This is the end of NaBloPoMo. Having successfully completed the challenge twice, I don't feel too overdone by it this time. It's a good thing for building the habit of posting. I wonder sometimes why I bother to post, as the site has little focus to it now that both the adoptions are completed. It's mostly just a vanity thing: "A Blog About ME!" I'd like it to be more focused on the issues of trans-racial/international/special-needs/toddler adoption, and while I do consider that to be the underlying theme of why I post, it's hard not to drift off into the daily minutiae of plain old family life and the regular junk of common parenting because that's what our life mostly consists of. And so for today, my last post of NaBloPoMo '07, a post on the regular junk of common parenting and plain old family life:

Family Portraits:
This is something I stress on. Especially now that we're on child number four. Thank goodness for digital cameras, because I don't think we'd have any pictures of Kai and Shen without them. I have tremendous guilt over the wretched imbalance in the documentation of Cam and Ben's early years. Cam was the first born. You should see the Sears photo package we bought of him as a baby. They took us for everything. If they showed it to us we bought it. With Ben: just the basic package thank you.

Now that we're on boy #4 (who is instantly four years old) I stress about getting formal portraits. Add to that the desire to get a family portrait while we still have some slim chance of rounding up the older two, and the pressure is really on! So today we went and did it. We went to Sears. The Premier photo studio for when mediocre is all you can afford. To be fair now, I don't believe Richard Avedon or Annie Leibovitz could have done much better with what we gave them to work with.

The photographer was a nice kid who was very professional in his manner. Cam and Ben were extremely cooperative and very patient with what was at best, a pretty crummy time for a teenager to put up with. Kai and Shen were fidgety and non-cooperative in that annoyingly natural way that children who are just barely four and five years old inevitably are at times like these: "Sit still, look this way, smile, no smile nice, no smile like this, no look this way, no hold still, put your feet here, put your hands down, don't pull your shirt up." Chasing that elusive shot of six people with all their eyes open, facing the same way, looking semi-pleasant. Even with all the studio trappings, it's not far off from wild-life photography.

But we did it! Is it the family portrait I've always dreamed of? Far from it. It would take a multi-day session with both Annie and Richard to produce what I'd really like, but I love this picture We're all in it, our eyes are all open, we're all facing the same way, and I think we're all semi-pleasant looking...

I've made it to the 29th with only complaining once about the regimen of blogging everyday. I didn't manage to stay focused on my main subject the way I hoped, but that's pretty much par for me anyway, so I'm not too disappointed about that. I really haven't thought about what to post at all today. This evening was kind of hectic. We had Chinese language school. Actually Kai and Shen had Chinese language school. Tina and I dropped them off and went to do a little birthday shopping for Shen, as his birthday is on Saturday.
I spent the rest of the evening working on Shen's photo storybook. I'm almost done with it, all I need is a whole family picture for the last page, and we should have that tomorrow as we are scheduled for family portraits at Sears. I'm planning on using Shutterfly for printing the books. You can preview the current draft of Kai's by clicking on the picture below. If you go to the page, click the link for the "Slideshow" they have a great way of showing how the final book should look with animated turning pages.

Remember this? We did this last year with Kai. It seems early to me, but the site seems to be flooded, and I actually picked up on this from someone else again. The boys love watching themselves dance as elves. The site is upgraded this year so you can have more than one elf dancing at a time. Click on the picture above to go to the site and see the Kai and Shen elves dance! Then you can make one for yourself.

**Update** The site was working better a little later so I made one more with all four boys you can watch by CLICKING HERE. We don't like to play favorites with them, but we really feel Cam makes the best elf.

The Sonorous Strings of the Erhu

I love erhu music. I associate it with our adoption travels. Cam got excited about erhu before we travelled to adopt Kai, as he plays violin and the instruments are somewhat similar. So when we were in China an erhu was on our shopping list. We picked out what we think is a relatively nice one. I don't know for sure, as I don't know enough about the erhu to accurately judge the instrument, but it's a pretty one. This erhu is Cameron's, but as he isn't really settled in a place with a spot for it, and isn't actively trying to learn to play it, we get to have it in our living room for now.

This morning on my drive to work I was listening to NPR and there was a story I wanted to hear the rest of, so I went to NPR on my computer to hear it. After I listened to the story, I saw in their list that on "All Things Considered" Robert Siegel interviewed the famous erhuist (is that a word?) Ma XiaoHui. She played a duet with Yo-Yo Ma on the film soundtrack to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It's a very interesting story you can read, hear and see HERE. There are a couple video clips there I highly recommend, especially the one in which she talks about her instrument.

This is a video I found of her on YouTube:

Return to the Homeland

The other interesting story I read online today is from the New York Times Blog "Relative Choices: Adoption and the American Family". Today's entry was "Return to the Homeland", written by 13 year old Jade Nissl who was adopted from China in 1996 and now lives in Boise Idaho. In here essay she describes her experiences on her third trip back to China. It was a very good article.
This blog series in general has received some pretty harsh criticism within the adoption community, both for the writing of some of the contributors, and also for the way dissenting comments appear to have been censored, but I think there have been a few good pieces to come out of it as well. This one was very interesting for me to read.

Yup. Twin six year old boys.
If you believe everything you read.

I really just want to be a part of spreading this rumor as early as possible. I think I'm actually pretty late in the game, as I picked up on it from another blogger I read, and then saw it on a China adoption discussion forum already. So, the first "news" of this showed up HERE. Now if you search Google News for Britney Spears Adoption there are dozens of hits. It's amazing how the news industry works. These articles are all about a rumor that appeared in an online gossip column. There is no verification of the story, just Britney's name in a column with an outrageous claim, and off it goes!

The disconcerting part of it for me is the way it colors how uninformed readers of this "news" view international adoption. My experience leaves me very skeptical that Britney would be eligible in any way. China just instated a whole new set of stricter rules and requirements for prospective adoptive parents. Heck she doesn't even make the age cut-off under the older more lenient rules. You have to be 30, she's only 25. And under the new rules you have to be married at least 5 years. So how could this be possible? But let's say it was, wouldn't you love to read the home-study her social worker wrote?

