Blogging can really be addictive! Reading other blogs is what inspired me to start one myself. When we began the adoption process I began reading the blogs of others who were adopting from China; it was a good way to learn about what we were doing. I obsessed over the the travel blogs of families who were in China to receive their children. Now I mostly keep up with the same set of blogs - most of the families are home, some are still waiting, some are starting their second adoption, and some are in China right now!
How does anyone keep up with this many blogs? You have to use an "aggregator" like bloglines.com to do it. They are simple to setup and use, they let you organize the sites you want to follow and show you which have been updated so you don't have to check them all individually to see what's new. I had a problem figuring out how to put my active bloglines list on here, so I had been using another site which I didn't like as much, this meant that my list here wasn't current.
Well I fixed that problem so The Blogroll Page us up to date with the blogs I'm currently reading.

What do you think?

It's week two of the Double-Happiness photo challenge game. Donna's subject this week is "Reinterpretation of Classic Art". I'm really impressed with the entries so far. If I'm going to keep up I'm going to need some real photo editing software. Yes, I'm working on a Mac, but I work with the REALLY cheap editing software. I think I kind of lucked out this week. I snapped this pic of Kai and Tina this weekend at the pumpkin farm. Serendipity!

Blogging is a great way to let family and friends keep up with us, and has also been an amazing way to connect with other adoptive families. We read a bunch of other blogs too and I want to share a couple of my current favs: The Cady Chase is our online friends Karen & Scott's blog of their journey to their daughter Cadence. They are in China RIGHT NOW so tune in and follow along! The other new blog I've really been enjoying is And Zen What. The writing on this blog is very good and I highly recommend checking it out! While I'm mentioning other blogs, I've added a "blogroll". I don't like sidebar menus that go on forever, so it's on a sub-menu page. Check it out to see some of the other blogs we read.

I've made a few other minor changes to the layout as well: photo albums are now under a sub-menu page, and I've finally added categories to the blog entries. Now if you want to see everything about "Stinky Mouse" you can click on the category heading in the sidebar and see the archive of those related entries.

Blogging that is…
Why exactly am I still writing this thing?
It began a little over a year ago as a way to journal our adoption experience. As we began the process we became connected to other families who were all at different steps along the way of bringing a child into their lives. These connections were forged through Internet discussion forums. There are a lot of these focused specifically on adopting from China. Tina was more active on them than I was at first. The one she got really involved with is our agency’s forum for families adopting Waiting Children. She dabbled around on a few other ones and happened to find a brand new one that a woman named Donna in California had formed. I started reading that one and got hooked. It turned out that Tina and I got to actually meet Donna and her husband Andrew on a trip we took to San Francisco last year. That made our online friendship even stronger. Donna, as well as a number of other online friends, were writing blogs about their adoption experience. As a certified computer nerd (it’s true, I actually have certifications) I felt this was something I had to do as well. So I started journaling the process we were going through.

It took us 9 months to adopt Kai. That’s counting from the date we turned in our application to our agency, to the date we received him in China. This is actually quite speedy, because Kai was a “Waiting Child”. As we checked items off our adoption “to-do” list we obsessed over other adoption blogs. Truly, the highlights of these are the travel stories. We constantly checked TheStoryofYou site, wondering as read how those stories would compare to ours.

I am very glad I made the effort to journal our trip in real-time. It is by far the most interesting part of this site, and an important part of our family history. After we returned home I didn’t want to stop writing, so I kept going.

Now it’s become a full-fledged hobby. When I began, I didn’t really care who looked at this. I also didn’t allow comments. But now I’ve put on all the bells and whistles: RSS feed, commenting, a hit-counter that gives me all kinds of details about who is visiting the site.

I’m still a very small player in the “Chinese Adoption Blogging” world. It amazes me when I see the hit count on some sites – they should start selling ads. It cracked me up when this site got mentioned on one of the really popular sites last week and my site traffic went up by 50%! Yeah, I actually watch that kind of thing. What's even cooler though, is when this thing connects us with someone. An old friend from college got in touch with us through the site. And then we got a comment from somebody in ShijiaZhaung (the city wee stayed in while adopting Kai), this gentleman wrote:

“After wiping away the tears, and due to the lack of a proper PC to trackback to find your names, I just wanted to say a heartfelt thank you for restoring some type of kindness in this world. I am an English teacher in ShijiaZhaung, I have been here for 10 months now, and living here when you were here. My flat is not to far from the Century hotel, so possibly I passed by you on my way to school. I am not sure what drew me to read your blog as I rarely read them, sort of a uninvited guest syndrome. But as I sat there reading it I found that I was touched in ways I had forgotten that I could be touched. Hui Hui, is a very beautiful name and a boy, I surely will pray that he is beyond your wildest dreams. I will continue reading and thank you from the bottom of my heart for touching this mans life.”

