THE ROBERTSON FAMILY STORY

Our journey to adopt our precious daughter began long ago. We first considered adopting from China around 15 years ago but what with one thing and another we didn’t proceed with any great seriousness until many years later.

After an incredible trek through remote areas in southern China in 2000 we came home and decided to pursue adoption from China with renewed vigour. Visiting China had changed our minds and lives forever.

After much discussion and research we approached social work to begin the process in November 2003 and after a long and stressful process our papers finally winged their way from the UK to Beijing in July 2005. Little did we know that our daughter was being born halfway across the world at the exactly the same time. We waited almost a full year until the end of June 2006 before receiving our referral information. Wan Jin Dao was just approaching her first birthday on referral and was 13 months old by the time we met her and fell in love in August 2006.

She had waited for us in Wanzai exactly as long as we had waited for her back home in Scotland.
We arrived in Nanchang at around 2pm on Sunday 27th August and at 5pm our daughter was placed in our arms in the Civil Affairs Office in central Nanchang.

Jiangxi is often called ‘the furnace of China’ and I now know why! The heat was incredibly intense and Dao Dao, as she was called by her foster granny and SWI staff, came to us wearing a very worn blue and white stripy body suit and nothing else. She was hot and sticky after the long minibus journey from Wanzai to Nanchang. The bus had broken down on the way and the babies had had nothing to eat or drink since mid morning.

To make matters worse our luggage had been lost between Beijing and Nanchang so we had nothing to give her.

Once all the formalities were completed I took Dao Dao back to our hotel while my husband and our guide went shopping in Wal Mart for bottles, milk and nappies etc to keep us going until our own things arrived the next day.

It took some time for Dao Dao to settle and drink something that afternoon but we bonded very quickly and all the stresses and strains of the long, long wait melted away as I held her in my arms and walked up and down the hotel corridor quietly singing nursery rhymes in her tiny ear that evening.

Our time in China felt like a bubble in time and space. It was incredibly important to be removed from the worries of everyday life back home for that short period of time. All we had to do was look after our daughter and get to know one another. Nothing else mattered.

Dao Dao was very happy from the start and settled into a routine much quicker than we had hoped for. She ate and slept well and quickly attached herself to both of us. She was wary of her new dad for a while but by the time we came home they had ‘clicked’ and she is now very definitely a ‘daddy’s girl’!

Back home in Scotland Maisie Dao Dao, as she is now called, has flourished and everyone who meets her falls under her charm. It’s wonderful to hear her little Scottish accent develop and to watch her race around without a care in the world.

I often wonder what her life would be like if she had been able to remain with her birth family in China. What would she be doing, where would she be living? Things would be very different – for her and for us that much I do know.

She is a perfect match for our family and is much loved by her big sister and all our extended family and friends.

I can’t imagine life without our beloved Maisie Dao Dao and can no longer remember life before she came along! In the two and a half years she has been with us she has transformed our lives beyond recognition. I had no idea what this little skinny scrap of life was going to do to my mind and heart when I first saw her but each day thank God for the blessing she has been to us so far.

Marion & Bruce Robertson