Happy Easter from the Gleesons!

Maelin is napping (and so is Baba!), so it's blogging time! Yesterday evening we met Kejing, Weifen, and Vivian and walked a few blocks down the street to a Thai restaurant for dinner. We had curry chicken, something squid, pineapple rice, and a couple of other dishes. Baba really liked the food, but it wasn't my favorite. I think we'll go somewhere different tonight.

This morning at 10am, we met Crystal and the others and hopped into our van for a ride to a Buddist temple. It was very busy because this is the holiday (Ching Ming) where everyone goes to temple to remember family members who have passed away. We each threw one Yuan coin into the 'wishing pot' (Mae with Baba in the picture above), burned some insense, and had a buddist monk say a blessing for Maelin (pictured with us above, after the blessing). Then we went to a store that specializes in ivory and other trinkets so we could do some shopping. Last, we went to the Chen family temple/academy, which is now government property so that people can visit it.

Tomorrow our guide will take all of our paperwork to the American Consulate. We will wait in the hotel room for her call between 10am and 11am. She will either tell us that everything is submitted successfully, or that we need to fix something in our paperwork. Obviously we're rooting for the former! Tomorrow evening, we'll take a river boat tour (one and a half hours) of the Pearl River, which runs through the city of Guangzhou. Our hotel is on the river, and our room faces over it -- beautiful view!

Some people have inquired about Maelin's hearing loss. Truthfully, we're not sure. We watched the ENT do a very basic test on her yesterday -- he got her to look at a colorful toy off to the left, and then he snapped his fingers outside of her view on the left. She did not turn to the noise. When he snapped louder and louder, she finally turned to look. We've done some of the same 'home' testing on her; sometimes she responds, and sometimes she doesn't. We know that her hearing loss is not profound - we're guessing that she has a mild or moderate loss, but we just don't know.

Our communication with her is getting better and better. She doesn't say any words in English yet, but we've learned some Chinese so that we can tell what she's saying ('i want more' and 'that's mine' is what she says about 90% of the time!). We're signing a lot of basic signs with her, and she imitates most of them. She has signed 'brush teeth' on her own, and she signs 'milk,' 'eat,' and 'more' quite often. We're also working on 'bed/sleep,' 'water,' 'no,' 'potty,' etc.

Today is Sunday...Happy Easter!!! We'll be home in a few short days -- yeah! :)

Love,
Jim, Shonda, and Maelin