I'm too tired to blog. The garage is done. Pretty much. There are a few little detail things left, but it has experienced a major overhaul. We replaced the carpeting out there, which really needed replacing a couple years ago. The stuff that was out there was nasty. To do that we had to pretty much empty the wholde space. I made the Goodwill/Dump run which eliminated most of what Tina and I had stashed out there over the course of the painting project. I should have probably tried to sell some of it on Craig's List, but I needed it gone. Then I had to go to the dump again with the old carpet and pick up the new stuff. I managed to catch three of Ben's friends/bandmates passing by over the last two days and sent them home with various belongings. We swept out every nook and cranny, mopped the floor, eliminated years of grime and countless spiders. Ben worked at the ice-rink both yesterday and today, so I only made him help at the end of each day. He complained as he had other places he felt he really needed to be, but now that the project is done he is extremely happy with the results. He rearranged the furniture a bit, changed around the posters on the wall, and has been "chilling" out there all evening. We have been so focused on the little boys since Shen has been home, so it feels really good to be able to do something nice like this for Ben. Here's a few pictures of the final results. I know you can't tell how much work went into it without the "before" pictures, but honestly, it was too embarrassing to post.

I really thought I would get through the garage today. Got about half way. It's deep out there. We don't actually use the space as a garage. It might stay cleaner if we did. We use it as a teen hangout space. We sort of made-over the space about six years ago. We insulated and finished the walls and ceiling, cleaned and painted the floor and layed down rugs, and built a big shed to house the lawnmower and all the other junk we had out there. Then we put some furniture in and gave the space to Cam and Ben. We had an old pool table out there at first, but that soon made way for the garage band gear. Cam plays guitar and Ben is a drummer. We thought the drumming might be a phase at first, but it's not. He's good. And it turns out the drummer's house is almost always the default practice house - too hard to move the kit around. So we have done our best to accommodate them. I'm not sure how many different band iterations have passed through this garage. We've had just about every genre you can think of going out there at one point or another.

There have been a couple girl vocalists involved over the years, but in our world the teen band scene is dominated by boys, and boys are hard on a space. Tina used to say to me, "Have you seen it out there?" My answer is always, "No, I don't go out there." And it's better that way. It's not something I want to see most of the time. But about once a year I round up the rakes and shovels and implements of destruction and dive in. The idea is to return the space to livable conditions. I thought about taking some before and after photos, but... the horror... the horror!

Ben swore that the mess was all Cameron's and when Cam moved out he would keep it clean. And he is better about the occasional straightening up, but over time, bad things happen out there. When I started at it today I wasn't sure if I was cleaning out a music store or a used sporting goods store. There were 10 guitars (about half of those are ours), 2 keyboards (we don't own any keyboards), 5 snowboards, extra bindings, 6 or 7 half assembled skateboards, miscellaneous helmets, gloves, other junk.

On top of all that, Tina and I have been piling our junk out there. We do not have enough room in this house, and stuff piles up fast. I started out thinking I would be able to sort through it all quickly and and make a combination Goodwill/dump run, but the task was beyond me. I did manage to clear out the worst of it and identify a lot of things that could go back to the homes of their owners, but I'm going to be out there again tomorrow.

The payoff for the little boys was that I uncovered the stash of Cam and Ben's Fisher-Price Little People collection. These are the old-school Little People that they don't sell anymore because children can choke on them. Cam and Ben (and Tina and I as well) both survived them so we're willing to risk it with Kai and Shen. Plus a pile of wooden puzzles we had put away a couple years ago because Kai wasn't ready for them. Now, the stupid thing, we let them have them now. We've got two birthdays and Christmas in the next month. This pile would have been more than enough for any of one those events. They were in serious heaven. So now we have all this "new" play fodder in the mix, and the birthdays and Christmas are still coming! The horror... The Horror!

We had a great time at my sister's house yesterday. Kai and Shen did really well. My sister had a bunch of Brio train stuff and books out that were old toys of my 12-year-old nephew Devon, which kept them busy for quite a while. They played and visited with everyone and behaved beautifully all day. They entertained one another, and had an all around good day. My sister has a big black lab that has taken Kai quite a while to get used to, but he had no problem with her at all yesterday. Shen is also quite wary of the dog (gou), but he held his own with her yesterday too.

This is a Kai hanging out with his cousin Devon, who was very sweet with both the boys yesterday. He's a really great cousin to have...


Here's a picture of Nai-nai (Grandma) helping Shen learn to be brave with dogs...


My sister's centerpiece featured a felt turkey head that I can't remember a Thanksgiving without, though I don't recall it being decked out this well before...


My sister wanted to get a family photo for their Christmas cards while we were there, so Mom and I shot a bunch of pictures of them with all three cameras. I'm not sure how many we took. Oh, the joys of trying to get a nice photo with two teenage boys in it! Still I think this one came out pretty nice. Hopefully she won't mind me putting it up here before she gets a chance to send it out, but I just wanted to share what good looking family I've got. Besides I took it with my camera so technically it's my photo...


Today was a pretty quiet day. I managed not to leave the house. Well, not exactly, I did go for a little walk with the little boys in the afternoon, but other than that I was housebound. Quite nice really. My friend Steve from work came over and helped me with a little trim project that resulted from our recent painting project. His skill level let us finish the project pretty quickly which was really nice. Then we played with some magic stuff. I've hardly touched my magic gear since Kai's been home with us so it was fun to get it out and mess around a bit.

Tina did go to the store to get some groceries today, so it's not like we managed to not spend any money, but she didn't do any "shopping" shopping. The boys were pretty wired, I think because we were having a day of pretty much just "down-time" after a big fun social day yesterday. Tomorrow's big plans are to clean out the garage, we'll see how they do with that - not exactly a kid-centered project.

Ah! So much to be thankful for this year. Our family grew again, nothing better than having more people in your life to love. Shen has certainly been a great gift to all of us!

Kai is enjoying his preschool class. Last night he showed me his Turkey-Hat he made, and very carefully explained to me how when he wears it he clenches his fist under his chin and says "gobble gobble". Hard to keep a straight face as he looks very serious when he performs this maneuver.

Very thankful for all our extended family too. Especially my sister Kris, as she is hosting us for Thanksgiving dinner today. My hat is off to all those who are preparing the full meal while parenting preschoolers, and I'm thankful we're not having to do that.

Also thankful for absolutely fabulous weather today. It is clear, crisp and bright outside. Perfect for the one hour drive south to my sister's. We will be listening to Arlo Guthrie on the CD player, as it is our tradition to always hear his "Alice's Restaurant Thanksgiving Day Massacree" on this day. Remember, "You gotta sing loud if you want to end war and stuff!"

