Happy 1st Birthday!!

Today is Ellie's first birthday. I was hoping that we would be in China with her on her big day, but we know adoption well enough now to not be too surprised by the delays. We will see her soon, and, I believe, meet her at the right time. We celebrated her birthday last night (a night early since John has to work late tonight) for two reasons: first, we wish she were here and wanted to mark her birthday; and second, so we can show her the pictures later. So we can show her how excited we all were for her to come home. To show her that she did have a first birthday party.

I have reluctantly become an avid record-keeper and photographer in the last few years. John will attest to the fact that I used to resist stopping 'the flow of the moment' to break out the camcorder or camera. But I now realize how important it is to preserve these memories for all of our kids, but especially for my adopted children. When there is such a dramatic break from the past, as there is for kids adopted internationally, pictures and mementos become that much more significant. The pictures that I have of Nicholas from when he lived in China and from our time together there mean so much to him. He studies them intently and asks lots of questions. It's like he is trying to remember, or perhaps trying to hold on to the memories. While I believe international adoption is wonderful in a lot of ways, there is also something fundamentally sad about it: children have experienced a lot of loss - loss of loved ones, loss of familiarity, and loss of homeland.

For this reason, I will cherish every photo we receive of Ellie's life in China, which unfortunately, will be very few. And I will try to make up for the lack of baby pictures with as many pictures as I can possibly take myself. I chose to focus today not on her absence at her own 1st birthday party, but on how blessed I am to be the one behind the camera in all the days to come: her first Christmas home, her first day of school, the ballet recital.

In My Heart

My good friend Zoe, who in a former life was a teacher, recommended the book "In My Heart," by Molly Bang. I loved it immediately because it depicts an interracial family, yet the book is not about race at all. It's about love.

We have been wondering if Peter, our 3 year old, really gets that he is soon to be an older brother. We remember that when we were in the midst of our wait for Nicholas, Olivia, who was then 2, was SO into it. She told anyone who happened to walk past us in the street that she was waiting for her little brother from China. She drew pictures about him. She asked us all about China. And now, like Olivia, Nicholas is very excited about his new sibling (and it is bringing up a lot of adoption talk, which is a good thing), but Peter, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be. It's not like he is unhappy; he just doesn't seem to care. Or get it. He just wants to play superheroes and eat jelly sandwiches.

That is why last night, after reading the book to the above-mentioned book to the kids, I was so surprised by Peter's remark. I asked him, "Peter, who is in your heart?" And he said, "Ellie, my sister. She is far away. But I love her." Just so matter-of-fact. So adorable.

Why We Decided to Adopt, Part 3: Nicholas!

This is the first picture I saw of my sweet boy, Nicholas. Before this, we had decided we wanted to adopt a little girl. We were drawn to China (for a lot of reasons -- that should be another post...) and since 95% of adoptions from China are girls, it seemed the logical choice. Also, I was used to girls: I had Olivia already and I am one of 2 girls. I was always a girly-girl and felt more comfortable with girls and women. Luckily, John didn't have a preference one way or the other, so it was an easy decision. Until I saw this picture. It totally captivated me. I don't know why exactly. I mean, he is cute, but it was more than that. Many of other Chinese children whose faces are posted on agency "waiting child" lists were adorable, too. But this picture caught my eye. The English name that the agency had given him was Nicholas, the very name John and I had always said we would name our son if we had one. And, his birthday? The due date for the baby I had just lost.

After losing our baby in 2005, we knew adoption was the right things for us. But, I hate to say that our loss and our genetic predisposition to having a sick child is "The Reason" we adopted. I know many people who also carry CF along with their spouse, or who carry other diseases, who took other routes to having children. Adoption is not for everyone, but it was perfect for us. It was one of the few decisions in life that John and I agreed on without much discussion, and that we both say gave us a feeling of peace immediately.

One blessing that came out of our loss was that John and I had to give a lot of thought to what it means to parent a child with a medical need. We talked a lot about what we could handle, how we would handle it, and how our marriage would change because of it. We got to see how we would work as a couple through a crisis; how we would work with doctors and medical procedures, and with grief. In a strange way, all of this clarified what was important to us, and it was not our busy, material-filled lives. We realized not only could we care for a child with a medical condition, but that it would bless our lives. We still felt firmly that we had made the right decision by not bringing a sick child into the world when we had the option and the means to prevent it, but we could parent a child who already had a special need. We wanted to.

And that brings me back to Nicholas. Nicholas has a cleft lip and palate. Parenting a child with a cleft involves managing multiple surgeries, intense dental work, speech therapy, and ENT procedures. But, after facing what CF might entail, this seemed like nothing. We are so lucky to have the financial means and the medical insurance to take care of Nicholas in the way that his birth parents could not. And we are so thankful to Nicholas for healing our hearts; for letting us take care of him in the way we could not care for our unborn son.

