Today was interesting.
We went to a gemstone seminar and learned all about picking out diamonds and tanzanite, etc. Actually quite interesting!
About noon we started to enter Glacier Bay National Park. They travelled very slowly as per National Park regulations and to not disturb anything. I think it was about 4 pm or so that we stopped at the Marjorie Glacier.
They stopped with the glacier on one side of the ship for 20 minutes so that we could watch for calving (ice falling off the glacier) and to listen to the glacier. The glacier is continuously “cracking” (the native people call it “White Thunder” and that’s what it sounds like!) and this particular glacier they say recedes 6-9 FEET PER DAY! Then they turned the ship so that the other side could watch for calving and hear the glacier. After they turned the ship, I went up to the Observation Deck to check email and THEN is when I saw larger chunks of glacier calve. Darn! I didn’t get it on video!
We also had a very good thing happen today! More on that later!
(The following post was written in a notebook but not actually posted on the blog until we received our referral because we didn’t tell our family that we were in process. We waited until we had the referral for our son before we published on the blog because we wanted to do this “covertly” and have it be a surprise to as many people as possible.)
It’s LATER! (added to post on Aug. 7)
About 10:55 this morning my phone started playing the tone that said I had a voice mail. Hmmm… I was able to have service long enough to check the message and call them back. We got cut off but had heard enough. We had a referral for a son and I needed to check email within 15 minutes! We ran up to the Observation Deck, signed in and eventually found the pictures of OUR SON!
We had known it was a possibility that CCOP referrals could happen the week of the cruise so we were prepared. I had doctors lined up to email just in case we needed more specialized opinions. I emailed our pediatrician. That’s all! No real obvious problems! He said he looked good, the medical info looked good and he and the nurses thought he was REALLY CUTE! The “special need” is possible delayed growth and development. But also, they think he may have grown out of that now. Hmmm… OK! What we are wondering is, with no physical problems, why was he abandoned? We’ve come up with a couple scenarios such as maybe his birth mom was single or maybe he was a 2nd (or 3rd) child? We’ll never know for sure, of course.
ANYWAY… his name is Xu Le An (pronounced “Shoo Luh On”), he is in an orphanage in Xuchang City in Henan Province. This means when we go to bring him home, we will go to his province before going to Guangzhou this time. We are not going to post his pictures (we have 3!) on the blog until we get further along in the process but if you are local, you can find us, our parents or our siblings and we all have pictures.
We waited till the next day to send our Letter of Intent to Holt. They eventually received it despite the slow satellite internet of the ship.
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