The Quest for Our Princess: Shawn's Birthday!!

Today is Shawn’s 30^th Birthday! We celebrated it with the family back in Homestead the day before we left. Today is just as special because we get to celebrate it with our daughter. We started the day out with taking a walk into the center of town to get some groceries. It took us about 30minutes to get there so not too bad. When we got into the town, we noticed they were having a festival. They had tents all over selling lots of beer and food! The stage had dancers and singers performing and around the corner were kids running from ride to ride. It was very cold today, in the 50’s already! We had a great time watching families interact and having a great time. It made us really miss the boys and wish we had our family together there celebrating. The food smelled great so we wanted to try some. Our first tent we went to had kabobs and we tried to ask for some but of course the lady didn’t understand. We tried pointing and using gestures but she was getting upset that we couldn’t understand her so we left and went to a different tent. We tried some chicken and a kabob that we thought was chicken as well but it was pork. They were good but nothing special, it smelled better than it tasted. We found a neat little table where a lady was selling some hand-beaded flowers. I bought some for souvenirs and we are collecting stuff from here to give to Eryna every adoption day so she has stuff from her country. On the way back, we stopped and got a dessert and juice to bring to the orphanage for the kids to celebrate with us for Shawn’s birthday.

On the way to the orphanage, we got a call telling us that Eryna had been sick throwing up this morning and was in isolation. They told us we could still come but just wanted to let us know. My heart melted. My daughter was sick and I didn’t even know and wasn’t there for her. Our driver couldn’t drive fast enough to get me there. We went up to her room to ask where she was and thank goodness, the nurse was just bringing her back. We called a translator on the phone to ask the caregiver if she was better and what had been wrong. They said that she was doing better, she took a 2 hour nap, and wasn’t throwing up anymore. We could tell something was wrong, she wasn’t as excited to see us and she wasn’t very talkative. I felt so hopeless. I could talk to her but she had no clue what I was saying. I just kept hugging her and giving her a kiss on the head. We were able to get her to do a puzzle and wow…she is good! I am so excited! I love doing puzzles as well so now I have a puzzle buddy. As our time was up, she was getting back to being her goofy self. We didn’t bring in the food because I didn’t want her to feel left out if she wasn’t able to eat so we will celebrate tomorrow!

Today’s pictures are of the church we are staying at, the festival and our visit today!