Day 7 - Trip to Yueyang

First thanks everyone for all of your comments. Keep them coming. We love to read them. There were a few questions:

1. How do we get around, did we rent a car?
2. We are traveling with a group of 12 other couples. Our agency uses buses to get us around. Most of the buses have been very nice coach type buses.
4. Is she saying any words? Not really. The only thing she says is Mama.
6. Is she crawling or scooting or cruising? She can roll over and sit, but that is about it. No crawling, no scooting etc. Some of the other 11 month old babies here are walking, but since they all had different foster families, they were all treated a little differently.

Is she sleeping through the night? Yes she sleeps very well and she takes good naps. Hopefully this will continue when we get back to the states.

Did you get any sort of schedule or routine about her life? We were supposed to, but this has not been translated to English yet.

Was her caregiver sad to leave her? Here caregiver had only met her the day before so she was not very sad. We did not meet the foster parents. I am sure they would have been much more emotional. (More on foster mom experience below)

Tabitha was found in a town called Yueyang. Pronounced Yuayung. We took a trip there today. There are two different places called Yueyang, one is Yueyang County the other is Yueyang City. The city is much larger than the county. The county is a much smaller town and is very rural. We took quite a few picures of the rural area around the County.

The first picture is in front of the Welfare Institute. Although Tabitha never lived there, she was brought here once a month for checkups. In addition, the staff from the Institute went to the foster families house once a week to check on conditions there. This institue has placed 22 children this year, our group had 11 of those 22. They have 20 children in foster care at this time and roughly half of them are special needs.

We did not meet the foster parents with one exception. One of the foster moms was waiting as we got of the bus at the institute. She was very emotional and wanted to see her baby again.

(Picture here is from inside the Welfare Institute) This is taken in the room where all of the babies had their monthly checkups - they also had their referral pictures taken here - notice the bench is the same as in Tabitha's referral picture!

Here are some pictures from the rural area around the institute. There is some sort of animal carcass hanging above the table outside this little house - maybe he is a butcher?

Traffic on the dirt road to the orphanage. A truck with a load of cardboard is pictured.

There is a city area in Yueyang County. It is fairly small, but it is not all rural. Tabitha is more likely from one of the more rural homes - shown below.

We also travelled to Yueyang City - No dirt roads to the city - In the city there is a very old and famous tower - called Yueyang Tower. It was built to survey the Navy on the Lake Dong Ting in 210 AD.