Our Journey to Jaden: Zhuzhou City

January 10, 2004

Today we had the privilege of visiting the Zhuzhou SWI where Jaden spent the first 10 months of her life. It was an experience I will never forget. Jaden's room was on the 5th floor and we got to see where she slept and played. There were basically 3 small rooms. One was packed with cribs, literally wall-to-wall, one had walkers and a few other toys and the one in the middle was where they changed and bathed them. There was one little girl that kept staring and waving at me and looking at her just broke my heart. I cried almost the whole time we were there because all I wanted to do was bring those sweet babies home with us. The orphanage was built in 1960 and right now there are 290 babies with 90 caretakers. It was clean, but very cold and we understood why they kept so many layers on the babies. The caretakers smiled and played with Jaden and gave her a cookie. They gave us back the photo album I had sent and she recognized it right away. I was so glad to see it because I asked about it the day we met her and they just shook their heads like they didn't know about it. She really seems to like it and we think she saw it quite a bit at the orphanage because she really did seem to recognize us on Monday. Jaden handled the trip much better than we expected. We were on the bus for an hour and a half both ways and she slept through most of the trips. We got to see where she was found and that was so special to us. We went around to six of the babies' finding sites, but didn't get to see the other 3 because they were too far away. Overall, it was a good day, but a very sad one for me, as well. We didn't take the video camera because we weren't sure if they would allow it, but we did get some pictures. We've just hung out in our room since returning and my cold is really aggravated after all the crying and being out in the wet and cold weather.
Before we left to go to ZZ