Rough Nights

Remember how we had a big decision to make, which was whether to visit Hope's Orphanage or not. With friends back home encouraging us to "go for it," we decided to go on Thursday. But the night before, Hope was very sick. Around 1:00am, she vomited several times. I'm (Grace) a very light sleeper. I can hear a cricket on a leaf hundreds of feet away. So, I jumped out of bed and helped her immediately. I had to hand wash several outfits and our hotel room became a laundromat.


One funny thing about Hope, we noticed that she always smells like fish. Yes, that's correct. Stinky, fermented fish. Now, I love eating fish, but not the smell of fish and certainly not on my own child. We could not figure out why she smells like fish. We would wash her and wash her, to no avail. Owen's nickname for her is "fish head" or "yiu toh" in mandarin. It's like people who eat garlic or curry, you can smell it off their skin.
Then, Owen went to the store to buy more baby stuff. He went to the rice cereal aisle and read a package with English ingredients. Did you know that in China, there's fish flavored rice cereal? The orphanage workers dropped Hope off with a opened can of formula and a opened bag of rice cereal. Our conclusion, this particular rice cereal is fish flavored. We definitely need another flavor, cuddling with a "fish flavored" baby is not easy on the olfactory system.