Planet R-H: Adventures in International Adoption

Travel Tips: Flying to China and Back

2012-02-18T01:03:00.001-05:00

First in a series of informational posts for those who are headed to China for an adoption, or considering doing so.

We began our trip in Beijing to get acclimated, do some sightseeing and visit the group foster home where our daughter had spent much of her life. We then traveled to Changchun, in Jilin Province, to begin the adoption process. Like all American families adopting from China, we ended our trip in Guangzhou because the U.S. Consulate that processes adoptions is located there.

We really enjoyed seeing different parts of the country during our two weeks. You may be among a select few whose child hails from Guangdong Province, and will therefore spend your entire trip in Guangzhou. If not, you will likely fly into one city and home from another. Most airlines will allow this kind of arrangement instead of simply buying two separate one-way tickets, which would be much more expensive. I am providing the following information with the caveat that everyone's experience is different. Our itinerary worked really well for us, but if we were turning around and adopting another child next week, we might choose to do it a different way.

Our itinerary was from Washington Dulles to Beijing nonstop on United, then from Hong Kong to Tokyo and Tokyo to Washington Dulles, also on United. We booked the tickets through Todd Gallinek, who has been doing adoption travel for ages. Todd does not have a website but can be reached by email, did an excellent job for us and was very responsive despite being on his own overseas vacation when we contacted him. I say this as the guy who always books travel arrangements for himself and other members of his family -- I never use travel agents. But Todd was great. His prices were competitive, and he was able to arrange the one-way ticket back for our daughter with ease. You won't be able to do this part on Orbitz or an airline website.

Flying to China is a long, hard trip even for a seasoned international traveler. Flying home, with a new family member who doesn't know you all that well, will be much harder. Your goal is to achieve the optimal combination of convenience, comfort and cost.

Here are a few things to consider:

Level of agency support. Your adoption agency's staff may require you to make your own overseas flight arrangements subject to a schedule they give you, as ours did; they may require you to take a certain combination of flights; or they may make the flight arrangements for you with your input. I was satisfied with the first model, and with the job our agency also did on arranging our travel within China.

Where you begin. The airports you choose will depend on the availability of service, their proximity to your origin and destination cities, and the cost. We chose Dulles even though we are closer to National Airport. The nonstop to Beijing on United was a no-brainer, as it was the shortest way there and also among the least expensive. You can also fly nonstop to China from Newark, New York/JFK, Detroit, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The carriers are United, Delta, American, Air China, China Southern and Hainan.

Where you end. As I mentioned, everyone finishes their adoptions in Guangzhou. Guangzhou is a major Chinese city with a major international airport, but only China Southern flies nonstop to the United States from there -- to Los Angeles. Connecting to flights headed for the eastern United States can therefore be a time-consuming and expensive endeavor from Guangzhou. This is why many families, including ours, choose to take the train to Hong Kong and overnight there before flying off the next morning. I'll cover how this process works in a later post.

Connecting. It's unlikely you'll be blessed with nonstop flights on both legs, unless you happen to live near Detroit, Chicago or Los Angeles, or are spending the entire time in Guangzhou. For the rest of us, that means at least one connection. My strongest recommendation of this entire post is to make your home airport your first touchdown in the United States if possible. This won't work for everyone. But remember that taking a connecting flight in the U.S. from an international destination means that you will get off your first plane, go through immigration (which will probably take a bit longer than if you were flying solo, because of the adoption paperwork), claim your checked bags, go through customs, recheck your bags, possibly change terminals, and go through security again before catching your connecting flight! At Chicago O'Hare, for example, this means a transfer on a train from Terminal 5 to Terminal 1 or 3 after you've already gone through four of these steps. Not fun if you're an adult stepping off a 15-hour flight by yourself, let alone with a kid or kids. Instead, consider connecting somewhere like Tokyo, Seoul or back in Beijing. Our connection in Tokyo was a bit hair-raising because our first flight landed late and we didn't have a lot of time, but we got through. The only thing we had to do was go through security again with our carry-ons. It was also nice to break the trip up into chunks of 4 and 12 hours, instead of a really long flight followed by another, shorter one. Note: avoid Toronto, as I've heard you cannot transfer in Canada to a U.S.-bound flight with an immigrant child from China. They're not equipped to handle the paperwork.

Airline. The U.S. airlines pretty much own the field when it comes to flying nonstop to China. Unless you're willing to connect somewhere in Asia on both legs of your trip, you're likely to end up on United, Delta or possibly American. Our home carriers are not known for their amazing service when compared to airlines from other countries, but they have expansive networks of connecting flights, and there's something comforting about getting on a piece of equipment operated by a company from your own country after a long trip overseas. Sadly, and unlike airlines from other countries, the experience you get largely depends on the aircraft, which leads me to my next point.

Aircraft. Put Todd or your travel agent to work if you're using one, ask questions, and visit SeatGuru. The specific type of plane that flies the route you're considering is very important. For example, we flew on a United 777 with the new International Premium configuration. This means more to Business and First Class passengers than it did to us on the seating experience, but it is also like flying on a brand new aircraft even though the plane might be 10-15 years old. The new configuration also means three sections of three seats apiece per row, where the old configuration was two, five and two. If you're traveling with a spouse and a child, you don't want to have to reach across an aisle, and you don't want to subject a stranger to meltdowns and frequent trips to the bathroom. Finally, United's 777s with new interiors have individual TVs in the seat backs, meaning you and your child can choose from many different entertainment options (including a number with Chinese subtitles if he or she is old enough to read). The alternative is watching the same, possibly age-inappropriate movie that everyone else gets, or not being able to see the screen at all.

By contrast, United flies a 747-400 from San Francisco and Chicago to China. This double-decker airplane used to be the queen of the skies, but the airline has let its 747s run down without upgrading the interiors. This means no individual entertainment, and a denser, more shabby cabin with more people in a three-four-three seat configuration. Doesn't sound like a lot of fun. Delta's 747s are in better shape for overseas trips, and the airline is in the process of reconfiguring its cabins to provide individual entertainment in economy class.

Class of Service. If you have the money, the status or the miles available to upgrade to business or first class on a trip like this, my hat goes off to you. We didn't. Passengers in these cabins get better entertainment, lie-flat sleeper seats or something close to it, individual attention, and some tasty meals. They also get a much less crowded bathroom that nobody else may use. One thing to consider when deciding to go business or first on the way back from China is that a one-way ticket for your child will not cost much less than a whole round-trip. Another thing to consider is that we spent most of the 12-hour flight from Tokyo to Washington entertaining a toddler who wouldn't sleep, so those amazing lie-flat seats would have done us little good.

If you're flying economy, as most people do and we did, you have two choices: regular economy or an enhanced economy, which United calls Economy Plus and Delta calls Economy Comfort. These are regular economy seats with the same service and amenities, but adding a few inches of extra legroom. The upgrades are sold by the flight leg and can be purchased in advance or when you check in, if they're still available. It's usually less than $149 per passenger per leg, depending on the length of the flight. My opinion, as a 6'4" male with a 5'8" wife, is that it's well worth it. We upgraded to Economy Plus on United for the entire year for the both of us, for $425. It's since gone up to $499, but that pays for itself with a single round-trip for two people. We did have to pay $129 to upgrade our daughter to E+ on the way back, which is terribly ironic because she's not tall enough for her legs to reach the floor. Todd was able to plug into our annual upgrade and select the seats for us.

Final thoughts. Good luck! Feel free to shoot me a message if there's something I can update on this post, or if I can help you along your journey in any way.

Day 17: Hong Kong and Beyond

2012-02-17T16:29:00.001-05:00

Our story's straightforward chronology has taken a hairpin turn, because you already know how the tale ends before you know how it played out. Yes, we are home safely. Lindy and Xiao Ya are asleep upstairs. The kid went down without a fight for a change, and her mother is taking a badly-needed break. Even if sleeping for several hours uninterrupted in the middle of the day isn't the best thing for getting back on Eastern Standard Time, none of us has slept much in the last few days anyway. As for me, maybe I'm less susceptible to jet lag. Or maybe it's my mind saying, "How can you sleep? There is laundry to fold, there are suitcases to unpack, and you have blog posts saved up in your head!" In any event, I'm sure I'll pay for this later. But the good news on that front is that Lindy still can't leave XY by herself or with just me in a room. So my schedule doesn't have to be tied to theirs at this point, so I can sleep while they're awake!

Anyway, back to Hong Kong, on the morning of Thursday, February 16. Which was the evening of Wednesday, February 15 here in the States. That's when we started to come home.

We began the day early at our Hong Kong hotel, with delicious espresso and all manner of other goodies from the breakfast buffet, which was the smallest but perhaps most thoughtful of the five we had on the trip so far. A quick shuttle ride whisked us all around the Kowloon section of Hong Kong, which was really neat to see. This is a true metropolis, with remnants of the British era including double-decker buses and driving on the left side of the road. Lindy and I talked about wanting to make a longer stop there someday. The Airport Express train was incredibly convenient. We checked in for our flight and checked our bags right there at the station, hopped on the train, and were inside the airport within a half hour. It was faster than a taxi or a shuttle bus because of the lack of traffic, and probably cost about $30 total for the two adults. Xiao Ya rode for free. She seems to love trains, which is good because we took one the day before from Guangzhou and would take another within the airport itself.

The Hong Kong airport is massive but navigable, with the help of a few well-placed luggage carts. We got to our flight in plenty of time. The four hours to Tokyo were pretty uneventful, except for a few little things...

The flight took off almost an hour late, and to this day I have no idea why.
Xiao Ya woke up from a nap with wet pants, which called in a backup pair we'd brought just in case.
She was apparently still asleep but didn't look it during a tough trip to the bathroom right before landing, during which she seemed to have forgotten who Lindy was. While they were in the bathroom together and Lindy was helping her clean up.
Related to 1, we landed in Tokyo and had a seemingly endless taxi before getting to the gate about 25 minutes before we were supposed to take off for Washington Dulles.

After going through about half of the security line for transfer passengers, a helpful lady called out for any Dulles passengers. We got pulled out and pushed ahead, and a helpful and patient security officer took us through the list of things we needed to remove from our carry-ons because it's different from the U.S. and there was no signage. (Liquids, iPads and cameras, in case you were wondering.) From there, we basically jogged to the next gate where some more helpful people pointed us to the plane, which was barely still boarding. We found our seat, got some space in the bin, and settled in for the 12-hour trip home.

