Growing Snowflowers

Where do babies come from?...cont.



This is the first photo we have of Piper. It comes from a small rural newspaper in her province called "Southern Farmer's Daily', it was published on March 5, 2005. So, in the world of guesses that we live in, Piper is under 2 months old in this photo, it is the only photo we have of her before her referral pictures which were taken at five months of age. We understand by the translation of the advertisement that Piper was found when she was just three days old, in a town several hours away from the SWI where she spent the first nine and a half months of her life.



The faces of children filled the bottom half of the page...each assigned a number, a description of where they had been found. We are lucky enough to know of six other babies on this page that found forever families the same day that Piper found us.

With the help of Brian Stuy at research-China.org we were able to get not only a color photo of Piper's 'finding ad' but the actual newspaper that it was published in. It is a thin thread to her past, but it is one. This month Brian is in China, in Qujiang, and the surrounding areas, he is working on a mini project to find out as much as he can about our children's finding places, with hopes of locating the person who came across Piper, and maybe, and it's a wildly hopeful maybe, find out if she was left with a note? We don't ask for ourselves, we ask for a beautiful toddler who will grow into a beautiful child, who will have questions. We cannot answer many of them, but we can give her the small threads that we have stowed someplace safe.