Dear Butterfly,
On April 17, you turned one year old. Hurray!
Although we’re so happy to know that you’re growing bigger, it was still a melancholy sort of day for us, your family waiting on the other side of the world to meet you.
Right now we’ve finished all of the paperwork we can, and are waiting (ever more impatiently) for our Travel Approval, when the government in China will finally let us — your mom, your dad, your big sister, and many of your grandparents — travel there to Guizhou to bring you home.
It’s a hard thing to not be able to see you or know more about you. Some adoption agencies let families send pictures and toys and keepsakes to their daughters while they wait for travel approval, but unfortunately ours, due to some archaic interpretation of some Chinese bylaw in some book, does not. (Indeed, this is one of the aspects that frustrates your mother to know end, as she reads about other parents throwing proxy parties for their daughters in your very orphanage, while we can only sit lamely by. Then again, partly due to the fact that this wait continues to linger on, your mother finds a reason to be frustrated with with the entire process only on those days that end with “y.”)
Nevertheless, even though we could not share this first milestone with you, we did celebrate it in our own way here at home. Your big sister, the Ladybug, thought it would be appropriate to have a Chinese dinner in your honor, and so we shared a small feast in your honor, sharing a slice of birthday cake and singing a round of Happy Birthday in your honor.
Happy birthday, kiddo. We miss you!
–Ba ba