The flight was not a pleasant experience, but it was also not the screaming, hellish nightmare we'd been steeling for since we made the travel arrangements. None of this has anything to do with the airline. The new international cabin on the United 777 is very comfortable, especially since we'd upgraded to Economy Plus for the extra legroom, and the flight attendants were attentive and kind. The meals were even pretty decent, which was a pleasant surprise given that the vegan option on the way over to China tasted like warm, damp shredded cardboard.

Now that we're home and have almost a day behind us, we can point to the fact that our 34-month-old daughter, who doesn't speak our language and didn't know us from Adam ten days earlier, probably spent a total of five minutes out of a 12-hour flight screaming her head off. Half of that was in the bathroom. She didn't disturb her fellow passengers, she didn't soil herself or anyone else, and she didn't leave her seat for most of the flight. We had no issues with fastening of the seat belt during takeoff or landing, and didn't have to resort to candy as a bribe. That's the good. The not-so-good is that she fought sleep harder than we've seen despite both of our best efforts, and may have slept for the last two hours or so of the flight. That meant both of us had to spend most of the time that everyone else on the plane was sleeping, actively engaged in trying to feed or entertain a toddler. To the best of my ability, I did this for several hours while Lindy snuck a rest break. There was a lot of Play-Doh and crayons. There were snacks. And there were screenings of Cars and Phineas and Ferb with no sound in the seatback TV, because Xiao Ya would not wear her headphones.

She ate very well and stayed very quiet during most of the flight. In truth, she's a very good traveler for her age. She thinks nothing of standing around in line or sitting around in a terminal, simply looking at people and taking it all in. A lucky few might get a smile or a little eye contact. But transitions and large moving vehicles are not an issue at all. Sitting next to the wing of a two-engined widebody jet can be a loud and jarring experience during takeoff and landing, but our daughter was unfazed.

She's a very good traveler but not a very good sleeper yet. In addition to only sleeping just a little despite being very tired, Xiao Ya had a full-blown night terror on the plane. We'd experienced the mini-editions with the kicking and thrashing before falling asleep, but this was our first big one. She seemed to wake with a start when we were trying to get her to nap. Her eyes went wide, she looked at both of us, and then started screaming louder than we've heard. She was inconsolable. She was pushing away from us and squirming when Lindy picked her up in the aisle to try to calm her. It was then that Lindy realized the kid was still asleep even though she looked awake. So the focus changed from calming to awakening and then calming. It worked. Luckily for us, this lasted (we now realize) for a pretty brief time and it was when the crew were waking everyone up for a snack.

So, blearily sleep-deprived and pretty rattled, we emerged from the plane to be deposited into one of the anachronistic Dulles "mobile lounges," which are giant old buses on stilts that move passengers from one place to another. We reached the immigration hall, which was stuffy as we wore our winter coats and shuffled along in a seemingly endless line. I was thinking about the huddled masses yearning to breathe free before I remembered we were in the "U.S. Citizen" line, and then my mind snapped back to all of the soaring, light-filled airport concourses we'd seen recently -- including Beijing and Hong Kong. This was the experience we presented to citizens returning to the airport serving the national capital of the greatest democracy in the history of humanity? From the dingy and worn little concourse serving United's international flights to the facilities that greet returning passengers, it would be charitable to call Dulles a dump.

Anyway, with our daughter now the newest citizen of the United States as soon as her feet touched earth, she also had to pee. So Lindy went ducking under stanchions with a whining toddler attached to her person while I continued shuffling with all of our carry-ons. We reconnected and made it up to the imigration officer, who gave the contents of the brown envelope I received in Guangzhou and was ordered not to open under any circumstances a cursory look before stamping everything and wishing the three of us a nice day. We got our suitcases, went through a short customs line, and emerged through double doors to see the smiling face of our friend Calista, who braved traffic to come pick us up.

The four of us nearly had a teary moment just then, all for different reasons, but we pulled it together and headed for our nearby Prius. Calista had thoughtfully prepared many snacks for the new arrival and her weary parents, which joined the Chinese nursery rhymes CD we'd bought as the means of placating Xiao Ya during her first time in a car seat at the age of 34 months. Turns out she hollered for a couple of minutes before we even put the car in reverse, and then was fine as long as Lindy had different treats to shovel in during the ride.

We got home, put away the groceries Calista had also thoughtfully brought over, collected our animals, and set about figuring out what to do next. There was some napping, during which another friend brought some breakfast to the house and didn't get to meet Xiao Ya. There was breakfast at 10:45 a.m. A bath, a tour of the new room to call her own, and some whimpering about various little things were to follow. I think the three of us got about 5 hours' sleep before waking up at 6 a.m. local time.

Things are going pretty well. There have been no screaming fits, and XY still has her appetite. She seems to love her room, and is just as attached to Mama as ever. We have enjoyed some of the new toys, and spent some time watching Ni Hao, Kai-Lan. She repeated "try it!" in response to the chorus of one of the songs. She is not as enamored with the cats and dog as they are with her. Clea came up and gave her a little lick, which caused her to yowl and drop her sticker book. Still, having the animals right up close in the dining room hasn't prevented her from eating, and Clea hopped up on the bed a couple of times last night and during the nap but didn't wake her. They're all going to be pals. It will just take a little time.

I, meanwhile, took advantage of my daughter's dependence on my wife and slipped out for a few errands. I've also run the laundry, responded to emails, and sorted all the mail. Unpacking is in the works. And we're starting, bit by bit, to become a functional unit again. We will all probably feel like zombies for the next few days.

I will post updates from time to time while we're pondering what's next for the blog. Some posts will likely address general things we've learned about traveling to China to complete an adoption, rather than focusing on the specific facts and figures of our own. Our trip preparation was so much smoother and better having learned what to expect from the experience of others. I'm hoping to pay it forward a little.

In the meantime, I may decide to take a little siesta after all...

Enjoying a train ride from Guangzhou to Hong Kong

An elegant lady eats an elegant breakfast in the executive lounge of the Harbour Plaza Metropolis.

Joining Mama for a cocktail to kick off a long flight. (Okay, it was water with a few drops of bloody mary mix.)

We are home.

2012-02-16T18:33:00.001-05:00

We are exhausted, brittle and a little smelly. Two of the three of us are already asleep. But we're home.

The trip wasn't great, and it wasn't as terrible as it could have been. Most of all, it's over. I will share some more details about our journey in the next few days.

Day 16: Guangzhou and Hong Kong

2012-02-15T09:51:00.001-05:00

Greetings to you from the Executive Lounge of the Harbor Plaza Metropolis Hong Kong, where a floor above me, the two R-H ladies are fast asleep. When I booked this hotel room a few weeks ago, I was looking for a room that had Internet Access and breakfast. What I got was access to the lounge, which is where we check in, eat breakfast and use the Internet. So, after check-in, we shared a table and cocktails with a nice retired couple from the UK on holiday before a cruise around Asia. Xiao Ya treated her new executive privileges with great dignity, enjoying as we did the complimentary fried tofu and peanuts that were part of the snack buffet.

This is the first time since Dulles Airport on Day 1 that I'm blogging without need for a VPN to get past the Chinese censors, and the first time that we are with our daughter outside the protective umbrella of our adoption agency. The Metropolis is a classy hotel with rooms on the smallish side, though I'm told that is typical for this city. We had a nice meal of Thai and Indian food after check-in, marking 45 meals or so in a row with some sort of Asian flavor.

Today was a long and tiring day, largely because we have a two-year-old and are running on a sleep deficit. But it was surprisingly drama-free. We slept late and got breakfast uneventfully. We won't miss the bland stuff on the buffet at the Victory, though we enjoyed seeing the other families grow closer every day and the other elements of the hotel were great. We've developed a surprising taste for something called "soya beans braised in ketchup." XY won't touch the stuff.

After breakfast, we walked around the island one last time and gave the girl a spin on the playground. She went up and down the slide with abandon, and then didn't challenge us when it was time to go back. We had a nice lunch of leftovers in the room and provided some of our extra snacks to a family from the Midwest whose reserves were low. Then, after practicing the timely art of walking Xiao Ya up and down the hall and counting up and down to 100, she fell asleep and we packed.

The packing was an artful exercise in logistical genius compared to the way we left Changchun. Everything fit in our original suitcases with room to spare. They were lighter, and we finished packing early. As a bonus, we actually have the right clothing, activities and snacks for carrying on the plane, we know where to find everything, and we don't need to open our suitcases at all tonight.

John and his driver picked us up in the early afternoon, and we waited outside the Consulate building while he picked up the passport with Xiao Ya's immigration visa in it. Everything was like clockwork. We got to the train station just moments later, saw many familiar families in the waiting room, and sat with John until it was time to go through security.

The train ride was great. XY was a champ, playing with a snack catcher and a Magna Doodle almost the whole two-hour trip. We saw parts of the countryside and Shenzhen. And one of the highlights, at least for our daughter who had consumed almost a whole bottle of water, was the bathroom. It was a classic squatty potty, except instead of a pipe underneath, it was a hole through which you could see the railroad tracks passing by!

We arrived Hong Kong, cleared immigration and customs with no trouble, and walked across the street to our hotel with a fair amount of difficulty and quite a bit of peril before discovering the pedestrian bridge after the fact. No matter. Our trip to China is now in the past, and our daughter has made her first steps toward immigration.

We will miss China for our daughter's homeland and the incredible experience it gave us. And whether Xiao Ya is our first or our only child, we will be back. But crossing over even briefly into a land where most everyone speaks English and the currency is dollars -- albeit not American ones -- is pretty nice. Tomorrow, we check our bags straight though and board a fast train for the airport. Four hours to Tokyo, an hour on the ground, and then 12 hours to Washington Dulles. We have a sealed brown envelope to hand over to the immigration officer, and Xiao Ya's American citizenship will be effective upon touchdown.

Posting is probably going to be pretty light for the next couple of days, as we will have some sleeping and settling in to do. We've been so incredibly grateful for the support and words of encouragement from our family, friends, and even people whom we've never met. We hope to provide more photos and summary-type posts in the weeks to come.

One thing we have yet to decide is whether, and in what form, this blog will continue into the future. On the one hand, we started it with the goal of catching people up on our adoption process and hopefully providing some measure of information to others who might be considering a similar journey. Once we get home, that mission is accomplished. And we hope to provide our daughter with some measure of privacy as she grows up in a world that seems to value overexposure more and more. On the other hand, we know the journey doesn't end when we walk through the front door of our house after coming back from China, and the public relations executive in me doesn't ever want to leave an audience waiting.

So we will see. In the meantime, photos.

The luggage pile. Two suitcases, three carry-ons, and three personal items.

A last walk around the Island in the Ergo.

Acting like the seasoned traveler already.

