicked me pretty hard. I was a bit uncomfortable in there with him - I just always felt like I had to have eyes in the back of my head. And we were all keeping an eye on him cause he kept hitting the other kids. I think it was over-stimulation for him and some of the other kids with all of us in there, and balloons being tossed and so much interacting happening. I think he does better one on one and in a calmer environment. We were in there for about 2 hours and it just seemed like it might be good to head out - looked like the teachers wanted to give them a snack and get things calmed down. We decided to say goodbye for the day and head back to the baby room for a bit.
We had about 45 minutes in the baby room and we brought the crayons back out. The kids loved coloring. This time, Jordan was eyeing all the crayons at the other end of the table and kept wanting more. So I just gave her a whole box to herself and she was thrilled - she loved taking them out of the box and picking each one up.
We didn't have long in there with them and we said goodbye. We knew we'd be back the next day for one last goodbye so we were already getting sad thinking about it. But glad that we did get to see them one more time.
We headed to dinner and found out that the directors wanted to take us to a Mongolian restaurant. Lily was a bit nervous and called the head of the travel company Mr. Shi to make sure that would be ok and he said it would be fine. Lily did order for us so we were thankful for that because the food was quite different from the Chinese restaurants we had been going to. And our first course was a traditional tea - only it was like a milky color and had beef and cheese chunks in it. We didn't want to offend so we took some sips of the liquid but I don't think any of us were into trying the chunks. Not our favorite but Lily loved it and had 6 bowls. The food wasn't bad - not our favorite meal there by any means but not bad. We got to try several things. My favorite was some sort of ribs with this yummy seasoning on it. There wasn't much meat on the bones but the flavor was really delicious. They had ordered some mushrooms which I don't eat anyway but apparently they had sand in them - so they sent them back and negotiated that instead of a new dish, the in-house performers come in and sing for us. That was a real treat. It was a guy and a girl singer, a guy playing a 2 stringed instrument and a dude playing synth on the keyboard. He was not dressed in traditional garb like the other 3 - they were all decked out. They were pretty good but we had our own little room and they had the sound up way too high on their little portable show. We about went deaf. The songs were all in Chinese - Lily would summarize afterwards and we got to laughing later cause 4 out of the 5 were about the Grasslands. Welcome to the Grasslands, The Grasslands in your Home, Please come back to the Grasslands, etc. The Grasslands is a beautiful grassy area near Chifeng that apparently people love to go to in summer. Lily said next time we need to plan a trip there in July or August and we will go see the Grasslands. I guess all the people who live there live in tents. Sounds neat. Anyway, the performers really got into it and it was good but also funny - I tried really hard not to laugh - the guy in the photo was using his arms and really getting into it. It was very funny. But they were really great singers and the dude playing the 2 stringed instrument was amazing. Lily was really getting into it - she kept picking songs. I think they were supposed to play 2 songs but ended up playing 4.
We were wiped out when we got back to the hotel and crashed. It was a good day.

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