That’s the best comment I’ve gotten so far, and is reason enough to keep posting for a while.

Blogging isn’t just writing though, it’s reading too. I keep up with a bunch of blogs. My “Real World” friends are always telling me how great this blog is. I always have to tell them that it only seems that way to them because they don’t read any other adoption blogs. So this will give them something to compare with. These are most of the adoption "related" blogs I regularly follow (but only a VERY SMALL sampling of how many are out there)...

Adoption
American Family
Ashley Rose Ring
Attachment Parenting
Baby Girl Bainbridge
Bringing Liam Home
Brinley Elizabeth WeiYa
China Adoption News
clueless in carolina
Davis Days
Do They Have Salsa in China?
Double Happiness!
EmpressElizabeth
Family of 4 and a cat
The Grouchy Ladybug
Jenna Joy Elizabeth Wells
Journey to Charleigh
keiraxingfulynch
Ken, Ellen and Bei in China
Letters From the Zoo
Loving Lydia
LWB January Trip to China
Macy Day
Mager Madness
Mindful Parenting
Morgan Lela Qian
The Murphy Adoption Adventure
The Naked Ovary
OmegaMom
Once upon a Cadence
Our Adoption Journey
Our Journey for Sarah Grace
Research-China.Org
The Smith Family's Adventures
So, it's come down to this
Spilling my coffee/beans...
TaiwanIndependence's Xanga
The Taming of Tenley!
Twice the Rice
The Vickerman's China Adoption
Watching China

Many of these bloggers keep what's called a "Blogroll" on their site, in which they list all the blogs they follow. I don't do that because I don't want to have to maintain the list, weeding out sites that become extinct, etc. Though I have to admit that I get an ego boost when I see our site on someone's list (it's on a couple). So how does anybody keep up with this many blogs? The only way to do it is a site called BLOGLINES. It keeps track of all the blogs you read and lets you know when they're updated so you don't have to keep checking on them when there's nothing new to read.

So I guess that kind of answers why I'm doing this. If you're enjoying it stop and comment. If you're blogging and I didn't list your site above, please link it in your comment so I can check it out.

I have had mixed feelings about commenting on blogs. Part of me feels that a blog is personal statement, not a dialog. I have always felt that if you wanted to comment on this site you are welcome to email me. If I wanted an online conversation I would post on a forum.

However, lately I have found myself leaving an occasional comment on other blogs and felt that maybe it would be nice to let people comment here if they like.

So If you'd like to post a comment, now you can. Go on, tell me what you think.

If you tune in regularly you have probably noticed the general look of this site has changed a couple times recently. The program I use to create this website is an amazing little tool called RapidWeaver. If you use a Mac and want to publish a blog or a simple website, this is a great program. It's very inexpensive and very easy to use. Creating the custom page headers is a little tricky but I've gotten pretty quick at it. If you are keeping count, this is actually the fourth header to appear on the site.

The dragon graphic in the top right corner is a scan of a painting we had an artist do for us at The Yu Long Friendship Store near The Great Wall just outside of Beijing. The original painting is about 12" x 28" in size. Here's an image of the full painting.

The first three images are the letters: K A I made of birds and flowers. The last image of a flower, dragon, and mountains is a stylized representation of the Chinese character Kai:

We had this painting made the day before we got Kai, and didn't know we'd be calling him Hui-Hui, otherwise we probably would have had his full name painted. Unfortunately the painting took a bit of a beating during our travels and has some creases in it, so we haven't put it up on the wall. I think we will probably be able to get it smoothed out, but it will need to be framed for it to look right. Fortunately it did scan pretty nicely, and I like being able to use the graphic here on the website.

Note: now that it's December all the posts from November have been moved into the monthly archive available for viewing from the menu on the right.