Day 15: Guangzhou

2012-02-14T02:47:00.001-05:00

It's a rare afternoon post for a Valentine's Day in China. I'm writing now because at this very moment, and as of about an hour ago, the little tyrant... I mean toddler... is taking a nap! I came back from a couple of quick errands to find Lindy very gently unloading Xiao Ya from the Ergo into bed. And in bed, she has remained.

Today has been a very good day. We had to rally and leave our hotel by 7:30 to get to the U.S. Consulate in time for our appointment. So we woke up extremely early, had a fast but uneventful breakfast, and got in the van to go. I have posted below a series of photos of the van ride, taken over the course of about 20 minutes. Quite the range of emotions on this kid.

We went through a series of lines and security checks before arriving at a room that is reminiscent of government waiting rooms all around the world. There was some play furniture for the kids that captured Xiao Ya's attention, and we recognized a number of the other families from our wanderings about the island. A kind-faced American woman addressed us as a group and administered an oath to us on behalf of our children, basically affirming that the information on all of our paperwork was complete. Several minutes later, we got called to a different window to fill out and sign some more documents. Xiao Ya seemed taken by the woman talking to us through the microphone behind the glass, so she hopped up on the ledge and stood in the window. Luckily, the clerk thought this was cute. In all, we were out of the office in less than an hour. No photos allowed inside, though we got one in the building near the consulate sign.

When we got back, our familiar game of distract the toddler while Mama tries to shut her eyes ended abruptly with Xiao Ya trying to stick a pen in Lindy's half-open mouth. So we went out. It was about 70 degrees and sunny today, so I put on just a short sleeved shirt to go outside for the first time on this trip. (my sympathies to our DC crew on all the snow, etc. this week.) We dropped off more laundry, bought a few cheesy souvenirs that are probably the China equivalent of the three-for-$10 DC t-shirts or FBI hats one can buy on the Mall, got some insanely inexpensive new shoes for the kid, and went back to the playground. This time, we attracted the curiosity of grandparents and their grandchildren, many of whom congregated around us while XY went up and down the slide. By herself. Again and again.

We had a decent lunch outdoors, in which Xiao Ya refused an additional helping of fried rice but asked for more broccoli. She did eat some peas, and we thank her H grandmother for the suggestion, as these were apparently the first green thing I ate. And then, on the way back home, something unexpected happened. Our daughter was walking on her own feet on the sidewalk, and she reached for my hand. She walked back the whole way between both of us. I bought her a silly phone toy we'd walked past a number of times for about $1.20, and she discovered that holding hands with both parents can cause the delightful sensation of being lifted in the air by the arms!

I went through the surreal and comical experience of changing money at a bank for the second time on this trip, because I got tired of the hotel's rate that is 5 percent lower than market. The number of forms and cross-checks the tellers must go through meant a 30-minute visit to change $100, but everyone was very helpful. On the way home, I got XY's Chinese name in calligraphy, and treated myself to a Slurpee at one o the Island's two 7-Elevens. It was congee-flavored. No, it wasn't really.

Much as the weather is amazing and I'm enjoying my unexpected free time, I think I might take a little nap myself before dinner.

Tomorrow will be another day of transition as we make our way home. We stop by the Consulate to get Xiao Ya's visa to enter the U.S. in the early afternoon, then board a train to Hong Kong. We will spend tomorrow night in the city, and then take a fast train to the airport first thing Thursday morning. From there, 17 hours of flying and layovers will take us to Tokyo and then Dulles! More to come, likely from Hong Kong tomorrow night.

The van series.

Outside the Consulate.

On the slide.

More broccoli, please!

Wait, is she holding both of her parents' hands?

Shamian Island is a popular place for wedding photograhy.

Elegant Sunrise!

Day 14: Guangzhou

2012-02-13T09:19:00.002-05:00

"There are always some one blessing you forever whereever you are."

-- Bed turndown card from Guangdong Victory Hotel.

This particular piece of comforting yet fractured syntax provided a little extra boost when we got back into our room after a very, very challenging day. Tomorrow is Valentine's Day and our oath-taking appointment at the U.S. Consulate. Tomorrow, team R-H is going to rally and kick some ass. Because quite frankly, that's pretty much the opposite of what happened today. We knew Xiao Ya's lack of a nap yesterday and not falling asleep until 10:40 would get us in trouble, and it did.

The experts and the veterans warn not to read too much into your newly-adopted child's behavior for the first few days, because the shock and the newness of the situation will have yet to wear off. Lindy and I were both pretty stunned at how seemingly easy the initial transition went, but knew it was entirely possible things would get worse before they got better.

We don't say any of this to cause undue concern. Despite being pretty close to the end of our reserves on sleep and patience, we still feel this whole thing is going reasonably well. We are incredibly pleased to be Xiao Ya's parents, and simply realize that we are more prepared to take on that role than she is to be our daughter. She is eating, sleeping and using the toilet. She has not shunned both of us, has not tried to injure herself or others, and is not physically destructive. She generally follows instructions. All of these things are remarkable blessings for an adoptive family.

Today started with sleeping in and a pretty temperamental breakfast. We were pretty run down, so we visited our first Chinese Starbucks with St. John the Patient and learned that one can pay $8 for two coffees even in a country where $7 can buy dinner for three. We went back to the medical clinic, chaotic with throngs of people seeking exams for visas to enter the U.S., and learned that our daughter does not have tuberculosis.

We had a nice walk through a park in the middle of town that had a botanical garden, koi, amazing rose bushes and larger-than-life expressions of Pikachu, Hello Kitty, Mario, Luigi, Felix the Cat and all the Angry Birds. Xiao Ya melted down twice in public, once because we insisted she pick up her photo album that she'd dropped on purpose, and once because she wanted Mama to pick her up but wouldn't walk over to make it happen. The park happens to be a favorite for retirees. One grandmother walked by mid-meltdown and noted that Xiao Ya was a stubborn one. One grandfather simply smiled and took our picture without asking.

All of the other meltdowns, and I've lost track of them all, have had to do with boundaries of behavior. Our heart breaks for her every time it happens, because you don't want your child to be upset. Also, in this particular situation, we're trying to foster attachment and trust, and realizing that when she screams her head off about having to sit properly in a chair to eat food, she's not just screaming about the chair. This is one angry, sad, emotionally unstable little girl. We can only hope that making sure she knows there are rules and we will enforce them won't conflict too much with her fears and her embryonic sense of trust in us. We also know that pushing boundaries is part of what all toddlers do with their parents as they grow. It's just new and particularly acute for us at the moment.

She is an extraordinarily tough and resilient child, but she is going through a very fragile time. She is equal parts Buddha and Pol Pot, arriving into our lives when she is just old enough to communicate for herself but has had that skill rendered largely useless because of us, and just young enough to be much less than a rational being.

There were in fact moments of joy and progress today. We had the best bread so far in China from a local bakery, and gave Xiao Ya her first peanut butter sandwich for lunch -- officially breaking the streak of nearly 40 meals in a row with chopsticks. I was mostly able to entertain the kid with some counting practice and Kai-Lan when she wouldn't take a nap but Mama needed to sneak a little rest. I helped resolve a couple of the mini-meltdowns even if I was a link in the chain of causation for many more. And she enjoyed our short walk around the island and trip to the outdoor playground this afternoon, interacting little with other kids but relishing a few trips down the slide with help from both of us.

Dinner was pretty hellish. John took us to a well-known Buddhist restaurant attached to another temple. The food was good, but XY had to be taken outside several times with screaming fits about this or that. Nothing contributes to local understanding of the international adoption process like seeing the only Westerners in the place drop their chopsticks several times to scurry out of the building with an inconsolable Chinese girl.

When we got back to our room and pondered the pillow greeting above a bit, Xiao Ya actually had a nice bath and fell asleep pretty easily, much earlier than last night but probably a little later than ideal. We are working on it.

Tomorrow's an early day. Fingers crossed...

At the park in Guangzhou.

John, the child whisperer.

Remind you of anyone?

Baby's first peanut butter sandwich.

Strolling on the Island with Mama.

Day 14: Guangzhou

2012-02-13T09:19:00.001-05:00

"There are always some one blessing you forever whereever you are."

-- Bed turndown card from Guangdong Victory Hotel.

Tomorrow's an early day. Fingers crossed...

At the park in Guangzhou.

John, the child whisperer.

Remind you of anyone?

Baby's first peanut butter sandwich.

Strolling on the Island with Mama.

Day 13: Guangzhou

2012-02-12T10:43:00.001-05:00

Today was probably the closest thing we've had to an ordinary day since Xiao Ya came to be a part of our family just a week ago. It was a very good day. We took two tours, one of a grand old Buddhist temple named after the native banyan trees inside, and another of an old family mansion that is now a cultural museum and art gallery. We finished our gift shopping and picked up some things at the supermarket.

After a lunch and nap that came way too late -- we continue to be confounded by the lack of anything resembling a routine schedule -- we picked up our laundry down the street and ordered an engraved stamp of our daughter's Chinese name. Then we went to our hotel's other building and hit the indoor playroom for awhile.

We met a nice couple from Houston who had adopted their first child, an energetic little boy not much younger than Xiao Ya. It took her awhile to realize she was in a familiar type of environment, but she did warm up and release Mama to start having some toddler fun. I'm not exactly sure how this began, but I was to play a major role. The kid discovered the slide is a good time, and she also discovered I would carry her to the top and catch her at the bottom -- saving her all the hard work and finally putting my mid-30s out-of-shape frame through the same paces Mama has endured all week. She wouldn't stop until she had to go to the bathroom. Lots of mugging and giggling were had by all, and I am very pleased to share below the first photos of my child enjoying herself because of my presence instead of in spite of it.

With a minimum of fuss, we left the playroom and wandered around looking for a dinner spot before settling on the Rose Garden, a lovely but peculiar combination of various Western and Asian cuisines. Yep, another meal with chopsticks means the streak is unbroken since we got off the plane. We had a simply delicious charcoal-roasted eggplant and some nice tofu, among other things. Xiao Ya was so enthralled with the broth from the tofu that she drank it all with a straw.

We are working through the food issues. She decided to start punching me in the shoulder playfully during afternoon snack time, and didn't stop despite my asking three times. Afternoon snack time was thus over. She wasn't pleased. But we ate three solid, civilized meals as family today for the first time. One of these days, we will probably even figure out what the proper portion sizes should be for a growing toddler instead of just letting her eat as much as she wants.

