Rehearsing and rehearsing

Tonight I had the first rehearsal since we started our travel preparations last week. Rehearsals allow the mind to fall into a kind of groove where escape from mundane streams of self-conscious thought is possible. The same happens when I run and sometimes on a long drive with a good soundtrack.

I found my thoughts wandering through the things we have piled up. I donated a carload today, and prepared another for the garbage and recycling. Every day this week we have purged huge bags of junk from the house, paring down what we have so we will use everything we keep. Most of it was outgrown, used up, written-on and had served a purpose.

Just to mix things up, this IS a before picture.

At the start of the day you couldn't walk through our garage, and now everything is back in its place. It's amazing what you can do with a few episodes of Little House on the Prairie, two helpful kids and some Diet Coke.

Upstairs is a pile of ALL the things we've been told we'll need and that might help Primrose become a Ward with the least discomfort jumbled in a large brown splayed suitcase. It's a suitcase so big we normally use it for our scuba gear. 

So tonight as we worked through what was frankly a slow rehearsal, I daydreamed about organizing all of that stuff and it dawned on me that this is nesting. Nesting is rehearsing. I didn't expect to feel such strong urges to do stuff to our house and our things without the hormones of a pregnancy spurring me on. 

Why does it feel so necessary?

We are being given a gift in this daughter. Part of the reason we are allowed this gift is because we are privileged to live in relative wealth and security. I feel an obligation to be sure I don't take those gifts for granted. I might have said that was true before, but it is so much more real to me in light of gaining a child through adoption. She has been monumentally UNlucky in her life. It's only because we are in an imperfect world and loss exists that any child needs adoption. It's the definition of injustice that a child is born in need of surgery and a family may not be able to provide it without relinquishing the child entirely. To we who have been given so much, well, we oughta at least tidy up the place. When she's 12 and her room's a mess it won't register any more and let's face it; our garage will be gross again long before that. But... before we leave on this trip, there is this shining moment when at least our things can be ready and it will make me feel ready. 

I have a secret conviction that out there somewhere, on somebody's blog or some agency's website, there is a story or a packing list that might tell us what we need to know. Unfortunately, we won't realize what it was until we get home so for now I guess I'll just have to read the whole thing. I need the internet to tell me how it's gonna be when we have her in our arms. 

When the truth is you can't possibly know what to do to get ready, it feels good to read the internet until two in the morning and disinfect the garage floor with clorox wipes. Despite the ludicrous ideas that I can become deserving of this gift and that if I prepare correctly I'll be proven worthy, it is so far from reality that even I know this is true instead:

Proverbs 10:22 

The Lord’s blessing enriches,

and struggle adds nothing to it.

(... but I still love that the camp art supply bins are labeled and stacked.)

Single Digits!!!

We leave in nine days. Niiine Days.

Here are some of the things that simmer at the back of my mind as we prepare to meet our daughter in China:

Who sponsored her surgery at 3 days old? (Thank you is insufficient. I would like to ugly cry all over them.)


What will it be like when we meet her?

How soon will she love the boys? (I swear they love her already.)

Did she go straight to the foster home or spend time in the orphanage at any point?

How did she get pneumonia at 2 months old? Does she have other respiratory problems?

What's missing from her medical report?

What does her skin feel like? Does she still have sweet baby smell (at 18 months)?

Will she like having her feet rubbed and her hair tousled?

Does she prefer stuffed animals or dolls?

Will the tulle on all the tutus I'm going to put her in annoy her?

Will she be able to overcome her annoyance at us in her tween years enough to enjoy all the long road trips we plan to inflict on her?

Hunting and gathering

We're deep into adoption preparation. I accidentally spent the bulk of the last two days dragging the boys around doing errands to complete our packing list.

At the start of the day, brothers.

Today we braved Goodwill, looking for books they can take to Grandma's house while we're gone and for cute things for our daughter.

We were successful at Goodwill.

The register malfunctioned, inputting the SKU number rather than the dollar amount. I was kinda impressed that Toby figured that out just by glancing at the back of the book we were buying. I'm slowly catching on that you have to find the humor in all these little things in adoption. Doing it in day to day life is good practice for me as a parent and for them as my kids.

The total for the things I could thoroughly justify buying for our trip.

The final weeks of waiting...

... have not gotten any easier. We're busy cleaning up from three weeks of music camp, organizing next year's homeschool, and making travel arrangements. Busy is a close proximation of comfort at this point.