Oh my gosh, I almost forgot to post a blog entry today! I've been working on the photo scrapbooks for the boys. Kai's is pretty much done, and now I'm adapting the layout for Shen's book. They are going to be pretty much identical, as that works best right now. It looks like for Christmas we are shopping for two of everything in the same color.

So anyway, today's entry is a YouTube clip that Tina found posted on a Yahoo group and she really wanted me to put it on the blog. Both the boys really liked watching this. Kai must have watched it at least four times...

She without arm, he without leg - ballet - Hand in Hand

Part 2: Shen

We adopted Shen for Kai. That sounds wrong I know, but it is true. We never sat down and drew out a plan to have a family of four boys: two bio-kids two years apart, wait twelve years add two more boys one year apart through adoption. I mean, what kind of plan is that? And besides, I was the "reluctant husband" every time. We started with just one boy, and he was great, and we loved him. But he seemed lonely, and so we decided to make him a sibling. So one of the reasons we had Ben was because we already had Cameron.

Once we found our way to Kai the same thing sort of happened; he was great, we loved him, but he seemed lonely. So we set out to find him a sibling. There were a number of factors we weighed as we started out down the road to Shen. Since Kai is the only child in our family adopted from China, we thought it would be nice for him to have a sibling with that in common, so adopting from China again was the first criteria. We were happy with our experience working with our agency's Waiting Children program, and because of our age, and Kai's, we wanted to adopt a toddler again. We also hoped to find a child with a similar limb difference to Kai's as this would give them both someone close to share this rather uncommon experience/challenge with. Though we know people who have had good experiences adopting "out of birth order" we felt for us it would be better to find a child younger than Kai. As to gender, after three boys, the initial choice was obviously a girl this time, but the more we talked about it the more unrealistic this looked for us. We live in a very small house, and space-wise there is no physical room for a girl, unless we wanted to raise her as a boy.

So, now we had defined our search criteria: boy, under 4 years old, from China, with a limb difference. You'd think that if you get this picky about something it would never happen, but then the universe has a funny way of working sometimes. We started looking at the kids on our agency's current list. The first little boy we were drawn to had an amazing little smile, and we were quite smitten with him, but his file was already under serious review by another family and they decided to adopt him by the time we asked to see his file. In hindsight he was quite a bit younger than we were really looking for, so again, I think the universe was looking out for us there.

And then there was Shen. There were some factors that deterred us at first. He was exactly one year younger than Kai, that was a bit closer in age than we had first imagined(It also meant another December birthday). And the pictures of him didn't project a "I'm a crazy loving kid just waiting to play with you!!" kind of feeling...


These were what we had to go on. And a medical report that rated his IQ at 75. That was qualified by the fact he couldn't complete the tasks requiring two hands, so not a real clear measure to go on. Even more fun, when we had two different local doctors look at his medical report for us they misread it and believed he had hepatitis C. Both doctors cautioned us strongly regarding the impact on our family bringing home a child with this condition would have. Our agency actually arranged with the orphanage to have him retested and it was clear that he was actually negative for hep-C. Having cleared that hurdle, we were starting to feel a commitment to this little guy and decided to move forward with the adoption.

In reality, the "choice" to have any of our children was much more complex than what I've put forward here, but my point is that even in going through the motions of choosing a Waiting Child to adopt you don't really have that much control. Who would have known from the pictures above that the little boy entering our lives would be this guy?

Saturday afternoon I took Kai and Shen to the local children's museum to give Tina some peace and quiet while she worked on painting the living room. The boys love it there, and it's really nice to be able to have an environment where they can play with anything they can reach, especially this time if year when we're housebound so much of the time. Here's a few pictures of them at play...

As you can see they had a really great time. I love the way they play together so well (most of the time) They are really great brothers. But like I said in the header, there was this really horrible moment. Kai had gone off to some other area, and I was watching Shen play by himself in the cafe kitchen. There is a lofted area just to one side of this space and a boy about 6 years old (I'm guessing) looks down over to see Shen, he gets this really weird look on his face and says, "What happened to his arm?" Now this is a very reasonable question for a child this age to ask, so I patiently answered, "Nothing happened to his arm, that's just the way his arm is."
And then he starts into a stream of consciousness roll: "It looks like it got cut off. What happened to his hand? It looks dead. I've never seen anything like that before. It looks smashed. That is really bad." then he turns and shouts to another kid, "Hey come and look at this!" He just kept going and going, and the things he was saying just kept getting worse and worse. I felt like a deer in the headlights, and didn't really know how to respond, and he was saying it all so fast I couldn't really interject. Finally I stood up and went over to the boy and took hold of his arm. "Look," I said, "you are behaving very rudely. You need to go find another area to play in." I know this was not the right way to handle it, but I was really shocked by what he was saying and just wanted to make him shut the ____ up. Shen had no idea the incident even took place. Later I kind of wondered if I should have asked the boy to come over so he could see Shen's hand, and then explained again to him that this is just the way Shen, was born. But I don't want to use Shen as a visual aid for sensitivity training of slow-witted children whose mouths run off faster than their brains process. The boy did seem to sort of snap out of it when I cut him off, and apologized. Makes me realize though, that this is something we are definitely going to have to work on with both Kai and Shen so they have ways to deal with it when confronted with this type of behavior. Their limb differences affect them so little in their daily life, and are simply just a part of them that we don't really even think about it much. Bums me out that it's going to be an issue. Not fun stuff.

This kind of bummed me out. The little Cluster Map widget in my sidebar that shows the red dots based on visits to the site was archived earlier today. I didn't know they did this. I looked at the blog today and all my dots were gone. I clicked through to see what had happened to them and there was an explanatory note saying they do this annually. I guess I didn't read that in the fine print when I set it up. It's a freebie though so I can't really complain about how it works. They explain too, that while users want the number of dots to just keep increasing (I know I do) the maps would end up being just a red smear. They do give you a copy of the little map before it "rolled over" so I have a little souvenir of the hit map for last year. Here's what it looked like this morning...

Page view statistics are one of the most fun parts of blogging for me. Seeing where people are who view the blog, and seeing where they linked from or what they were searching for if they came via Google or another search engine. It's kind of like bird watchers who carefully inventorying the birds they've spotted, or amateur radio operators collecting QSL cards.