We are also working through the sleep issues. It takes at least an hour to get her down for a nap and at night, and despite the occasional temptation to channel Samuel L. Jackson channeling Ricardo Cortes, it's pretty easy to see why she fights off sleep like an intruder. We believe the anxiety and nightmares actually start before she falls asleep, so the kicking of the legs and the chanting of the names of various people and animals in her photo book are sort of like sleepwalking in advance. On the plus side, this process is getting easier every day, and when she's out, she's out. Lindy and I could have a Möbius Strip concert in Room 8414 and I don't think she would wake up. We've never put her in a stroller, because she never used one at Harmony House and now either walks or is carried. But the Houston family mentioned that their son is out like a light the moment he gets parambulated, so we might resort to that soon. She slept until 7:30 this morning, and didn't go down until 10:30 tonight. Tomorrow is going to hurt a little.

Since our last post, we've come to believe staying on Shamian Island was a good choice. Yes, it is a little bit like a theme park. Yes, Americans can be loud and tend to consider themselves and their families the center of the universe, leaving us to occasionally feel apologetic on behalf of others. And yes, we feel a little bit like colonists and the way the hospitality workers have treated us isn't helping that much. But it has been nice to compare notes with a few folks who are having a similar experience and enjoying the adventure like we are. Walking around is quiet and peaceful, and the scenery is gorgeous. It is an amazing contrast compared to the densely populated and chaotic outdoor shopping mall and street markets we visited yesterday. As friends of ours who have done this did predict, we have become quite comfortable here.

We have really enjoyed watching XY's personality start to come through. She has experienced quite a bit of unadulterated joy and quite a bit of anger and sadness. She is playful and very funny, and is full of little looks that crack up the adults around her before cracking her up too. She is independent but can be needy, very fastidious and very opinionated. She aims to please and will follow instructions, sometimes taking a little more prodding. She has little patience and doesn't know what later means, but has incredible concentration and sill stay on a task for a very long time, especially if it involves play or eating. She does not talk to strangers, but will accept offers of a peanut and a kumquat from a Buddhist or candy from a shopkeeper.

Tomorrow is a trip to a well-known local park and the reading of Xiao Ya's arm for the TB test results. We may venture off the island to a Buddhist restaurant for dinner. Tuesday we take the oath to become a family in the eyes of the United States government.

As an aside, I have been fascinated by the cars here. Volkswagen does a lot of local production for the Chinese market, and I was pretty amazed to see Jettas in the 1991 body style running around Changchun by the hundreds as taxicabs, but with updated headlights, taillights and graphics. Turns out VW produces that model as the Jetta, and sells the car that is the latest Jetta in the States under a different name, at the same time. Here in Guangzhou, I kept seeing the Volkswagen Santana as a taxi. It has a modern VW front, and graphics, but I couldn't place the body. It is derived from the 1981 Passat, meaning they've kept the same basic frame for 30 years!

Photo time. And bedtime for grown ups too.

At Six Banyan Buddhist temple.

At the Victory Hotel's play room, with Xiao Ya and her Baba working the slide.

Day 12: Guangzhou

2012-02-11T09:48:00.001-05:00

Greetings from Adoption City USA, otherwise known as Shamian Island, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, People's Republic of China. The "Island" is actually a sandbar surrounded by the Pearl River on one side and a small branch of the river on the other. It has a totally separate architecture from the rest of the city, owing mostly to its status as a possession of England and France in the 19th century as the result of the Opium Wars. For years, Chinese people weren't allowed on the island. That hasn't been the case for quite some time, but the place later retained its outside influence by becoming a hub for overseas adoptions. The U.S. Consulate used to process adoptions here in an office attached to a large hotel called the White Swan. But the consulate office is now across town and the hotel is closed for renovations. With these two new realities and the government slowdown in overseas adoptions, the island isn't as busy as it once was. But it's still very much geared toward people who look like us.

We chose to stay here as opposed to in one of the other off-island hotels because we love old buildings and wanted to be able to walk to some of our appointments. Still, making our home base an area that began life in such a culturally insensitive way and continues to be very different from the rest of the city, let alone the country, is very strange. On the plus side, the hotel is lovely and old but renovated in a tasteful way. The room is comfortable. And the island is really nice for walking around, as cars are restricted unlike any other place in China. The trees are ancient and credible, and people sing and perform Tai Chi on the riverside in the mornings.

Another part of adjusting to this place has been in acknowledging the reality of being just like all the other adoptive families in many ways. This has been a bit tough because we tend to think of ourselves as different. We enjoy traveling internationally precisely because it offers the experience of everything different from the way it is at home, and we don't expect anyone in other countries to cater to us because we are Americans. That one may walk into a restaurant and order a cheeseburger in English or safely trust the ice at Starbucks is really of little consequence. So it has been a bit of a shock to hear so much English spoken at breakfast, to walk down the street and see Americans everywhere. The hotel staff has been friendly but distant (and imposing of a borderline usurious currency exchange rate) and the island is overrun by reminders that to many people, overseas adoption is very much a business. Case in point: I'm drinking a beer I bought this evening at a 7-Eleven. There are two on the island, which is only about a half-mile across.

So we started our day after breakfast by trying to get Xiao Ya to sit in a chair by herself for another official photo without screaming her head off. No dice. We decided to try again later and went ahead to the medical clinic. Much to our amazement, the girl smiled and laughed her way through a bevy of pretty invasive procedures, including the removal of a chunk of ear wax with metal forceps and the injection under the skin of her arm to test for tuberculosis. The nurses and doctors were impressed, as were we. We figure she has had enough medical attention in her short life that a trip to the clinic is just no big deal. I was also able to snap a portrait of her in front of a blank wall that will serve fine as a visa picture, and the added bonus is that the ENT doc said the cleft palate repair was great and would require no further surgery. (This from a woman who looks at a hell of a lot of adopted palates every year.)

From there, it was back to the hotel room for lunch, which went very well. I am including pictures below of meal time, which has been one of my favorite times of the day with XY. Today was notable because she fed me some of her soup, and because she again performed the trick that led us to her latest nickname, the Fruit Canal: eating an entire banana in four bites. The girl definitely has issues with food -- see prior post about snack catcher and sugary cereal -- and today's midsize meltdown was in that category too. Shine lights into her eyes and stick needles in her arm and she's fine, but put away the dried apple rings in front of her when there are more in the package, and you're in for some screaming.

Sleep has been a challenge for us as well. She wouldn't go down for a nap easily today, so we got in some Skype time with her grandmother H and that was great. By the time she fell asleep, though, there was no rest for her parents who only slept for 4 hours last night. Similarly, it took her more than an hour to get settled into bed tonight, despite the establishment of rituals such as a dark room, a story, music, and a recap of the day's events. She is an energetic, resourceful and strong little girl, but sleep is probably still pretty terrifying right now because of the grieving process. Her brain is literally rewiring itself with the tools it will need for her to trust us and fully let us into her world without fear of losing us along with all the others. Given that we've spent eight months preparing for this transition and she has had five days, I think we're all doing remarkably well.

We did a little shopping today, picking up a DVD of Chinese cartoons and a CD of traditional lullabies for our little girl. John, our extremely helpful and knowledgeable guide, pointed out that many adoptive families pop the CD in the car for the ride home from the airport to calm their new kids who have never been in car seats before. Good idea. One benefit of thousands of adoptions going through the same city every year is tremendous collective wisdom, which we've been trying to pass along whenever possible.

Tonight's dinner was downright civilized. Xiao Ya sat in her own chair between us, outdoors at a western-style restaurant with a pretty long vegetarian menu. We ended up ordering Chinese food again, and she and I collaborated on the feeding. All three of us managed to eat at the same time, and there were no struggles about portion size. Meanwhile, just for kicks, I offered her celery, cucumbers, green peppers and broccoli. She refused all of these, of course. But with the broccoli on chopsticks in front of her mouth, I said, in English, "But you ate this on the plane last night." She looked at me, and to my delight and amazement, simply opened her mouth. She proceeded to eat every remaining bite of the stuff I offered, and I suppose it's therefore my own damn fault that she's been asleep for the past hour or so but continues to fart up a storm.

Tomorrow, we are touring an old mansion and a Buddhist temple, and picking up a bushel of clean laundry that was not washed in a hotel bathroom. More to come.

Impressive bravery and cooperation at the medical clinic.

Feeding each other soup and other tasty things. We say "aaah" between bites to make sure we have an empty mouth and are not rushing through our meal.

Operation Fruit Canal.

Day 11: Changchun and Guangzhou

2012-02-10T12:12:00.001-05:00

Well, it's after midnight, we've got cocktails with no ice, and I'm chomping on seaweed-coated peanuts on the fourth floor of the Guangdong Victory Hotel. We have arrived in our final city in China. I'll write more about our surroundings tomorrow, but we've already seen more than a handful of adoptive parents and their kids.

This part of the trip seems designed to feel like we're not even in China, and we are not quite sure how to feel about that. What we had for the last five days was unique to us. The experience in Changchun was peculiar and even vexing at times, but it was our first opportunity to get to know Xiao Ya as a person and to learn more about her roots. By contrast, every adoption of a Chinese orphan by American parents ends in Guangzhou. (Many adoptions also originate in Guangdong Province, so they often start here as well.) By the thousands every year, we all stay at the same half-dozen hotels, take our children to the same clinic for exams and testing, and take the oath and receive visas at the same U.S. consulate. We will welcome the opportunity to spend time in person with families who are sharing similar experiences -- as we have already done online -- but will miss the early days we had with our daughter and the various people in her home province who took such good care of us.

Today was a long and exhausting day, but a good one. Xiao Ya had a good night's sleep and a good breakfast. She even let me pick her up a couple of times! We had some FaceTime with one set of the Michigan grandparents. Her afternoon nap went long, which meant we missed a Skype call with my mom. It also meant the sight of two ordinarily rational and organized travelers buzzing around their room like a couple of hummingbirds, frantically jamming their belongings into every opening of every piece of luggage. But we made it out on time, and I even had one last trip to the dreaded Supercenter across the street to replace a little girl's coat that was regurgitatively ruined. I managed to make some order out of the packing chaos while we were riding to the airport. We also got her Chinese passport today.

We had a guide with us and a luggage cart, so the check-in experience was pretty simple. We did have to wait in line to get our boarding passes, but the security officers let us through to the front of the line because of the child and the comical number of little carry-ons I was hauling. Xiao Ya discovered what fun it can be to pull her own suitcase (see photo below), and I marveled at the little machine in the wall that dispenses both hot and cold drinking water. Apparently it's common practice in China to carry one's loose tea leaves in a clear commuter mug and fill it up with hot water after security or on the plane. I think that's pretty neat.

