FAQ ~ Continued Continued

Q1: "I'm coming with an 8 year old post op heart boy in October. I think my biggest concern is language. How long did it take for your boys to understand you enough to get by ok. If you used a translator what kind was it?"

Ahhhh those translators.
I was all amped up about them before we traveled for the boys.
I did my research,
read the reviews,
scouted the latest and greatest,
payed $25 for and installed the best on my phone....

and then promptly never used it.

I guess my simple answer is:
Don't sweat it.
Charades are very effective and even better.....
8 year old's can charade right back at ya.

We did try the translator app once or twice but found it to be slow and not always precise.
For example,
"Do you want to go to the park?"
Quickly turned into:
"You park and dishwasher said the moose to the turtle."

Ok.
I made that up.
But you get my drift.
They didn't work quite as well as I imagined and hoped they would.

Besides, some things are just universal and transcend language barriers.
Pointing works great,
pantomiming works wonders,
but for the heavy stuff or bigger conversations you need to have...
ya know....
like you are going to the hospital and they are going to cut your chest open to fix your heart...my best advice would be to make friends with someone who speaks Mandarin.

When Joshua came home a sweet friend of ours had called the local Chinese Christian Church and they met us at the hospital at 9pm that night he landed.
They rallied around him.
They loved on him.
They comforted him.
They cooked him some off the hook delicious Chinese food.
{Watching the nutritionist in the PICU trying to count calories and fat intake for foods that she had never even heard of before was rather comical. How many fat grams in a duck head would you say?}.
They did wonders for him.

Hi Guys! We miss you!

And I will never forget the love they poured out on him...heck on both us for that matter. I'm not sure I would have been able to even shower that entire month if not for them coming by everyday. 
And even if you aren't facing major surgery the first few days home,
make some friends......cautiously.
Much like I wouldn't want any English speaking stranger talking to my bio kids,
I didn't want just any Mandarin speaker talking to my newly adopted kids.
You won't know what they are saying and that can be....well....dangerous.
Find some Mandarin speakers who love Jesus as much as you do and who are committed to helping you grow and nurture the new relationship between you and your new kiddo.  

So bottom line, seek out some connections in your community that are trustworthy and throw the translators to the curb.

Q2: Have you figured out a solution to the socks??? Cuz if you have, I NEED TO HEAR IT! 

Oh goodness socks.
Thankfully our sock issue isn't an issue for us.
John, Jason and Jordan all wear the same brand/size so that's easy.
The twins wear the same size, different brand than the others so that's simple.
And the little one's all have microscopic feet so it is easy to determine which one's belong to them.

What I haven't figured out yet are the shoes.

Oh.
The.
Shoes.

I've done a post already about shoes a few months ago so I won't go into all that again but suffice it to say we have something like 27 pairs of shoes around here. 54 individual shoes without a place to call home. A pair of tennis shoes for each person, a pair of flip flops or crocs, baseball kleats, basketball shoes.....I'm tellin you. It's borderline ridiculous.

So this is me throwing that question right back at ya.
Shoes.
What.
The.
Heck do I do?

Our porch looks like something out of a bad episode of Hoarders....only instead of trash and 8 broken dishwashers I have piles and rows and rows and piles of s.h.o.e.s.

Help me.