Getting Closer

So, after a lot of delays due to my lack of fingerprints (that's right, I do not have fingerprints; should have gone into a life of crime...), we finally have our I-800, which is our formal approval to adopt Ellie. The US has approved our request to bring a "foreign born minor" to our country to live as our child and to become a citizen. Our agency has told us that the wait is now 11-16 weeks until we travel. I am still holding out hope that things go very smoothly and we have Ellie home before Christmas. Not likely, but possible. Yay! Celebrating small milestones is just one way to cope with this LONG wait.

Since you asked...Why We Decided to Adopt, Part I

**Okay, this is the LONG answer to the question that I get from both friends and strangers at the grocery store alike. As I reread it it seems a tad indulgent. Blogging as therapy. If you skip through this and just look at the cute pictures of Ellie, I won't be offended...

We have been waiting for Ellie since 2005. Really. No, the process did not take 5 years to complete (although, if you are a family waiting for a baby girl with no medical needs from China, the wait actually IS this long -- or longer --now). We just got a bit sidetracked, as I tend to do. Sidetracked, but always confident that our daughter was in China and that we would meet her and bring her home one day.

I grew up just thinking adoption was another "normal" way to build a family. My best friend from my hometown, Claire, was adopted, and it was never unusual or even especially interesting to me. Just there. And her family was just like mine in most ways. So, I suppose that is why I had no resistance to the idea, as some people tell me they do, when I watched a special on TV about American families adopting internationally. When John joined me on the couch and said that he thought this was cool, too, I knew instantaneously that this was something I wanted to do. I can't totally explain it, except to say that the idea of meeting my child, who perhaps right now was living miles away in totally different circumstances, thrilled me. It was not unlike the feeling I had when I decided I wanted to get pregnant. Just thrilled, purposeful, determined. I loved the idea of having an international, perhaps interracial family. I wanted to travel and learn about other cultures. And I wanted to be a mom.

When I look back at our lives in 2005, I confess we were a little nuts to start the adoption process. We had a one year old and we were not adjusting smoothly to this new task of parenting. Olivia, our oldest, did not sleep through the night until she was 16 months old. So we were exhausted. Add that to perfectionism, naivete, and anxiety and you will have an accurate picture of our family life back then. But, strangely enough, we also loved being parents and were anxious to expand our family. And, we also knew that sometimes a baby takes longer to arrive than one might anticipate.

Before we had Olivia, I had 2 miscarriages. This was heartbreaking and scary, as we did not know if there was something that would prevent us from ever carrying a pregnancy to term. I started to see a Reproductive Endocrinologist in order to determine why the miscarriages had occurred, and although we never did quite find the answer to that question, we did find out something else: I carry the gene for Cystic Fibrosis, a serious genetic disease that affects the lungs and digestive system. Our future children would have the disease only if John was a carrier, too. So he took the test, and much to our relief, he was not. Or so we thought.

It turns out the test does not check for all mutations for the disease, just the most common ones. So, John took another test, one that checked for the next group of most common mutations. Again, he was in the clear. With that news, and a little synthetic progesterone, we went ahead and got pregnant. It was really very unlikely, said our genetic counselor, that John would be a carrier. But, just because John is nothing if not a thorough guy, John took a test called "Gene Sequencing," which tests every single one of your genes for any possible problems. The test, at least 7 years ago, took a long time to process. We weren't really worried since the other tests had come back negative, so we kind of forgot about this test. Then, when I was about 20 weeks pregnant, we got some bad news. John carried a very rare CF mutation.

I had an amnio, and, thankfully, found out that Olivia did not have CF. She is now a happy and healthy 6 year old. We are grateful for that every day. But as we decided to give Olivia a sibling, our indescribable desire to adopt now had a more logical twist to it. Now it was a "smart" option. But, just because I like to make everything more complicated than it needs to be, I couldn't quell my desire for another pregnancy. (Yes, I am one of those annoying women who loves being pregnant.) So, we decided to have another biological child while we were still young, and adopt later. Great plan. Now, how to avoid this pesky genetic disease thing...back to the fertility doctors we go.

Our daughter!

Here she is: Miss Eleanor Jia Meng! We are so proud and in love, even before meeting her. Ellie, as she will be called, is almost 1. Her birthday is September 30. She is from Henan province, which is the most populated and poorest province in China. I have heard that it also amazingly beautiful and rich with Chinese history. We cannot wait to meet our little one and to see where she was born-- hopefully this winter we will be traveling to China, with big brother Nicholas in tow. Ellie's caregivers have told us that she is "stubborn and a little bit shy." Well, if she is stubborn, she will fit in very well around here.

Ellie also has cleft lip and palate. We are familiar with this condition as Nicholas was born with this birth defect also. While Nicholas had his initial repairs done in China, we have requested that Ellie have her's done here, where the medical care will be more under our control. I am thankful that I have gone through at least part of the procedures and therapies with Nicholas so that I can help Ellie better.

I am feeling so grateful right now that I have been blessed with yet another beautiful (and stubborn) child!