The Changchun airport is pretty intimate - probably about the size of the one in Grand Rapids, Mich. that we've frequented while visiting the R side of the family. But recall that Changchun's population is similar to that of Los Angeles. China simply doesn't have the air miles traveled per capita that the U.S. does. But this is changing. Beijing's airport was the largest in the world when it opened in 2008. Ready for more impressive stuff? China built 33 new airports in the last 5 years, and improved facilities at 142 others. In the next 5 years, the country plans to expand 91 airports, build 56 new ones and relocate 16 others. That leaves only 12 airports untouched in the entire country. Total cost over 10 years is nearly half a trillion dollars. Yes, they know no to invest in infrastructure around here.

So we got on the plane in plenty of time, and I have to say despite our nightmares of a toddler screaming her lungs out for the whole time unless we doped her with Benadryl, we actually had a lot of fun. She learned how to put on and take off her seatbelt by herself, and had such a good time in the bathroom that she kept drinking water and took Mama there 7 times! We ate a nice meal together, got a coloring book from the fight attendant, and spent the entire time playing with items we acquired on the plane. We'd brought along a little backpack with crayons, paper, Play Doh, a squeeze ball and her ever-present comb and photo book. But none of these would see the light of the cabin during the flight. Instead, Xiao Ya was totally fascinated and entertained by...

Granola bar
Seat belt
Overhead lights
Cup and spoon
Box that contained dinner
Plastic trays from inside the box

We still haven't shown her most of the things we brought to occupy her time. I never busted out the iPad on plane. And we had two minor power struggles about sitting down in her seat and buckling in during takeoff and landing, both of which we resolved quickly with a little food bribery. She cried for two minutes or so out of a 4-1/2 hour flight, and threw an empty paper cup over the seat in front of Lindy. (The sleepy woman she hit with it handed it back to us.) But these little things and the many, many bathroom trips aside, we had a very good first flight together. She seemed to not even notice the noise, thrust or ear pressure buildup from the takeoff and landing, much as she slept through the fireworks on Monday night.

Our guide John was waiting for us with a lovely sign and excellent English skills. We drove to the Victory with two dozing R-H females in the van, and now here we are. Tomorrow is the little one's medical exam and TB test. The afternoon is free and will likely include nap time for all three of us...

Pulling her Trunki through Changchun Longjia Internaional Airport.

Aboard Shenzhen Airlines #9666: more water, please!

Day 10: Changchun

2012-02-09T09:32:00.001-05:00

With Lindy wrapping a hard-earned sleep wrapped around all 10.2 kilos of snoring daughter, I'm on my own to polish off some leftovers and reflect on our last full day in this city. Today was a very hard day, but it was fulfilling and represented progress in ways I now know only parents can fully imagine or comprehend. I am not the one who carries Xiao Ya, or bathes her or takes her to the potty, but I am bone-tired anyway from trying to decode this kid and keep up with the less hands-on tasks of parenting like laundry and dishes, and making sure there is food.

All of that said, this has been a marvelous adventure and a true change of pace. To go from shoveling down lunch at my desk on a good day to sliding grains of rice into the mouth of a toddler on chopsticks is nothing short of an exercise in true mindfulness. She is a great teacher. And I haven't had a cell phone or BlackBerry on me in 10 days, though I will cop to checking my work email a few times mostly out of habit. I do not have hundreds of pieces of information flying into my brain every day. Instead, I focus almost entirely on what I'm here to do: be a dad and a husband, and make sure we get the right paperwork to get all three of us out of here.

The day started well. There was no kicking in the head last night, and Xiao Ya slept pretty soundly until 5:30 or so. Breakfast was uneventful, as we stuck only to white rice, bananas and steamed buns. I'm pleased to report that her digestive system seems to be under control. Perhaps too much. But we will see tomorrow.

We also had a few meltdowns today, all related in some way to undesired or desired behavior; food; and the bathroom. For example, we had to take away a snack cup full of what we later discovered wasn't Cheerios but something much sweeter, because food isn't allowed in the bathroom. She screamed and fussed for a long time, but we had a nice teachable moment and all ended up feeding each other the rest of the cereal. We've learned she is not ready to control her own snacking, as she does not know the concepts of "abundant" and "later" just yet. So food will come exclusively from us, at designated times, while seated, for the time being. We will be more diligent about sugar, and perhaps more obviously, taste things before feeding them to her off the breakfast buffet.

The screaming fit to end all screaming fits was today, and also resulted in little XY's first "time in." For institutionalized kids, you don't want to do a "time out" where you send them away to cool off. Instead, you join the child and hold her while she's squirming and yelling her lungs out. This took about a half hour. She did simmer down and eat a nice dinner with some good eye contact afterwards. The precipitating incident was that Lindy had the Chinese phrasebook out to ask some questions in the bathroom, and Xiao Ya grabbed it from her. Lindy took it back, and the fireworks started. It was hard to watch, especially as a bystander who had little role in the comforting. But the girl obviously has some sadness and rage to work through, and letting it out is important. Especially when it's not in the middle of the night, in a store or on an airplane.

Xiao Ya is letting me in a little more every day. I actually have it pretty good, considering the stories I've heard about other adoptive parents who aren't even acknowledged for months. Also, if she had been closer to me initially, I would have had to scramble to learn all of the caregiving functions that Lindy already knows like she's been doing them forever. Instead, I can just watch her and learn as I'm respecting and admiring. Today, I picked the kid up twice to put her in a chair to eat, continued my job as the feeder in chief, got my foot touched a couple of times on purpose, and was delighted when she stayed in the room with me to eat Saltines instead of following Lindy to the bathroom!

Today, we visited Jilin City. About an hour's drive from Changchun (which is the capital of Jilin Province), this is where Xiao Ya was found and spent the first year or so of her life. We were initially unsure about whether we would be able to make the trip, given the potential weather conditions and questions about the cooperation of the local officials. But today was a beautiful but chilly day, and the local officials treated us to a giant feast of a meal at the one Buddhist restaurant in town before taking us on a tour of several key places. We expected to take them to lunch as thanks for bringing Xiao Ya into our lives, but the tables had turned. Our daughter fared quite well, enjoying the conversations and the attention even though she was still eating only Saltines and bananas. (An aside: the northern dialect contains an interlocutory expression, like a "well," or "um" in English, that sounds astonishingly like a well-known American racial slur. As it makes up a good chunk of nearly every conversation we hear, Lindy and I keep shooting each other looks.)

We first visited the Social Welfare Institute, which is a home for orphans and the elderly. We met the nanny who first took Xiao Ya in at the age of one month, back in 2009, and was thus the person who named her. She was so pleased to see her former ward again, and to hear that we're keeping her name. We went into the room where she spent about a year growing up, which we were a little concerned would freak her out. It didn't. We met a much younger baby who is about to have surgery, and he let me pick him up like we'd Ben each other for years. The orphanage director asked if I thought he would find a family. I told him that would take about five minutes!

Next, we stopped and took some pictures outside Anshun Compound, which is a gated apartment community in Jilin where Xiao Ya was found. We don't know exactly where. Then it was off to the police station where she was taken. We had the name of the officer who brought her in, but Hannah and the station management couldn't track him down to talk to us after a fair amount of trying. We then drove around and saw some public spaces and the riverfront. I was going to write that it really is a beautiful little city, until I learned it has a larger population than that of Los Angeles. (Changchun, by comparison, is almost as populous as New York.) There are rolling hills and soybean and cornfields in the area leading up to Jilin, plenty of trees, and even a bunch of people out flying kites on a chilly midday. We got back to our home base around 4:00.

Hard as it was to travel while we're still getting to know each other, and easy as it would have been to ignore certain realities about this adoption, we are so glad we took this trip. We will never have an original birth certificate, an exact date of birth, or knowledge of the exact circumstances of her abandonment at about a month of age. It's highly unlikely she'll ever know her biological relatives. That's a pretty big hole in a person's identity. So it is extremely important for Xiao Ya to know, when she's old enough to understand, as much as we know about where she came from. That she has already been back once as a visitor and can choose to do so again when she's older. And that it takes nothing whatsoever away from our status as her adoptive parents for her to seek as much insight and information about her origins,

Tomorrow's update may not actually come until Saturday. We are due to receive Xiao Ya's passport in the afternoon and catch a late flight to Guangzhou, likely arriving in our hotel after 11. We are looking forward to the change of scenery and the warmer weather, and spending time with other adoptive families. Also, at the risk of sounding like a spoiled American traveler, we look forward to a little more diversity in cuisine. I think I've earned the right to say this, having used chopsticks at every one of my last two dozen or so meals. Important stuff is happening on Saturday, as the little one will have her visa picture taken and medical exam administered.

Some photos from the day...

Local taxi.

With the crew of the Social Welfare Institute of Jilin City.

With the nanny who named Xiao Ya.

Alan meets another baby.

Outside the residential complex where she was found May 15, 2009.

Outside the police station where she was taken.

Slumbering away on the way home.

Day 9: Changchun

2012-02-08T10:06:00.001-05:00

Today began around 5 a.m., with my daughter upside down in bed and kicking me, repeatedly, in the head while thrashing about in her sleep. (We're both pretty sure she was sleeping and not doing it on purpose.) By late evening, I was washing vomit off her clothes and her mom's clothes in the bathtub.

Yep, it was one of those days. We had four mini-meltdowns, all based on telling her she needed to do something or to stop doing something, a bout with the runs that caused many trips to the bathroom with Mama and another trip to Walmart for Baba, who bought saltines and Gatorade and plotted ways to keep Xiao Ya's food inside Xiao Ya while keeping himself from further enriching the Walton estate while in China. There was a confusing conversation that leads us now to believe our future daughter was receiving infant formula several times a day as a toddler up until recently. And yes, a surprise yack attack in the van on the way home from dinner.

But today was also a very good day. Xiao Ya began asserting a little independence for the first time, which is why we had to set boundaries for her. We had great eye contact during her feeding times, and you'll see a picture below of when she decided to yank the noodle bowl out of my hands and finish the job herself. She blew a couple of kisses at me while sitting in the bathroom sink, which is officially her favorite place in the hotel. Mama was able to sneak a few minutes for herself in the bathroom. And I discovered that the kid's policy against eating green foods does extend to dried kiwi, but not to Skittles. Within that discovery, by the way, was the related revelation that two Skittles is too many if our toddler is to remain as levelheaded as one might possibly expect.