I was so proud of all those red dots all over the place. Sure, a bunch of the more exotic locals were hits from odd Google results, but I still count those. At least I've got a hit already from China. I suspect this is from a family we know through our agency who received their daughter in Hefei today. Here's a LINK TO THERE BLOG.

I blog at night. My usual goal is to upload entries before 11:45 PM. But I'm posting early because we have plans tonight.

Yes, PLANS. We're going out. We, Tina and Scott, without any children. We're going out with other adults. It's a real evening out: dinner and a show! Time with other grown-ups away from children! I feel a little guilty for being so excited to get away from them, but this will only be the second time we've managed to get out without kids since we've been home from China with Shen. The other night out was for an early-bird dinner special at a nice restaurant to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary; a two-hour outing. Ben, Cam and Brittni stayed with Kai and Shen for us that evening, and that's the plan for tonight too. So what are doing for our big date? Mexican food and a magic show. Yeah, I know that sounds kind of lame, but I really like magic, and Tina really wants to get out.

We're going out with Steve and Veronica. Steve is a friend of mine from work who has become interested in magic over the last couple years. He and I get together once or twice a month and work on simple sleight of hand. Our wives are indulging us and coming along to see a magic review at the Mount Baker Theatre.

Magic has been a lifelong hobby of mine, I know most of it sucks and is generally lame, but there are some really great performers out there. I'm not talking about David Copperfield or David Blaine, but the creative people behind them who perform in much smaller venues and are known mainly to a sub-culture of magic junkies like myself. Here are some YouTube clips of a couple of the performers on the bill tonight that I am looking forward to seeing...

Tina Lenert


Jason Latimer

We have enrolled Kai in the public school's developmental preschool program. This is what they call the early intervention program, or the special ed preschool. We had real reservations about this, but the decision really came down to his speech delays. He can be very difficult to understand sometimes, even by Tina and me who are with him more than anyone else. So we met with them last spring and got him evaluated. He didn't qualify on speech but they didn't really give him a full evaluation. He did qualify though for "cognitive delays". The teacher is a friend of ours from college and she has been great to work with. She knows we want him there for speech, so she is doing what she can to get him help in that area. Trying to get the speech therapist to work with us however has been much more difficult. Last spring when we met she kept referring to Kai's as an ESL student (English as a Second Language). However, ESL is a classifications for children who are speaking a language other than English in the home. Kai hears only English in the home. She kept saying, "legally he would be considered ESL." After that meeting I said to Tina, "If she says 'Legally' one more time to me I'm going to tell her that if we're discussing a legal issue we should all get our lawyers in here to sort this out."

So today we had a parent-teacher conference. The main teacher (our friend) invited the speech therapist come in to discuss our concerns. Again, her mode was to go over a litany of reasons why Kai isn't eligible to receive services. It was very frustrating, because what we want is a valid assessment to determine where he really stands. I realize that developmentally there is a broad range of what is considered normal for speech development, but if you compare Kai's speech patterns to any other child I know his age he is significantly delayed. Are his delays within range of what's considered normal developmentally? I don't know, that's her job to determine, but she kept coming back to his Chinese language. At one point she pulled out a text book that listed the different sound that are present in English but not in other languages. She pointed out the hard G sound (which Kai can say so it's moot) is not present in Mandarin according to this inventory. I told her that was wrong, the word for dog is "gou" and the word for big brother is "ge ge". She looked at me and pointed to the cover of the book, as if to say sorry, no, not according to the book. He omits the closing sound on most words. "Does Chinese have hard closing sounds?"

I finally stopped her and said, "I feel like no matter what we say here, you are coming back with every reason you can think of to tell us he won't qualify." This finally made her stop and she apologized. Her point is that she doesn't want to label a child incorrectly and that developmental delays are over diagnosed. I can appreciate that, but I really felt that her mode was very confrontational, and very carefully crafted to put us off.

After she left the main teacher actually thanked me for saying what I did. She said it is our job to advocate for our child. I am still hoping things might move forward for Kai in this program, but I am guessing that there will be several more rounds between me and the speech therapist before this is over.

I stared at the computer screen for about an hour tonight and came up with about one and a half sentences I didn't like. So I poked around at the baby books I'm making. My sister emailed me a really nice note yesterday about the cover I posted earlier, so I thought I would put a couple more pages from the inside here for her to see. These are from Kai's book.

.

Part One: Kai

We chose to adopt from China because of the program’s reputation for stability and clear timeline (that timeline began changing rapidly after we made this choice). We were told the program would take roughly a year from beginning to end. I think we also liked the idea of a child coming to us through a sort of random assignment – as that’s the way it works in the non-special needs program. We could express some choice preferences as to gender and relative age and then a baby would be selected for us. The idea of actually picking a child from a list seemed somewhat bizarre to me, but then this is what we ended up doing in both adoptions.

There is a popular saying in the Chinese adoption community that goes like this: "An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but never break.” This is attributed to being “an ancient Chinese belief. My understanding is that the concept of people being destined in this way, joined by this invisible red thread, actually is traditionally related to the marriage of a man and woman to one another, and really has nothing to do with children, or adoption. Still, it is a beautiful notion and I can understand why adoptive parents like it so much. Some people feel it is overly sentimental and glosses over a lot of the real challenges involved in adoption, and while this may be true, I think most people find they fall so easily in love with their adopted children, that it does seem magical.

Again, our children did not come to us through random assignment, we chose them, which is kind of a weird thing when you think about it. There was a list of children we were looking at. It’s easy to compare the process to shopping, and I know that some parents to scour many many lists looking for something very specific in a child. This is not what our experience was like. We had an agency we were working with already, and at first we were looking at their Waiting Children lists out of curiosity. And then we saw Kai. The name the agency labeled him with was “Hunter”. I can remember a few of the other children on that list, as we know their families now through online connections, but I don’t remember really considering any of them seriously for our family. It was like love at first sight. We “knew” he was our child. Tina likes to say he chose us, and while that’s not the way it truly happened, it did kind of seem that way. And once we committed to him we felt as strongly about that commitment as we did with our two biological children.

Today Tina got a phone call from Kai's preschool teacher, "Teacher Tammy". This isn't too uncommon, as she's called a few times to share things about Kai's experiences at school. There are only nine children in the class, so she is able to call all the families from time to time. Tammy is an old friend of Tina's and mine who we have known since our college days; she is probably the main reason we have Kai in the program. She is very candid with us, and also very supportive of Kai.

