Care Package #2

Today I’m mailing out Emerson’s second care package. The first one I mailed in December, and it arrived to her orphanage on Christmas day (I hadn’t planned on that, but it took a lot less time than I expected it to–about six days to get there). I forgot to take pics of the first one.

Here is what I’m sending this time, and I hope it arrives just before the Lunar New Year on the 18th:

They say that one of the traditional gifts for the new year there is new clothes, so I’m sending a jacket and a shirt–pretty stuff, not practical stuff. After all, she’s a Rooster, and I hear that Roosters are style mavens.

Also, a funny blanket that was stitched using an actual child’s image of a bug (a woodlouse, I think) and has all sorts of soft flaps to chew on. We’re sending another book of photos, this time with just pictures of R. and I, and a toy cell phone that we recorded our voices into, saying “This is your mama,” “This is your baba,” “We love you, Fu Lu”–but all in Mandarin. Heh. I have no idea if we even made the rises and falls in our voices correctly, but there you go. We did this for the last care package, too, except the recording was inside a stuffed rabbit. I’m also sending socks (practical mom!), and a soft-sided book with lots of pictures of arctic animals–a polar bear, a seal, a penguin, and so forth. She can just look at the fun pictures and squish the weird materials that they used to make it, until we get there to read it to her. And, of course, the obligatory camera for the orphanage staff to take pictures for Emme Lu to have in the future, and some candy made from cactus fruit (well, I am in the southwest!) and chocolate for the nannies.

The pink stuffed rabbit in the photo couldn’t fit in the box, so it’s not going. I’m thinking I may send it instead to the little girl I’m sponsoring at the New Day Foster Home, since I just found out I can send her care packages. She had her heart surgery and is doing well.

If you look really closely at the bottom of the last picture, you’ll see Gus’s head sticking in and looking intently at what’s going on. He either wants all the fuss to be about him (and it isn’t), or he wants to help with all the fuss (and he can’t). I fear he smells his future, and it might not be what he expected.