We also had an amazing dinner tonight. Thanks to the efforts of our guide, Hannah, who joined us, we visited the home of our friend Joy's parents about 25 minutes away from where we are staying. It's a tidy two-bedroom unit that is intriguingly decorated with artifacts from all over the world, and makes absolutely brilliant use of space. They are a retired opera star and music teacher, and they made us an outstanding meal that will likely be the only home-cooked one we would have in China. It was the best tofu I've had, and came with a massive spread of other foods and beverages that covered the whole table. Xiao Ya was her usual shy self, sitting on Mama's lap the whole time when they weren't running to the bathroom, but it was obvious she enjoyed hearing the rapid fire Chinese spoken across the table. When someone who has lived down the street from you for years but remained a stranger until she came to work for your employer introduces you to her friend who grew up in the same province as your soon-to-be adopted daughter, and when said daughter is joining you for dinner in the home of said friend's parents a few months later, it is truly a small world.

Despite all the running around, crying, and rather volcanic digestive tendencies of the day, kiddo is sleeping wonderfully right now, as she has been for the past couple hours. A bedtime bath and somewhat peculiar haircut have left her looking like an unconscious Buddha with a mohawk and rolled-up cupcake pajama pants. We are hoping the rest of the night is peaceful as well.

Tomorrow, we are set to go to Jilin City to look at the area where she was found in 2009 and see if we can track down the police officer who brought her in. If she is still feeling unwell, she and Lindy may skip the trip and I will join Hannah alone. Xiao Ya's passport is due to be ready early Friday, and we leave late that afternoon for warmer weather and the company of several other adoptive families in Guangzhou.

More tomorrow. In the meantime, photos...

Xiao Ya meets the hair dryer.

Have we mentioned she likes noodles?

Self portrait of two exhausted but happy parents and a skeptical toddler.

With Joy's parents, and their bird.

Day 8: Changchun

2012-02-07T08:53:00.001-05:00

Tonight's post will be brief, as it's just before 9 and the two of us are pretty well drained, watching our sleeping child as we sip a couple of adult beverages and catch up on our electronic correspondence. It was a long day, but Xiao Ya made incredible progress. I believe she is slowly starting to learn we're the only game in town. It will take her much longer to realize we're not about to leave her as all the other adults in her life have done so far. She's a smart, brave little girl who continues to surprise us with how well she is doing.

Xiao Ya and Lindy are still pretty much joined at the hip, waist or hand. Not a lot of crying today, but the few whimpers came when Lindy walked to the bathroom a few steps ahead or tried to get the kid to walk when she wanted to be carried. Meanwhile, I am definitely getting some good acknowledgement and eye contact, but kisses and carrying are still basically verboten. My role at this point is essentially one of a manny -- I feed and provide liquids, and support Mama with whatever she needs. (I also have plenty to do in my roles as documentarian, business manager and personal shopper.) I am absolutely fine with this, as I was prepared for it. I'm still a stranger in the world of a child who has known few men and no male caregivers. Also, giving that Xiao Ya will be raised by a pair of introverts, it only makes sense that she's a little reserved. We met one little girl at Harmony House this week who wanted to be picked up, played with and fussed over by every adult in the vicinity. It was absolutely delightful, and really a lot of fun. But she will likely have some trouble attaching to her new parents and not seeing every adult as a potential caregiver. Xiao Ya playing the tough customer will mean an easier time with boundaries and distinctions when relatives and friends come to visit and meet her.

Today was an all-indoor day for the girls. Lindy's day began around 4:30 this morning, when Xiao Ya decided eight hours of sleep would be enough and it was time to party. Apparently there had been lots of fun with a sticker book after I got past the initial disruption and rolled over back to sleep. Breakfast was a decent experience, and one of the dining room ladies sat down with us for an unexpectedly long chat that ended up encompassing international adoptions, child abandonment, attachment parenting and development milestones. I knew a good while ago that I married a born parent, but this past two days has been truly inspiring to watch.

My signature accomplishment of the day was laundry. In the tub. Seven days' worth for two adults and two days' worth for a toddler. After stomping the water out winery-style, I hung everything up all over the room. The hotel's laundry service is pretty close to expensive even for American standards, so I took matters into my own hands. Given the drying clothes on every available surface, the inexplicably clogged toilet and the wet bedspread (pull-ups for the next few overnights, just in case), we don't think the housekeeping staff was doing cartwheels after leaving Room 970 this afternoon.

That said, despite our early skepticism, this place has been just about perfect for our needs. The odd layout and location within the mall have given us plenty of room to walk around indoors, and plenty of things to see and hear. The food court provided our dinner for the second night in a row, this time on site. We had a giant hot pot with tofu and noodles, and an eggplant dish with rice, complete with two sodas. Way too much food for our little family of three to finish, loaded with fresh vegetables, and all for less than $7. Once again my handy wallet card and a student eager to practice her English helped us along the way.

I did make another Walmart venture today, this time on my own at midday. I picked up a few necessities, and it only took silly pantomiming in front of six retail employees before the underdressed, giant pale guy who doesn't speak Chinese managed to find a lint roller. Otherwise, it was an indoor day for me too.

Today was a day with a lot of smiles and giggling, about a dozen trips to the potty with both kinds of success, and two baths. There was also some sadness, and even a little listening to discipline when both of us insisted it was not good protocol to smear lotion on the mirror.

We would like to share ten fun facts about our new daughter, in no particular order, before the photos of the day.

She is a champion eater. We have encountered few things she won't eat, though nearly all green foods are on the "no" list. She will simply turn her head to one side if she's had enough or doesn't want it. The kid takes bigger bites of a banana than either of her parents. She nearly ate two of her own today, along with: breakfast that included two Chinese buns, a couple of sesame balls, some warm soy milk, a little fruit and about two cups of dry cereal; part of an apple and a pear; part of two fruit leathers; a handful of cashews; some cubed tofu; and a whole bunch of the noodles, eggplant, tofu and veggies that came with dinner. Oh, and a children's vitamin. We're really amazed at her appetite and very grateful for it.
She likes to take baths in the sink. She will pour cups of water over herself for as long as you let her. The tub was a little too big for her yesterday.
She talks to Lindy in Chinese while she's sitting on the potty. A lot. We wish we knew what she is saying. But she communicates the need to go by pointing, and she has had no accidents since her long sleep last night.
She has a terrific attention span. While Lindy was napping for a while, Xiao Ya and I went through the pictures in her photo book over and over and over again.
She carries her photo book (part of the care package last summer) and her comb (from yesterday) everywhere. She will put them down nearby to eat or take a bath. These are especially important to her because they're her first possessions.
She is an acrobat in her sleep, and does a fair amount of talking.
She is very self-sufficient from growing up in a group home, but also content to be cared for. We are trying to give her some of the experiences she would have missed out on growing up so far, such as being fed from a bottle (sippy cup, actually) with eye contact on one of our laps, and sleeping on top of a warm Mama.
She loves lotion, and will put it on herself and others until asked to stop. Similarly, she loves brushing her teeth and washing her hands.
She is fastidious. She will wipe her hands and face while eating, and does not like any food on her clothes. If I am feeding her something and drop a little on the table, she will stop eating and point at it until I clean it up.
She started talking to us today. She asks for Mama and Baba by name, and her first English word was "What?" She also learned how to say "purple."

Tomorrow we venture out to meet our friend Joy's parents while continuing to wait for Xiao Ya's passport. More to come.

Tickle time!

Not to be confused, of course, with apple time!

Day 7: Changchun - Evening

2012-02-06T08:41:00.001-05:00

For nearly two hours, our little steamed vegetable dumpling has been asleep in the middle of our bed. Her parents are eating takeout Sichuan (smile lots, point at picture, share helpful "I'm a vegetarian" explanation card) and marveling at how far she has come today.

Xiao Ya's nap this afternoon was almost over when we got a call from a frantic Hannah, saying we needed to be dressed and out the door in a taxi in a matter of a few minutes, to hurry up and get our photos taken to submit for her passport. Why this little detail couldn't be ironed out when we were already in town this morning, I may never know. But I do know that the photographer's well-intentioned and standard "get the baby to smile" tricks were doomed to fail. I finally asked Jennifer, Hannah's student who has also been helping us, to tell the photographer that we'd been the poor kid's parents for less than five hours and she would never smile if we sat there all day. Mission accomplished. Plastic watermelon and stuffed Minnie Mouse went back in the closet, and out came tiny photos of two grinning adults and one wailing toddler. Needless to say, there was plenty of talking back and forth in Chinese, including to Xiao Ya. We have no idea of anything that was said.

When we got back to the hotel, we actually had an awesome afternoon and evening. She took Lindy's hand walking down the hall. The sales manager for Days stopped by to explain that her staff had mixed up the non-smoking reservation and not the travel agency. She apologized profusely, gave me her card and said I should call her directly anytime, and offered us a nice fruit plate. We spent some time playing with a snack catcher, and Xiao Ya fed each of us from her stash of peanut butter filled pretzels. We taught her how to moisturize, and she put some on my nose.

Today is the Lantern Festival, which closes out the New Year holiday in China. That fact plus our location in town meant we could see -- and hear -- amazing fireworks right outside our window! We told Xiao Ya they were in honor of her family day, of course. Her dinner was a noodle bowl we'd bought last night, and she and I worked out a system where I'd twirl the noodles with a fork onto her spoon, which she would then put in her mouth. Good teamwork, and she ate almost the whole darn thing!

Bath time was pretty easy. As you can imagine, a kid growing up in group care is pretty good at following instructions, though she would only stand and not sit in the tub. She got a little whimper on at the end, so we dried her off and tried putting her to bed. Not much luck getting her to fall asleep any way except on top of Mama, but she apparently rolled off on her own while I was out getting food. She has been out ever since, even though the fireworks are still very much in progress.

I have to say I'm amazed at how well Xiao Ya is doing. We have been her parents for less than 12 hours. She has slept in three different places in as many days, and said goodbye to all of her little friends. This is all on top of her two surgeries and multiple sets of caregivers and living situations. She's a pretty tough kid. I know progress is incremental and some days will be worse than others even when it seems things are getting better. I'm exhausted and Lindy says every muscle is sore -- because she's the only one our daughter will allow to carry her at the moment. But we're both feeling pretty blessed and optimistic about the future.

Enjoying the fireworks above Times Square in Changchun.

Day 7: Changchun

2012-02-06T01:18:00.001-05:00

Greetings from Times Square, where the new boss has arrived and set up shop. Today was about as hectic and nerve-racking as everyone warned us it would be, but the good news is that we have our daughter, we're already nuts about her, and she is fast asleep on top of her Mama right now. We got her some lunch (juice and leftover dumplings from last night) and a change of clothes here in the room. She has spent a fair amount of time crying, but she has had a lot of attention from a lot of people and many changes of environment in the last two days. We have nothing scheduled until at least tomorrow afternoon, and plan to give her as much space and time as she needs to start her grieving and attachment process.

