The arrival of Child No. Six

I think the picture says better than I could what an exhausting day it was yesterday. Yesterday my mom came home from picking up Child No. Six in China (Children No.'s Four, Five and Six, are all adopted). They were both exhausted, as was my step-dad from taking care of the house (and all the children) by himself for the past week. I was also exhausted from telling my step-dad how he ought to be running the house and from my week of parenting during his week-long stint in China. So a quarter the people in the house were pretty jetlagged and the other three quarters were angry at the jetlagged quarter for being jetlagged, and tensions were running high. Luckily for all our sakes, after a few hours everyone fell asleep wherever they happened to be, which is when I took this one. The shutter didn't even make them stir.

So in case you were wondering why Child No. Six's right leg looks kind of odd, she's actually "special needs" and has a problem with that leg that the doctors in China tried to repair but didn't really fix adequately. She's reasonably mobile, albeit with a very significant limp. The only thing she really can't manage is stairs, so we might ramp the house, but we'll see what she needs and go from there. All the kids that were adopted were classified as "special needs" actually, which is why my mother took them, because they each had only a very small chance of finding homes. But as of now Children No.'s Four and Five are both in perfect health, so I have a lot of hope that we'll be able to make Child No. Six just as healthy and happy as they are. In conclusion, adoption is fun. You get lots of cute little subjects for photography.