Pre Travel updated photos!

What a treasure it was to wake up this morning to 3 updated photos of our daughter! 

Pardon if we are biased, but we think she is just beautiful!

Looks like she's growing some of her hair back, which will be nice for her in the winter. 

And check out all those layers of clothes on her already! We've been told that her orphanage is already bundling the children up even though the weather is in the 70's sometimes 80's. 

We love this little red jacket she's wearing & it would be wonderful if we can have it when we get her, but we're thinking it's not going to be likely. From the condition of her clothes & her scuffed up shoes, we can only imagine just how many other children in the orphanage have previously worn them. This little red jacket is probably something special they put on Madi to wear just for these photos. 

We've been staring at these photos for a few hours now, & we are just treasuring all of the details we are noticing. On photo number one, she's standing really close by her main caretaker, we're assuming she's going to be the one going with the Director on Sunday when they bring her to us. And it's kinda funny that she's hiding in photo #2, where you can kind of get a glimpse of her smile. Wonder if that's a juice or milk box she's holding. And if you look closely on Madi's pants, you'll notice she's wearing traditional "split pants", to make it convenient for her caretakers to change her diaper ( if she's still wearing one ) or to allow her to squat to do potty. You can read a little more about this here.

And photo number 3 really just breaks our heart. Not sure if you'll see it as close as we can in our photos, but she's got these big tears about to break in each of her eyes. So sad, but we just don't know what that's all about.....maybe she doesn't want to be outside, or look at whomever she's told to look towards to so they can snap her photo. It would have been nice to see her holding the album we sent her which has our photos, but that's ok.....we are still treasuring these. 

Back to her clothes though.....she's got some kind of long number ( kinda looks like a phone number ) across one of her pant legs. Really curious what this is for. Someone mentioned it could be the orphanage number maybe in case she were to wander off? Don't have a clue, but we would be interested to learn about it once we're in China. And after looking closely, we can see that she's actually wearing two sweaters underneath that red jacket, the yellow one & a red one underneath that one & who knows if she's got others shirts underneath those too. We've been told the Chinese are very concerned about keeping the children very warm ( just check out those red cheeks ). 

As far as measurements...she's grown about half an inch & has gained about a pound since September. 

These will be our last pics of her before we travel to get her. Can't wait to see this baby crack a smile!