Before we had a moment to catch our breath, we were shooed out of the van with Xiao Ya after a very fast goodbye to Lily, the director of Harmony House who accompanied her here for her adoption, and dashed up the steps of a government building.

Our first meeting was with a provincial official who approves all adoptions. She quizzed us on our plans for Xiao Ya's health care and education, had us sign a bunch of forms including an oath never to abuse or neglect our daughter, and explained that we have 24 hours to change our minds and give her back. (Yeah, right.) She was extremely helpful and cracked a few jokes, gave Xiao Ya a whole bag of candy to get her to stop crying -- a bag of candy she will never eat -- and even helped us count our donation to the orphanage. We were quite surprised at all of this, given that at least two people had warned us about her unpredictable and unfriendly demeanor. We had expected a grumpy old woman with reading glasses perched on her nose, not a fashionable person our age or younger who was patient and understanding, and worked part of a holiday to help us. Today is the Lantern Festival, which concludes the Chinese New Year celebration and explains why firecrackers have been going off in the streets since early morning -- followed a few minutes later by city workers sweeping up the debris. The first photo below is of us with the official and two people from the Jilin orphanage where Xiao Ya was first taken after she was abandoned.

From there, it was back to the van and off to the notary, where we answered many of the same questions, parted with some more cash, and signed some more forms. Somehow, these two trips and some more driving around by Hannah in the next couple of days will culminate in us receiving Xiao Ya's Chinese passport. Only then can we go to Guangzhou on Friday to get medical exams and a visa to wrap up this little adventure.

Considering the upheaval she has been through in recent days and the fact that Xiao Ya has only been our daughter officially for the last 4 hours or so, she is doing exceptionally well. She lets us tend to her biological needs and has cycled through all of them. She isn't keen on me picking her up much, but is also very unused to men. So I am content to be Mama's pit crew for now and have a little patience.

Later this week, we plan to visit the home of our friend's parents for an early dinner. We will go to Jilin on Friday and see if we can talk to the police officer who took Xiao Ya in after she was abandoned. And we've discovered that we can walk the shopping mall even before it opens in the morning, so we hope to get her legs a little work there. The Days has no pool, only separate communal soaking tubs for men and women. Turns out the VW factory isn't doing tours anymore. So we'll see how the rest of the days go.

In the meantime, may I present Ms. Xiao Ya Ellyse R H?

Day 6: Changchun

2012-02-05T09:46:00.001-05:00

We are ensconced on the 9th floor of the Days Hotel after a long day of traveling and making arrangements. Recall from the last post that the Doubletree Langfang is now our favorite hotel in the world. Well, breakfast did nothing to dispel that notion. It was a great meal, and we had the whole dining room to ourselves. In fact, looking at the check-in sheet, there must have been only about 20 people in the whole 200-room hotel. As we were leaving, one of the wait staff told us she was very proud to have us visiting because she grew up in town. I have to say on the whole, everyone we have encountered in the hospitality sector has been extremely friendly and eager to please. This is a dramatic contrast from the United States, where I'm often frustrated by people who don't seem like they care to do a good job at their jobs.

A pretty feverish scramble through the domestic terminal of Beijing Capital International led us to our quick flight to Changchun on China Southern Airlines. This is no mere regional carrier. They have a fleet about the size of Southwest's in the U.S., but some pretty impressive aircraft including a couple of A380s. There was a hot meal for a midday 90-minute flight, and the attendant was kind enough to scrounge a couple of vegan trays even though we hadn't requested them in advance. (Note to self: flight to Guangzhou later this week is 4 hours. Take action.) A queasy-making bumpy patch of air and an early landing later, there we were at baggage claim in Changchun awaiting our guide to pick us up.

The drive into town was 40 minutes or so. So in an effort to clear up a few of my own misconceptions, many of which I probably could have researched away before coming here...

Changchun is not the Planet Hoth. In fact, it was only a few degrees colder today than Beijing was yesterday. However, we're told the locals are calling this an unexpected spring.
Changchun is not an isolated, desolate place. It is actually a pretty big city, with a lot of street life and what appears to be a fair amount of wealth.
Changchun is not completely devoid of foreigners. There were at least six of us on our flight, two of whom were speaking German.

All of this said, our experience has been a bit bizarre. Our frenetic but helpful guide Hannah hustled us off to the Days Hotel to check in. It is part of the American Days Inn chain, but is inexplicably not a Days Inn. It's spread out on two sides of three floors above an upscale shopping mall. Our room was small and somewhat dumpy, and thick with the smell of cigarette smoke. A group of men across the hall was smoking with the door open, and there was an ashtray in the room.

I get the fact that a lot people smoke in China, in places where it's just not done in the U.S. anymore. Hell, I used to be a smoker myself. But Lindy and I just couldn't spend five nights with a toddler in a room with such poor air quality -- especially when Xiao Ya will need time to grieve and we will be spending a lot of time inside because of the cold. We couldn't believe the agency would not have reserved a non-smoking room, especially when the other rooms had been. So this touched off a frantic three-way conversation among Hannah, the front desk and the travel agent in Beijing. Needless to say, the only word we recognized was "Beijing." First, there was no such thing as a designated non-smoking room. Then, we hadn't reserved one. Then, there wasn't one available. Finally, a room was available in the "deluxe wing" of the hotel, which landed us more space and clean air for a few extra dollars a night. Aggravating, but worth it. The new room is very comfortable, if not oddly hot despite the heat being off and the window open in the middle of winter...

We then went to the bank and changed a bunch of money for the week. We went from two money belts to an armload, given that a dollar buys you more than 6 RMB but the typical highest circulated bill in either currency is 100. Felt like we just pulled some kind of heist during the short walk back.

After dinner at a somewhat shady Buddhist restaurant that was also quite tasty, which followed a somewhat death-defying taxi ride, Lindy and I did something we haven't done together in more than a dozen years: we went to Walmart. It is right across the street from the hotel, and we figure it is slightly less problematic to buy overly discounted items that are made in China if we are in China. We had a few little things to pick up, like a gallon of water (sorry, Earth) and a small pair of scissors for knitting after the Beijing airport security confiscated Lindy's. Wow, talk about a synaptic cluster bomb.

Typical of Walmarts everywhere were the bright lights, overcrowded aisles and poorly stocked shelves. But the similarities basically end there. For starters, the store was hard to navigate because there were so many employees restocking. I've never seen an overstaffed discount retailer in the States. Secondly, the store was in the middle of a mall and on two levels. Changing floors required the use of a device that looked like a combination of an escalator and a moving sidewalk -- flat with no steps, but definitely sloped. I told Lindy that a mechanical failure on the way up or an accidental cart release on the way down would be like bowling. They also had people shouting into microphones, and chicken feet for sale in bulk. (We passed.)

Anyway, we got our items and out the door for a little less than $20, including a charge for the plastic bag (sorry, Earth, again) and finally found our way through the right door to our hotel. We were hoping to toast our long day and look forward to tomorrow, but there is no bar and the restaurant wouldn't sell wine by the glass. So we opened the minibar instead, and now it's time to get some sleep.

Tomorrow is Family Day! If what we know of Xiao Ya and the experience of our fellow blogging parents is any guide, we will likely be in pretty rough shape by the time evening rolls around. But we will do our best to post photos. We also hope to travel to Jilin City, which is where she was abandoned and found and is another city in the same province, and to tour the local Volkswagen factory! As a car buff and former Jetta owner, I am hoping our daughter grows up to share my love of metal things that go.

More soon.

Day 5: Langfang

2012-02-04T08:08:00.001-05:00

This morning, we gathered up all of our belongings and jammed them back together into our suitcases before meeting Shirley in the lobby. Her task was to hand us over to the driver who would take us to the next part of our adventure.

Langfang is a smaller city about an hour outside of Beijing. It is an industrial development zone, meaning the government has made conditions favorable for business. It is also the home of Harmony House. For reasons that we'll be able to explain a little later, I will not be describing most of our day in this post. But all is well.

We had pretty low expectations for this place. But it has plenty of charming streets with lots of trees, and we chose a hotel attached to a new upscale shopping center that is still partially under construction. Many well-off young people wearing fancy clothes caught us a bit by surprise. The food aesthetic there is more sit-down than Cinnabon, so we had a nice meal of Thai for a change, and fared surprisingly well given that the staff were speaking Thai and Chinese with very little English.

The hotel is opulent. Put another way, the Doubletree Langfang is the fanciest hotel I've ever seen, let alone stayed in. The room has 10-foot ceilings with marble everywhere, and a wall-sized window in the bathroom with a retractable blind. Everything is just a few months old, and the place is nearly empty for the moment. It is an odd feeling to be the couple staying in the nicest hotel in town, and one we wouldn't come close to being able to afford if it were in an American city. I need to grab a picture of the lobby to do it justice. For now, here is one of the room.

Dinner tonight was at a Buddhist restaurant in a strip mall. Terrific, after the usual dance of finding the person who speaks the best English on staff. We walked back, and will probably spend some time at the pool.

Tomorrow morning: the R-Hs join the hopefully friendly folks at China Southern Airlines for a short trip north to Changchun, where the high temperature will be 28 and the low will be 10. More soon.

Day 4: Beijing - Evening

2012-02-03T08:40:00.001-05:00

Busy day today! We did end up having a spectacular meal at the veggie place for lunch, and never would have expected to find such a place in what is basically an alley.

We wandered around the shopping area near our hotel after breakfast. On our touring agenda for the afternoon were Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, a tea tasting, the area where the Olympics took place four years ago, and a Chinese acrobat show at the Beijing Theatre. Beijing is big on public gathering places, and we learned how popular the Forbidden City became once it ceased to be an imperial compound and was opened to the public less than a hundred years ago. The acrobats were great, but had a couple of close calls. Highlights included an illusionist riding a motorcycle, and at least six girls on a single bicycle.

It was a packed schedule, and as predicted, several random people did stop us and ask to take pictures with us. I'm still not really sure why this happens, but I don't mind the newfound celebrity too much. I think it's probably my height. Given that and the year of my birth, Shirley has dubbed me the Giant Rabbit.

Dinner was good and rather comical too. We went to a restaurant I found in an English-language newspaper, which had Vegan Tea Restaurant in big English letters outside. Imagine our surprise after the driver and Shirley dropped us off to find no English in the menu at all, and a limited set of vocabulary from only one of several bemused waiters and waitresses. We puzzled it out, but not without some curiosity and giggling, which I probably made worse by flinging a piece of lotus root onto the floor with a chopstick.