She called today to tell us about what Kai had shared in class. They are doing a unit on Thanksgiving (naturally), so today they talked about the things they are thankful for. When it was Kai's turn, he said he was thankful for his brother Ben, his mommy and daddy, and for Shen and Cameron. (Actually, she wasn't sure what the last name was he said, as he has a hard time pronouncing "Cameron" in a way that would be clear to someone who wasn't sure of what he was saying, and I think he probably was saying Cameron and Brittni.) Is there anything that could possibly be sweeter?

This is Kai's first school portrait. He looks so grown up I can hardly believe this is the same little boy we met in Baoding just over two years ago...

I haven't written on here about the changes we made a couple weeks ago with Kai and Shen's preschool arrangements. We have been active for years in our community's parent-cooperative preschool program. The program is facilitated by the local community college and we were instrumental in starting a new cooperative when Cameron was three years old. Later Tina took the job of teaching at the preschool and we had Kai in class with her four mornings a week last year. Knowing we would have Shen home this fall, Tina resigned her position as teacher, but we kept Kai enrolled in the Tuesday/Thursday program and Tina stayed with him and brought Shen as a "tag-a-long".

We then enrolled Kai in the public school's "developmental" preschool program on Monday/Wednesday/Friday. This seemed like a good arrangement at first, but as time went on we decided Kai really needed the consistency of being in only one program. While we love the co-op, we felt the public school program offered more specific help in the areas Kai really needs to work on. So now Kai goes there all five day (the program is only two hours a day) the consistency of this is really good for him and it means he is there on the day the speech therapist is there, who he really needs to spend time with. It also means that Shen is home with Tina, one on one, for a couple hours each day, and this is much more valuable for him right now than a group preschool setting.

Okay, I've kind of let the whole monthly theme slide. Instead of writing in the evenings I've been working on a "digital scrapbook" project for Kai and Shen. The idea is to make sort of a little story book about their adoption for each one of them.

We have a number of little photo albums for each one of them that are out all the time, but they're not really put together in any formal way. We have the blogs for both of them, and video for Kai (Shen's is coming), but they don't have regular access to these. So the idea is to give them a little book they can look at when ever they want. These aren't going to be traditional baby-books, or the kind of formal "life-book" we will eventually make for them, but something simpler they can carry around and enjoy now.

It's amazing what you can get printed now. I'm looking at Shutterfly's options for printing scrapbooks, because I like the "full-bleed" option. I'm using a new program called iScrapbook that makes it pretty easy to put together simple layouts.

This is the cover for Kai's book. Shen's will be identical as that seems the best solution to much of the sibling rivalry we're currently experiencing. I am doing 20 8"x8" pages (10 double sided pages) for each of them, and have 16 done in Kai's book so far. Again, Shen book will be basically identical, so once I get the first one done, I will just have to change the pictures and a few other minor things. Kai has picked up that I am working on this, but I am trying not to let him see it. I want it to be a surprise for Christmas.

Shen got a hold of the good camera the other day and managed to snap off a number of pictures before I could retrieve it from him. The camera pretty big, and definitely configured to use with your right hand. As he is very small and has no right hand this makes it pretty challenging for him to use. Most of his shots are of the floor, but he clicked off this series of Kai at extremely close range (I think Kai was trying to get the camera to use himself). Tina doesn't care for them too much, and they don't really represent Kai's general look very well. The room was well lit, but the flash on the close subject blacked out everything behind him, that and the odd angles give them a dreamlike quality that I find captivating for some reason.

I made it to post #10 before complaining about the daily blogging regimen. I really thought it would be much easier this year, but this was a tough week. I've got a couple other projects I've started that are taking a lot of time, and I'm enjoying them more than this right now. On top of that I was on "Pager Duty" at work this last week and I ended up getting pages 4 days in a row at about 5:00 AM. I don't usually start writing my blog entries before 9:00 PM and this week I was up till midnight almost every night (it's 11:12 PM right now). And on top of this, Tina decided that it was time to paint the interior of our house. Actually just our living-room/dining-room area and two hallways. Events like this make me thankful, thankful, thankful that our house is under 1200 square feet.

So the painting plan is to change the colors from greens to yellows and reds (though now it looks like the red might end up purple). The real killer here is that once we started it became very apparent that the ceiling was going to have to be painted. We have one of those awful popcorn ceilings which I have always wanted to scrape off and have retextured, but there is just no way to do that and live in the house at the same time, so I finally caved in and consented to painting it. I am really happy to say that it looks great because the process of painting a ceiling is AWFUL!

Another blessing for me is that Tina really enjoys painting, which means that it's pretty easy for me to get out of most of the brush and roller work, except I did end up doing a lot of the ceiling today. And of course, nothing makes a painting project more fun than having a couple pre-schoolers in the house while you're doing it.

Here are some pictures of the state of the house today...

Here are Kai and Shen "helping" us move stuff out of the way and drape stuff...


This is wrecked dining area where we piled stuff out of the way. It's already painted so you can see the yellows we're using. The facing wall is the darker shade and you can kind of see the lighter one on the left, though it's actually much lighter than you can tell in this picture.


this is a picture of corner where you can kind of see the shades we're painting over. The darker shade is called "Chateau Moss" which is way too appropriate name for our house. The lighter shade is called "Lemon Smoke" and looks brighter in this picture than it really is, though you can get a pretty good idea of its shade against the white ceiling. The yellow wall above used to be the dark green color. I read somewhere that in this climate you should use warm colors not earthy green tones, and though I have always liked the greens, I'm glad to see them go. When Cam and Brittni came to dinner earlier this week, Cam looked at the yellow and said, "fourth grade?" He was referencing the Waldorf school's color schemes, as each grade at the school has a specific color it is supposed to be painted. Actually, third grade is yellow, and fourth grade is green, so we're moving back a grade.


And now, a product endorsement. This stuff is great! The container accommodates a full size roller and has a grate inside it for rolling off excess paint - no having to pour into trays to roll!. It also goes on pink so you can see where you've painted, then it dries bright white. Very nice stuff to work with.


And now my post is finished and it's only 11:50 PM. Made it.