I wonder how her foster family feels just now, and whether they have grown to dread the day they have to leave her at the Child Welfare Institute. We won't meet them; the hand-off is performed by orphanage workers. Maybe the fosters are experienced, and have the right metric of loving care + personal preservation intact so they're able to help children make this transition again and again. I hope the bittersweet knowledge that she will have a family is a comfort to them.

There are so many things I don't want to miss for her. What if we forget to ask something that could become important to her when she's older? I've been trying to research and find out what the parents who have done this and who have grown children now would do if they were new like us. You can ask for information about the leaving spot, the note (if any), pictures of the child on that day. People don't always get them and they don't always get even enough to find a family later. It would be such a shame to miss out on information she will want because we simply didn't think to ask. I trust our agency (Holt) but still, the responsibility for so much of this lies with us.

We're going to try to post a laminated picture that announces to her city (of 10.2 million) that she will be okay. That her surgery was a success and she'll have a family who can care for her, and that someday we will come back to visit all together. Her beginning will always be a part of her, and while I never understood this when I read other adoptive parents' words, I believe I already love all of her. It might be harder later as a mom and a human being, but right now I hope she does want to embrace China and find the beauty in its relationship with her.

Our plane tickets are purchased, our first few nights in Hong Kong reserved. Now to prepare the boys' school work and little gifts to open at Gramma's while we're gone... just 17 days left.

My expression when I learned there is more paperwork to be done in China! (and that there are at least two Starbucks within walking distance of our hotel in every city we'll visit...)

Travel Approval!

We have travel approval! We should be in the mid-August group and will find out for sure within the next 48 hours as Holt hears back about our necessary visa appointments. That's the very last bit, the last cog to turn before we buy tickets and lose what's left of our minds.

We've been waiting so long, it is an odd mix of emotions now that we're finally here.

Becoming a parent of three kids is a big change. We've had people tell us it's much more than going from one to two. The boys are old enough now (6 and 8) to entertain themselves, to be helpful and to have glimmers of self-sufficiency. Our first adoption... our first girl... and to have her join us at almost two years old...

Preparing for it is kind of like preparing for the first time leaving home. You can ask people all the right questions, read all the right books, take the classes, and still have no idea what you will really need. She will be unique, and our big day (week, month, year) will be unlike any of the others we've seen described.

One thing I know. Adopting adds layers to the anticipation of a new kid; travel, more paperwork, having a baby in a hotel, meeting a child with expressible opinions and set needs about which we will have no idea. Our daughter will need a thorough check with a specialist when we get her home. She probably won't need further surgeries, but she could. Sometimes kids in the special needs program have other issues as yet undiagnosed. There is simply no preparing for any of this.

We're going to call her Primrose.

Allllmost leaving. Allllmost home.

We are supposed to travel about a month from today. If all goes as our agency expects, we'll need to be in her city (Wuhan) by Monday, August 18th to meet her. To take her with us. To start caring for her in person, with our actual hands and feet. It's like that part of a mega roller coaster where it's ratcheting up the hill, jerking and clicking along, building anticipation in the region of your lower abs.

I watch the videos on YouTube. Search "China Gotcha Day" on there and pull up a box of tissues. I really love the ones that show the people become a family and then go on to show the next year of the new member's life. The changes in their bodies, their health, their lively eyes. The way they become at home.

What will our day be like? Will she cry and struggle to get away? I imagine my boys would have, had they been handed to a foreign family just months before their second birthdays. I can't go too far down that road, actually, or I get weepier still.

We're going to cheat and bring her treats, bring ipods, bring all sorts of distraction tools. Someday when we look back, I wonder already which things will stick out. Which will be important because they showed the core of her personality from the start? It's a lot to have entrusted to a couple of average parents. I'm so grateful we'll have a lot of years to wrap our minds around the depth and richness of that blessing.

Here she is! Matching outfit, beautiful little human.

The tri-annual catch-up post

All of us in Tualatin, Oregon

 Well hello there! In keeping with my blog tradition, it has been years since my last post. I thought I ought to dust off this old thing in order to be able to post about our current big thing: adopting a daughter from Wuhan, Hubei, China.

