Finally Home!

Sleeping children are a good thing, especially on the plane.

Night before we left Taipei in our hotel room. The kids actually played together for a while. The favorite toy, of course - a box. The one the stroller came in (thanks again, Joe & Christina!) provided about an hour of good laughs and play.

Last Taipei supper, in a food court, Indian food for the adults, random Chinese food for the kids. Isaac will eat ANYTHING. A random woman kept making googly eyes at the kids, and even took a surreptitious picture of them as she was leaving. I'm chalking it up to cuteness, and not the catastrophe of the dining table.

How Joel and Madelyn have slept for the past week.
At least, this is her favorite position to start with. Her other favorite is lying crosswise across Joel's chest so he can't sneak off after she goes down.

Madelyn does not know how to eat String Cheese. Here she is in the car, trying anyway, on our ride home from the grocery store. They actually did great at the store until the cart stopped moving and we were in a really long line at the check out, at which time, bribery snacks were deployed.
(Note the blanket with its brownish colored corner from a long history of the same.)

We are in our home finally. I'll let Joel blog about the actual plane ride, but suffice it to say, we arrived without any missing children, body parts, or luggage, and just one less story book (a favorite book of course). Seriously, our intermittent mantra to each other was "2 strollers, 2 children, 2 diaper bags, 2 back packs, 2 sippy cups, 2 blankies" as we were so paranoid about leaving stuff behind and inciting a meltdown.

Both children have their own special blankets which are serious players. Madelyn holds hers and on rare occasions sucks a corner of it. The corners are so discolored it's embarrassing. I've washed that damn thing like 3 times in the 6 days we've had her. Isaac has his blanket too. It's pink with cute military pigs on it, I think the foster mother made it for him. It's really cute. He holds it in his right hand and sniffs it while sucking his left thumb. He does this when he's tired or self-soothing. It's quite an offense in the McFarland household if either blanket is noted to be MIA so I wash them when they are napping. I cannot believe I've just spent a paragraph writing about the intricacies of "blankie" care.

Our sweet neighbor, Oanh, has given us food both days since we got home. She and her husband are originally from Vietnam and so she wanted to give the kids Asian comfort food. Homemade Vietnamese egg rolls, noodle and broth soup. The great thing is that she was right as Madelyn, who normally takes some encouragement to eat sufficient quantities at meals, sucked that food down so fast it was shocking.

Madelyn cannot lose sight of Joel. She is attached to him completely. She now has a special chair stationed in front of our shower door. She sits in it while Joel showers and intermittently wails. The intermittent part is an improvement from last night when she threw a tantrum and cried throughout the entire shower. Joel now surreptitiously undresses/dresses inside the shower stall. The same for going to the bathroom. I'm not sure Joel will ever go to the bathroom alone here at this house, at least when Madelyn and Isaac are awake. They like to watch...... Nobody told us these things before we got them!

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