After writing about some of the challenges that can occur during your first meeting with your new child and offering tips on dealing with all of the emotions that are common during that time and the time that you are first home with your child, I thought I would share some of our experiences with meeting our children and our early days together.

We have had all sorts of experiences with meeting our children for the first time.

With our first adoption, I had to make two trips to Vietnam. On the first trip I got to visit with our tiny baby Maggie for three days, and then I had to leave and go home without her. It was pure torture, and to this day remains as one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. I traveled alone on both trips, which I do not recommend for a first time adoptive parent. I did fine, but it was emotionally and physically exhausting to travel that far and go through all that I did by myself.

On my trip back to Vietnam to bring Maggie home, I knew that she was in the hospital and had been sick. I was imagining her looking very ill, so I was pleasantly surprised to find her looking very healthy. I was also instantly very worried about her little head, which seemed to have taken on a square shape in the two months since I had last seen her. I swear that child's head was so square that it had corners. (It turned out to be no big deal. I don't know that she could ever "go bald", but she has beautiful hair so I think she's fine).

It was very frustrating however, because despite the fact that she looked great, the doctors wanted to keep her in the hospital for another week. Not only would that delay the adoption process and our return home, but every day they brought new patients in to share the room with her at the hospital, and many of them were clearly very, very ill. I was petrified that she would catch something and actually become very sick. The hospital was not a fun place to be. It was a room full of cots (babies were tied to them so they couldn't roll off) and the family members of the patients were all crowded into (and living in) these rooms. Laundry and dishes were everywhere, and there wasn't a thing about the place that appeared sanitary. I just wanted to get her out of there and care for her myself.

After two long days of visiting her at the hospital I was finally allowed to get her discharged, and was free to be her mom at last. In that taxi ride on the way back to the hotel I cried that she was finally, finally mine. Having her with me was amazing beyond words.

She has some medicine we were supposed to give her (that the hospital in Vietnam had given us) but since I could not read the bottle nor the directions they had given me and my mom experience found her to be in excellent health, I threw it out (I did have medicine that I had brought from the U.S. if she developed symptoms).

I did treat her with Elimite for scabies our first night together, and she did not have any lice so I donated that stuff to the orphanage.

Continued in my next post.