 Our daughter is beautiful, smiling for her foster family in her pictures like the well loved child she is. We were given a video of her at barely a year trying to sit on a plastic horse, and pictures of her at 1 1/2 walking gleefully outdoors in a thick pink matching outfit. She was born with digestive tract malformations that caused her to need surgeries at the age of just a few days old. We haven't even met her, yet I ache thinking of her family having to relinquish her, whatever the circumstances.

Isaac in Florida

China Special Needs was not the first adoption program we tried. We nearly adopted a relative from foster care about 6 years ago, but the timing fell apart as Isaac made an appearance instead. We also signed on with a domestic agency for a while, then a local attorney, all of which netted us zero and made me feel we were competing with infertile couples, to be honest.

A friend recommended in January of 2013 we look again at international, and Holt's programs in particular. Our daughter was actually born right around that time! For those who might be adoption savvy, we now have our i800 approval and are waiting on Article 5 and Travel Approval. If my extensive googling is correct, we might be on a plane in the next 6 to 8 weeks.

 A quick run-down of the rest of our family life:

We are now fully committed homeschooling weirdos. We do Classical Conversations, a homeschool community, once a week during the school year and tons of stuff related to our family's travels and interests. It is great, and Toby who is 8 now loves reading so much we had to make a rule about closing books whenever one is walking about. (He came a bit late to reading and then took it in all at once, so I am still a bit in awe of the development.)

Isaac's Homeschool Group

J is working in law but has experimented with two different jobs since last we spoke, including toying with starting his own firm. His current position seems the perfect balance of freedom and income. He can do the work just about anywhere and it is nice to find a firm that is okay with that.

J and I started running about a year ago and ramped it up when we decided to start scuba diving. We did a 10k in January and the Vancouver USA Half Marathon last month. I thought I didn't like races (I am double-digit-minutes-per-mile slow and am about 30% overweight still) but was surprised how much I liked it. My dad, a long-time Marathon and ultra-Marathon runner, has been a great source of training advice/info and did the half with us. It was on father's day; perfect!

I'm still running a small music academy and performing. Today we're heading to the Oregon coast for a chamber music festival where I get to play Brahms and Schubert. Also Hummel, but I'm not sure yet whether that piece falls in the "get to" or "have to" category... That's all the news that's fit to blog for now. I plan to update with adoption news in particular, but I've made blog promises before...

Toby and Isaac at an old tungsten mine in Montana

Hope to see you around here soon!

I love Adoption stories...

This article was linked today on a conglomerator blog I like to read. The author is part of a reformed theology conference we attended a few months ago, though he didn't speak at the Oregon event.

I like the perspective of this father, and I love adoption stories of any kind. His family includes several children added the "old fashioned way" before they adopted a baby from Russia.

But when the sentence changes from "We're going to have a baby" to "We're going to adopt," things change. All of a sudden the qualifications of good marriage, sufficient income and a home aren't enough. All of sudden, we need to look at the facts.

and this is beautiful:

We had faith in the God who loved us enough to adopt us, sins, scars, imperfections and all, into his holy family. We had faith that just as he knew each of our children before they were born, he knew that Mary was for us, even though she was conceived and born in a different country, by different birth parents.

In our specific situation, we're waiting for our minivan fund to come together and then we'll be moving forward. At this point we're thinking a domestic adoption will be the best choice and we've started gathering paperwork and are researching the options available. Every once in a while when reading statistics about African orphans our thoughts & hearts sway that way, but then we remember the expense and the travel involved, and the stories of kids waiting in foster care are also inspiring.

"We even asked each other, why are we considering this?... But we are not alone. God has given so many others a heart that is sensitive to the needs of the orphans. Some satisfy that sensitivity by providing the finances necessary to make adoptions happen, some build orphanages, some give clothing, some pray without ceasing."

He writes about being grateful. Grateful for a loving God, for the opportunity to have these two daughters in his family, for people who are willing to adopt other children.

"...And, if that is not you, pray about supporting those in your church who are doing this. If you can't do that, pray for them! Love the children they adopt. I can tell you that six years after adopting Mary, and three years after adopting Ana, none of us would trade our family for another. We praise the Lord for his grace and the blessing of adoption - first into God's eternal family and then for permitting us the privilege of picturing this in our earthly family. There is no greater joy. Adopt."

I am a marshmallow.

Maybe a Peep?

I bawled in church today. Not because it's Easter and not because of the message.