One of my favorite blog writers has a recent set of entries in which he discusses his families choice regarding exploring their adopted children's past. They have chosen not to really pursue this much, and put forward some very good reasons why. His focus is on the future and where he and his family are headed, and really, that is what life is about. To be honest, I'm not much of a family genealogy guy. I was born in New Jersey, but have lived in Washington state for nearly all my life. I don't ever really think about going back and seeing the town I was born in, or if the house my family lived in then is still standing. But I don't really have to. I have an Aunt on my mother's side who has researched their family tree back about as far as you can go. My father has become very involved in genealogy as well, and I know he has all kinds of information on that side of my family. I did actually Google around on the genealogy sites one afternoon and quite quickly found photographs of my great-great grandfather in his civil war uniform. I have photo albums with pictures of the home where I was born, as well as old home movies transferred to VHS I can watch if I want as well. With virtually no interest in this stuff, I know all kinds of stuff about where my ancestors came from what they did.

I know I can't give this kind of information to Kai and Shen regarding their birth-family, and for all I know they might not care a bit. I have a friend at work who was adopted as an infant and he says he really has no interest in finding his birth family. He's in his mid-thirties with a wife and kids of his own, and is clearly focused on looking forward not back. Again though, if he wanted to, he could probably find out quite a bit with a little work, and maybe knowing this lets him ignore this facet of his life more easily; just as my easy access to my family history enables me to pretty much ignore it.

For Kai and Shen there's a lot more to it, and like I said before, perhaps they will not be interested at all in this stuff. I think I could sleep better at night if I dug and dug for all the information I could get them and they didn't look twice at it, than if I did nothing and they came to me one day and asked why.

(My monthly plan of posting on one continuous topic is not panning out too well. I think it's best at this point if I shoot for every other day)

A friend from my work gave us his old Tivo box several months ago and I must say, I love this thing. I don't think I've watched live broadcast TV since we've had it. We subscribe to the bare minimum number of cable channels you can possibly get, so being able to time-shift programs has really expanded (and improved) our viewing options.

Even more fun right now with the Tivo box, is that they have added the Rhapsody music service to the options. They launched the program with a 30 day free trial so we've been playing with it quite a bit. Actually, right now the service seems a bit buggy, so I think this "free" period is their way of beta testing the system, and it does need some work. But for free I don't have too many complaints. There are over 4 million tracks on the system that are easy to search and it makes recommendations based on what you play. It has theme channels that are like radio without commercials and it's amazing! Cam and Ben have shown us new music that we've been enjoying, and we've been playing old stuff from our vinyl collection that died years ago with our turntable.

There's a Children's channel we play a lot during the day for Kai and Shen that plays some really good stuff besides the standard Raffi. An old favorite of ours we've been playing for the boys is Peter Paul and Mommy

This is a great children's album that is very listen-able even for adults (well, for adults who like the kind of music I enjoy anyway). So, the Tivo is now a great way to NOT watch TV at all!

I remember back about the time we really got going in earnest with “this whole adoption thing” that there was a sudden media surge regarding adopting from China. Maybe this was one of these things where you see what you’re looking for, and it was just that I was more attuned to media stories about this, but I don’t think so. The event I remember most clearly was Oprah having Lisa Ling on as a guest and discussing her National Geographic documentary “China’s Lost Girls”. I looked this up to confirm, and it was the beginning of December 2004 when this segment first aired. Tina and I watched this episode together, and later bought a copy of “China’s Lost Girls” on DVD. It was very influential in forming my original thoughts and opinions regarding adoption from China. I pictured us as one of those couples traveling in a large group, being herded into a conference room and having our name called out then handed a baby girl. It seems a strange fantasy now, and one that I am glad never actually happened.

As December rolled on, Tina started spending more and more time on her computer, getting involved in different online adoption forums and Yahoo Groups. I just sort of watched this activity from the sidelines at first. She would show me various posts and discussions, but I didn’t belong to any of these groups myself. It appeared to me at the time (and still does really) to be a woman’s thing. Even blogging like this, in the adoption community, is really done almost exclusively by women. Of the sixty or so adoption related blogs I subscribe to, about three of them are written by men. So I started out just sort of peeking over Tina’s shoulder.

Then Tina seemed to take quite an interest in our agency’s Waiting Children list. She seemed to be constantly showing me pictures of these little kids with various special needs. It really didn’t mean much to me at first. I understood Tina was curious about the program, and had a soft spot in her heart for these little ones, but I couldn’t picture any of them as being “ours”. I would look at them and nod politely, but I didn’t feel any pull there. This went on for some time, and I actually found it to be a bit annoying. “Yes, I get it, there are all these kids out there waiting for homes. But we’ve got lots of work to do to get our dossier completed and logged in, and then the CCAA will send us a referral, and that will be our little girl, and that is all going to take about a year, so looking at all these pictures of waiting kids just doesn’t mean anything to me!”

And then she showed me some pictures of a little boy. Here, let me show you one…

And she told me how this little boy had been waiting on this list for quite a while. In fact, almost all the other kids on this list had already been chosen by other families, and a new list was coming out soon. Kids with much more severe special needs were picked instead of him. And I was just sort of shocked, but then I learned this is pretty typical for boys in the adoption world. They are less desirable. Which is just so crazy to me, because this is the whole problem for baby girls in China, and why they are so readily available for international adoption there. In China boys are wanted more, unless they have special needs, then they are wanted even less, and that’s true for these little guys even if they make it onto a Waiting Children list with an adoption agency in the U.S.

So I’m looking at these pictures of this beautiful little boy that no one seems to want, and I start to question just exactly what it is we’re doing. We’re going to bring an infant girl into a house with two teenage boys. How exactly is that supposed to work? Have you looked through the leftover toys that have survived them? I can tell you none of it’s pink. And diapers? And formula? And all that stuff? I’m 43 years old, how much more of that do I really want? And suddenly I’m the one who is advocating for a two-year-old little boy.

(another break from my narrative today -- Back on topic tomorrow...)

The New York Times has a new blog linked from their Opinion page: "Relative Choices: Adoption and the American Family - A new blog by adoptive parents and children.
In the first post, journalist Jeff Gammage tracks down the man who found his daughter on a street in China."

I read through the first article today and was really moved by it. Then I read through all the comments which I found even more interesting, most of them were of the "What a great story/It made me cry" variety, but there were some other very opinionated viewpoints put forward as well. It's funny, some of the contrasting viewpoints that always come up around adoption. There was the obligitory, "Why do people adopt from other countries when there are so many kids right here in America's foster care system in need of homes?" And of course the great retort to this, "I don't ask parents of biological kids why they procreated instead of adopting kids from the foster care system so you should just shut up!" (I'm paraphrasing here a bit). But even more interesting to me were the comments by adoptive parents and adoptees themselves who questioned the value of pursuing information about a child's roots.

