This I Know

Do you remember when I was telling about the trip home from China and Hope’s trip to the ER in San Francisco, when I said that I made a flying trip from the hospital back to the hotel to pack our bags and searched the room hurriedly, afraid that I would leave something behind? Well, sure enough I did, but we didn’t know it until we had been home almost two weeks.

When we got home we were so exhausted and so involved tending to Hope that we were still looking for small items for two weeks. Everything was scattered. There were some little souvenirs that I bought for the grandkids that I had given up on, and one evening Becky found them. There was one item though that we couldn’t locate and as time went on we realized that most likely it was lost.

It is a little stuffed lamb with windup music to the tune of “Jesus Loves Me”. Becky had bought it for the “little China girl” way back about the time of our approval for adoption. We considered putting it in the “care package” but it was a bit too large. We took it to China with us and it was one of the first toys that Hope played with. She loved to stand beside the bed and wind it up and then press her Mimi mascot’s (2008 Olympics) tummy and get it talking. When she was going to sleep we would wind it two or three times and she was usually out.

As we talked about where it might be, I recalled that I had unpacked it for Hope in the hotel in San Francisco about an hour before we took her to the hospital. I could not remember putting it back in the luggage, but thought surely I would have seen it when I searched the hotel room. We were really sad to think that it was lost. I suggested that Becky call the hotel and ask, just on the long shot that it was there and someone had found it and turned it in.

The next day Becky called me at work and said guess what is on its way home from San Francisco? All it took was a phone call and a credit card number to pay for the shipping. It is a small thing, but once more during our trip, we had been pleasantly surprised by the kindness of strangers in the USA and in China.

Ronnie