It's these words, and the act of trying to sing them with a group of people:
~
How deep the Father's love for us
How vast beyond all measure
That He would give His only Son
To make a wretch His treasure

How great the pain of searing loss
The Father turns His face away
As wounds which mar the chosen One
Bring many sons to glory

Behold the Man upon a cross
My guilt upon His shoulders
Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice
Call out among the scoffers

It was my sin that held Him there
Until it was accomplished
His dying breath has brought me life
I know that it is finished

I will not boast in anything
No gifts, no powr's, no wisdom
But I will boast in Jesus Christ
His death and resurrection

Why should I gain from His reward?
I cannot give an answer
But this I know with all my heart
His wounds have paid my ransom
~
It's especially those italicized verses that make my throat tight and hurty. The fact that my husband drives straight home, gets out his guitar and figures out the chords is pretty awesome, too. This year, I have that wonderful Christmassy feeling at Easter instead. It's probably better that way, really.

It's not that we prepared especially. We certainly don't have an Easter tree, and my mom had to buy all the egg decoratin' gear for Toby to have any memory of this year's holiday at all. We did stop at WalMart this morning and snag the very last bag of malted eggs in the whole state, apparently. We didn't even do lent despite my fascination with it. I guess you could say it's a pretty distant fascination, sort of like the way I feel about people who run ultra marathons or play in the Met Opera orchestra.

It's just that I feel the recent clouds- adoption failure, new baby haze, heinous church shopping, the various infections and medical mysteries the boys suddenly seem bent on collecting- have disipated. They're there, but it just feels like life and not so much like the other.

Yesterday I watched a community come together and celebrate a violist who was killed the year I moved here. I play some of her gigs, I have the priveledge of carpooling with some of her good friends. Preparing for the concert was a heavy responsibility and I found myself cherishing all the goofy things in my hectic and lovely life. It turned out to be fun, and fulfilling and I think she must have been quite something considering all the funny stories people were remembering. Sassy. I like that word even more now.

I love Easter. God bless you, internet.

Grace

We have been talking, thinking, praying and reading alot in the last week.

We're no longer sure we should continue to pursue X's adoption. She is a toddler now, and as such will need some careful parenting in the first few years to ensure she is able to attach well to our family. She's also a pretty high-maintenance kid, most likely a healthy aspect of her normal personality.

If she had been available eight months ago, I believe we would already have her in our family and we would have that time under our belts. Our own two-year-old would have had some time to adjust to her and vice versa. We'd have all the logistics and carseats and rooms figured out.

Instead I am due in 9 weeks, which sounds like right about the time X's state would have liked to send her our way. We are probably moving, and this year is going to be full of some serious transitions for us and for our kids already. Over the past week (has it really only been a week?!), I have felt no sense of excitement. Some nervousness I would expect, but this blank dread? I could not have anticipated the gray weight of this decision or the lack of joyful anticipation. I am not one to be led around by my emotions, but I don't feel this is the right time to commit to a child who deserves the full measure of her parents' time and energy.

I believe God has grace available to us that we cannot even fathom, and I hope to live as though I know that grace will be there for me even in my parenting. But over the past few days I have been surprised to find a certain peace with our change of heart. Neither choice- parenting while under stress or letting X go without knowing what will happen next for her- feels anything less than wrenching. I did not feel led either way despite begging for a specific direction, but that modicum of peace has meant... well, it's frankly indescribable. This doesn't mean I haven't wept daily. And it doesn't mean that I'm sure I don't need grace to cover even this decision. There's no right or wrong here, no damn balloons will pour out to show we are following the right path.

This is by far the hardest decision my husband or I have faced. It is difficult at this point to even describe all the factors we have considered. We have taken this holiday weekend and turned ourselves inside out discussing, praying and resting. My parents have taken Toby for a birthday weekend sleepover, just another way they have helped us beyond what we can ever tell them. J's parents have given us wise and compassionate counsel worth more than I can say.

I would really like divine balloons right now, but I will take this respite from guilt and worry.

Holy cow!

The girl we might adopt is coming for a one-week visit at the beginning of February.

I'm not sure what else to say about that right now, because when I try to think of a descriptive word or emotional state to pin on the whole thing, I realize the exact opposite of whatever I was going to say is also and equally true. Imagine one of those big-cheeked goldfish, who open their mouths as though to tell you something only to shut them back up when they can't quite get the thoughts to ripen.

More here, if you missed the long slow backstory...