Tina and I have been talking about this lately in regards to Kai and Shen. We have fragments of information about both their pasts, but there are huge "blank spots". As to their lives in the S.W.I.'s, we have lots of photos, and were able to visit both of them. Consequently both boys have lots of pictures and video of themselves there, so they have a connection to at least a bit of this part of their lives. For Kai, who has been home longer, his past has taken on a bit of a fairy tale quality in his mind. He talks of when he was "Baby Kai in China". He talks about his nanny, Chin-yen, who took care of him, but he has never asked about his birth-mother, or how he came to the S.W.I. Now obviously this is because we have not talked about this with him yet, and I must admit I'm a bit stumped still as to how this conversation will start.

Chronologically (as best as we know) Kai is almost five years old. One would think a child this age would start to have questions about where they came from and some information, even if it's just the acknowledgment of more blank spaces would have come up by now, but it hasn't. He's only been with us two years, and he has some pretty big developmental "blank spots" he's dealing with.

So how to discuss birth families is currently on our list of things we're actively working on. It's pretty clear though, that the information we'll be able to give Kai and Shen will only be of a general nature at this point, as that is all we have. We have some pretty big regrets right now about questions we failed to ask when we were in China to adopt Shen. Looking back now I keep asking myself, "why didn't we ask this?" or "why didn't we go here?" In reality though we were dealing with so much on that trip it's amazing what we did accomplish. One thing we did come away with from this last trip however, was the realization that traveling to China is not that big of a deal. As my regrets over unasked questions mounted, I realized that the simple answer to the problem is to just go back and ask the questions. And that the easiest way to help the boys form a connection to their birth country is to let them visit there as much as possible, and that is what we hope to do.

In the meantime we have also established email contact with Kai's S.W.I. and hope to do so with Shen's as well. There is also snail-mail for sending photos and we can maintain contact this way too. And we continue to look at photos and videos with the boys and talk about what we do know. And I may also be a bit guilty of indulging their imaginations and fantasies of what might have been...

Last weekend Kai needed a nap. We had been out running errands and Shen fell asleep in the car. I carried him in and laid him out on the couch. Kai was fussing and complaining and we told him it was nap time. He began to whine and cry, "I don't need a naaap!!!" Unfortunately for him, it's a standing house rule: You Cannot Cry Your Way Out of a Nap. I took him to their bedroom and offered to read him a story, but he continued to cry even louder, so I laid down on the bed with him and held him. I offered to tell him a story "from my head", but he refused and kept crying. How about a Little Red Squirrel Story (a favorite Baba tale) "No", he cried. "How about The Story of Kai, Shen and the Dragon?" "Noooo!" again. "How about a Baby-Kai in China Story?" he suddenly went quiet, "yes" he said. So I quietly whispered to him about how when he was a little baby he lived in Baoding, and his nanny Chin-yen loved and took care of him. Now that's really all I have to work with, so I picked up a fragment Kai had woven himself when we were in Xi'an. We had seen a street vendor selling giant caged crickets. Kai was fascinated by them and said that one of them was his friend when he was a baby. So I told him how when he lived in China he had a little pet cricket he had caught and held in his hands. He was fascinated by this and asked me a string of questions about the cricket before falling asleep. After his nap he told an expanded version of the story to Tina, so it looks like for now anyway, a little imaginary cricket is helping to fill one of Kai's blank spots.

A couple weeks later we went to the Adoption Faire. It was really quite interesting, there were a bunch of different agencies there and they held a couple different panel discussions with adoptive families. We went there pretty much thinking we would be working with WACAP, the agency who had hosted the event we attended earlier. I still have immense respect for WACAP as an agency and believe we would have been very happy working with them, but it didn’t turn out that way. As we were visiting with the various agencies and discussed their programs we met with representatives from a local agency called Children’s House International. Neither Tina nor I were aware of them before this meeting. I remember discussing them with Tina as we left the event. She was very taken with them for a number of reasons: they were local, they weren’t too big, and most interesting, they didn’t make people in their China program travel in large groups. I was unconvinced at first, I felt more confident in what I knew about WACAP, and I kind of liked the idea of a travel group. Tina finally convinced me though that this was the agency we wanted to work with.

It’s interesting now, in a way, that decision was one of the most important ones we could have possibly made, for it is the one that ultimately led us to our two youngest sons. Had we gone with any other agency we would almost certainly never have seen their files. Both Kai and Shen were “Waiting Children”. This means that because they both have a special need and were slightly older, the China Center for Adoption Affairs (China’s government agency which oversees all adoptions) put them on a list of children that is sent to a specific agency to try and find a family for them. In Kai and Shen’s case, they were put on a list that was sent to CHI.

Now back then, back in November 2004, we weren’t looking for little boys, and we weren’t looking for children with special needs or who were slightly older. I, more than Tina, felt particularly strongly about this. I clearly remember the night we filled out our agency application. They ask you to be as specific as possible in stating what sort of child you want to adopt. The standard accepted language in the China adoption community is as follows: “healthy infant girl, as young as possible”. There’s even an acronym: HIGAYAP. And I was fairly adamant that this was what I wanted written on our application. I had a number of reasons for this: first, we had two biological sons, this was one of the main reasons we were adopting from China in the first place, so we should put "girl" on the application. As to special needs, or older children, I did not want to endanger our pre-existing commitment to our two biological children, and I didn’t want to take on something that would disrupt this. I was also very concerned about Reactive Attachment Disorder so I thought it was important we try to adopt a child as young as possible. So that is what we wrote on the application.

In my Friday post I talked about Tina’s and my background in relation to adoption and some of what shaped our attitudes towards it. In reality, we only really thought about adoption from the perspective of the adopting family. Thoughts about birthparents and their relationship to the child weren’t really weighed heavily by us. Nor did we really discuss the inherent loss that is inextricably a part of adoption. Though all of our adopted family members and relatives were adopted domestically, none of them (at that point in time) had been in contact with their biological families. I think because of that, neither of us really thought too much about these relationships.

When I was in college I worked a couple summers for a family that made and marketed wooden toys. They had two children, a boy adopted domestically, and girl adopted from Korea. Adopting from Korea had become very popular in the late 70’s, and international adoption in general was becoming more mainstream.

So a few years after we had our two biological sons, we began to discuss the idea of adoption. I think that the media’s focus on the negative aspects of domestic adoption influenced us to a degree as we first started to think about this. If one were to base their impression of domestic adoption based on mass-media you would have to assume it’s almost impossible without battling a birthmother who has changed her mind, and that was an issue for us. In hindsight I realize now that this rarely happens in domestic adoptions, and that it was not a realistic reason to look overseas, but it was a factor in our decision at the time.

Then along about the time when Cam and Ben were four and six Tina showed me an ad in the paper for an informational meeting on adopting from China. I remember going to a church and watching a video presentation and listening to some couples discuss their experiences. It was fascinating, but in the end, we decided we weren’t really ready to expand our family then. And then the idea just seemed to fade away, we didn’t really discuss if for a long time.

Tina insists that it was me who brought it back up again. I truly don’t remember this, but I do know that we began the discussion again in earnest a little over three years ago. Knowing what I know now, having completed two international adoptions, and being somewhat actively involved in the online adoption community, I realize how little we really understood what we were doing back then.

We started out pretty much just thinking about China. In terms of numbers, China is far and away the most popular country for international adoptions, and I think we felt some safety in that fact. Also, we were interested in adopting a girl as we already had two boys, again, the China program was well known for its large number of available infant girls. Then there was a sort of coincidental experience when we were visiting with Tina’s dad. We went out for lunch at a Chinese restaurant with him near his home, and he told us about meeting a family there who had several children adopted from China. He was quite impressed by this, and went on and on about it. I remember Tina and I looking at each other as told us this story. We had recently had a number of conversations about it, and this little anecdote shared by her father seemed to make the idea become concrete.

We started talking more, and a few months later, it was November, National Adoption Month. An ad appeared in the newspaper for an informational meeting on international adoption, and again, the two of us went to a church on a Saturday afternoon. I remember feeling as entered into the building, that we were already committed to the plan. This tends to be the way I approach things: I buy into the big concept, and then work out the details later. I didn’t need to do a lot of research to commit to adoption, but I did need more information before committing to an agency. The “meeting” we went to was for an agency called WACAP. It actually was pretty informal. A couple who had adopted two daughters, one from China and one from Russia were acting as liaisons for the agency. They had a video they played, and then shared their stories. Tina and I ended up being the only people in attendance, so it was very informal and we were able to have a very candid and conversation with them. We left that meeting feeling more confidant in the idea of adopting from China, and quite positive about WACAP. They told us there was another event, an “Adoption Faire” to be hosted at the same location in a couple weeks where there would be representatives from a number of agencies. We decided on the spot that we would definitely attend that event.

Day three of NaBloPoMo and I'm already off topic. I did say I would probably post some regular family event type posts, so it's not like this is to be unexpected, and besides November is also National Adoption Month. One of the things our adoption agency (Children's House International) does to celebrate this is to host an "open house" event for families. We always enjoy these events: getting to see all the "new" little kids who have just come home, and getting to catch up with families we've come to know over the last several years. The boys had a great time - even though it was a pretty wet day, we gathered in a gym at a local park so there was lots of room to run, there were craft projects, and lots of ride-on toys to zoom around on. A very special part of the day was that Shen got to play with Lana (they're together in the center-right picture) who he lived with at the CWI in Xi'an. It was really great to see the two of them together.

Another interesting person we got to meet is the young man in the lower left picture. His name is John and he volunteered to help out at today's gathering. John is 22 years old and a student at Western. He also was adopted from China when he was 10 years old, and like Kai and Shen, has a limb difference affecting one of his hands. It was so great to meet him, he has a very positive attitude and is very excited about working with Children's House. Meeting a young man like this, who is in college, seeing him play with the young kids, and visiting confidently with the adults was very encouraging as we look forward and try to imagine what Kai and Shen might be like when they are his age. We hope that we can continue to get to know him better.

To really talk about our adoption experience I need to go back quite a ways. What first led us to this path? Well, adoption had actually been part of Tina’s and my “family plan” for as long as I can remember. When we first married, 25 years ago, and talked about having children I felt very strongly about over population at the time (that sounds funny to me now, but it’s true) and felt that if we wanted more than two children we should adopt. I remember China’s One Child policy (actually known in China as the “Planned Birth Policy” ) had been in force for just a couple years back then, and I thought about it quite a bit.

Besides that, adoption was already a part of both our families: Tina has two siblings who were adopted, and I have 5 cousins through adoption (distributed among three families on my mother’s side). I can distinctly remember the adoption of each of them. I remember when one of my aunts and uncles came to stay with our family when they adopted their second child. I was very young at the time and the event impressed me very much. I believe it impressed my mom too, as it wasn’t long after that when my parents began discussing the idea of adopting a child themselves. They ended up not adopting, but they considered it seriously enough to present the idea to me and my brother and sister. These experiences growing up made adoption a regular part of family life for Tina and me, and something that we both considered a normal and common way to grow a family.

All that said, we then went on to have two "biological" kids, and for a long while felt that we were done adding children to our family. But as you already know, that’s not how things ended...

Yes friends, it's that time of year again! November is National Blog Posting Month. This is the event that dragged Stinky Mouse out of retirement last year and set us on the path of regular posts.

NaBloPoMo is a challenge to post a new blog entry every day. i learned about it last year on one of the blogs I read regularly, and decided to try and see if I could do it. I have to admit it was challenging at times. My regular posting schedule (when we're not in China) is only about once or twice a week usually. I have decided to use this year's event as a writing exercise. I want to go back and review our experience of adopting from China; what brought us to this decision, and what we've learned along the journey. I feel like the blog entries I've written along the way have been a good journal on the surface, but I want to look at things more deeply and try to explore our experience on more levels. I plan on retelling our experiences with a bit more perspective and analysis.

I have read a lot of other blogs by people adopting from China, and I have learned a lot from them. Sometimes I find myself agreeing strongly with certain bloggers, other times feeling strongly opposed to the same person's ideas. I have a lot of thoughts of my own and I want to try to express some of them this month. This will be, for the most part, one continuous piece of writing composed over the next thirty days. I will probably interrupt it with posts of our daily life, but I plan on writing about this subject every day for the whole month.