Please enjoy some photos. Posting will likely be light in the next few days as we transition to a couple of different locations over the weekend. Monday is adoption day!

Alley location of Fu Hui Ci Yuan Vegetarian Cultural Restaurant.

Random people with us on Tiananmen Square.

Lindy and Shirley, our tour guide, in front of the Forbidden City.

Inside the Forbidden City.

All about Chinese Tea.

Outside Ai Weiwei's "Birds Nest" stadium, built for 2008 Olympics.

And... another photo with a random tourist.

Day 4: Beijing - Morning

2012-02-02T16:10:00.001-05:00

Yesterday's daytime activities were a lot of fun and very educational too. In fact, the combination of everything we did, the time change and the sleep deficit teamed up to change our evening plans rather dramatically.

After breakfast, our guide Shirley and her driver (whose name, after two days, we still do not know because he never talks) picked us up. Our first stop was a government-run jade factory and outlet store, where we learned all about the different kinds of jade and how they're carved. We had the full faith and credit of the People's Republic backing both the quality and price of the materials. Naturally, we spent far too much money on gifts.

Then, the Great Wall. It was a blustery, windy day, so we sadly did not get very far on our climb. It wasn't very crowded, and we got some great pictures. Shirley had left us to our own devices, so we ended up also spending some time at a Taoist temple at the foot of the Wall. No photos there, but after a sizable donation, the priest guaranteed us and our colleagues success in business and good luck for our parents.

Lunchtime saw a trip to some sort of giant truckstop/gift shop/cafeteria. Shirley took us in, got us a table, ordered for us and left. The food was decent but not great, and though we seemed to be the only Americans in a restaurant of several hundred people, we felt oddly inconspicuous. After a run through the gift shop, Shirley explained that no actual Chinese people ever ate or shopped there. They were all tourists from Korea or Japan, two countries that join ours in sending the bulk of the visitors to China every year.

The Summer Palace was next. Shirley did the guiding this time. The place is vast, beautiful and very serene. Built in the 18th century, it is actually pretty recent by way of Chinese historical landmarks. It has the world's largest painted corridor, which the emperor at the time built so his mother could see the lake on inclement days.

Shirley is pretty fascinating. Her English is superb, and she has been to DC and spent some time studying and working as a waitress in San Jose. She and her husband have two small boys, permissible under the one-child policy because both parents were only children. We have talked about everything from media depictions of our respective two countries during the cold war to the labor situation for Apple assembly workers in the Foxconn plant at Shenzhen.

It was back to the hotel after our time at the Summer Palace. We had thought about visiting the lobby bar for happy hour, and since the anonymous driver was kind enough to show us the restaurant we couldn't find the night before, we planned a rematch for dinner. First, though, we figured a brief nap would be in order.

Thirteen hours of briefly napping later, here I am writing a blog post before the crack of dawn. I'm a little hungry and very dehydrated (the room is drafty, so we've been cranking the heat, plus there isn't potable tap water available everywhere as at home, so we've been drinking tea and a little bit of bottled), but I'm very well rested. Lindy is still out cold.

Today, we visit Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, a tea house, and an acrobat show. We will track down the elusive but nearby veggie place for lunch first. Tomorrow morning, we transition to Langfang and visit Harmony House to see where our future daughter has been living for most of the time in her memory.

A few photos from today:

Jade artisan. The piece is a series of concentric balls carved from a single piece of stone. It represents good luck for the family.

Jade sales lady, after a demonstration of how to tell real jade from fake. One of the bangles from this case is now on Lindy's arm.

At the Great Wall, and after coming back down

At the Summer Palace, in winter. Detail inside one of the painted hallways.

Day 3: Beijing - Morning

2012-02-01T19:11:00.001-05:00

Last night's dinner was amazing. Perhaps it was fatigue, and perhaps it was the vegan airplane meals that were edible but had a slight correctional quality to them, but the two of us demolished the tofu, spinach, and scallion pancakes put before us at a restaurant a few door down from our hotel. I believe the total cost was about $20. We benefitted greatly from our friend Joy's little "we don't eat any meat" card.

We had wandered around trying to find a veggie place I'd discovered online, which Google said was only a few blocks away and the front desk person told us was an easy walk. No dice, though plenty of folks tried to help us and practice their English at the same time. One young girl asked us where we were visiting from, told me it was romantic that we were holding hands, and said, "Your girlfriend is very tall." As it turns out, I think I'm the tallest person in the entire city. Lindy says people keep staring at me, but i haven't noticed.

We went to bed a little after 9, and woke up at 3 a.m. deciding to hit the snacks. After a couple more hours of rest, we got up for the breakfast buffet. It has a beautiful presentation and plenty of options. On closer inspection, some of the items are somewhat inaccurate approximations of Western breakfast foods (hash browns, baked beans), but the fruit and juices were great, and the made-to-order noodles with fresh vegetables ere delightful.

Today: Great Wall, Summer Palace and jade market. Lots of walking. High temperature will be 32 degrees. About a dozen years ago, Lindy bought us a pair of vacuum thermoses at Starbucks that will keep liquid hot for 8 hours or more. We have some tea, and we'll see how it goes. Hoping to post pictures tonight.

Day 2: Beijing

2012-02-01T04:06:00.002-05:00

The view from Row 22, Flight 897.

We have arrived safely at our hotel in Beijing. The flight was not crowded, and landed about an hour early! Economy Plus was a worthwhile investment.

The view from the 7th floor.

It's 5 p.m. here, but neither of us really slept on the plane. My guess is it will be dinnertime, followed by bedtime, pretty soon. Tomorrow is a big day of touring...

Day 2: Beijing

2012-02-01T04:06:00.001-05:00

The view from Row 22, Flight 897.

We have arrived safely at our hotel in Beijing. The flight was not crowded, and landed about an hour early! Economy Plus was a worthwhile investment.

The view from the 7th floor.

It's 5 p.m. here, but neither of us really slept on the plane. My guess is it will be dinnertime, followed by bedtime, pretty soon. Tomorrow is a big day of touring...

Day 1: Virginia

2012-01-31T11:39:00.001-05:00

Tomorrow.

2012-01-30T19:06:00.001-05:00

Well, tomorrow is nearly upon us. Bags are packed, final chores complete, and I'm preparing a feast of leftovers that should get us through boarding.

You're looking at a picture of last night's Ergo kid carrier test run. The "baby" we used was a 17-pound bag of cat litter that's smaller and lighter than our daughter and doesn't have legs, but at least we know the basics.

This is the luggage pile. Our two biggest suitcases, filled with adult and kid clothing, snacks and various wipes, soaps and medications. The big donation box. A carry-on and personal item each. Lindy's carry-on is actually Xiao Ya's suitcase. Thanks to our kind neighbor who lent us her bathroom scale, we know everything is within weight limits.

Today, we finished our packing in the morning and very nearly had a private screening of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" downtown in the afternoon. It felt a little like adult hooky. I bought overpriced luggage tags. And we've made arrangements to Skype or FaceTime with nearly all of our relatives.

Boarding documents and passports are packed. Our next dispatch will probably be from Dulles Airport, where we are wheels up in about 18 hours!

Thrust.

2012-01-29T11:14:00.001-05:00

2 Days Before Departure.

The Pratt & Whitney 4090-112 turbofan engine can develop more than 90,000 pounds of thrust. It is one of the largest, strongest jet engines ever built. In pairs, they power the Boeing 777-200ER that will begin carrying Lindy, a few hundred other passengers and me toward Beijing in less than 48 hours.

Simply put, anything capable of lifting 656,000 pounds and hurling it through the air for thousands of miles is a technological marvel. Yet it actually pales in strength when compared to the community that has embraced us and carried us through this process since we announced our adoption plans in May. So I suspect it is their hopes, prayers and actions I will feel, rather than the two 11-foot diameter engines under the wing, when we're airborne on Tuesday.

We have had our parents gently jockeying for future visits, our friends falling all over themselves to give us wisdom and aid, and perfect strangers reaching out electronically to wish us well. Our respective employers have been amazing, from Lindy's six-month sojourn away from the classroom and streams of excited but dejected students coming through her doorway to my team's quiet assurance that all will be well for the next month and quick sendoff with little hoopla, which was exactly what I wanted.

And so we come upon our last weekend as non-parents. Tuesday is wheels up. One week from today is the first of the ultimate transitions, when we'll fly from Beijing to Changchun and await the beginning of our official adoption proceedings in the provincial offices the next day. The weekend is going exactly as we planned -- fairly easygoing and with little stress, much to the seeming amazement of many except ourselves. Work is basically wrapped up, save for a stray phone call or email here and there. We've had dinners with friends, Lindy had a baby shower and a manicure yesterday, and I sat down and finished off our taxes in a tidy 90 minutes. Today, we're headed down to Chinatown for the Chinese New Year parade. At some point later in the afternoon, not sure when, the laundry will be done and we'll pack our clothes.

Tomorrow, I will print our boarding passes, go to the bank, and take my wife to the movies. On a Monday. In the middle of the day. Then we'll have a nice dinner and try to get a decent night's sleep. One of us will remember to pull our passports out of the drawer and bring them to the airport. And then we'll go start a family.

It might do me some good in the next couple of days to remind myself that we're actually in the eye of the hurricane right now. That our lives are about to be turned irrevocably inside out by the arrival of a force whose magnitude we cannot yet imagine. At the same time, I feel like all of the time and reading we put into Buddhism, meditation and mindfulness yet have pretty well ignored for a couple of years is actually going into practice right now. I don't think I've ever felt quite this present in my life. For this moment, present means sleeping in, leftover pizza and the Sunday paper. There's no doubt that the next moment will be radically different, but it's not here just yet.

When it is, we will have the thrust of our community lifting us high.

Cooking, Cooking, Reading.

2012-01-23T15:47:00.001-05:00

8 Days Before Departure.

We're into the single digits here, folks. Lindy and I are nearing the end of our first day of the last work week before our big trip. The big news from the weekend is that everything except going to the bank and packing our clothes is done.

What this means is that I spent a bunch of the weekend cooking. The freezer is full for when we get back, and it's specifically full of things like Dairy Free Mac and Cheese, Chickpea Cutlets, Bittman's Bean Burgers and Marbled Banana Bread.

Adoption is in the news here in DC. Yesterday's Washington Post carried a story about adopted teens returning to their birth countries in search of a piece of themselves. I also discovered, a little late, that the Chicago Tribune is running an adoption series. Especially liked this post about what taking custody looks like when you're adopting from China -- it's probably a good preview of what we're headed for in a few weeks.

We both hope the week is relatively low-key, wrapping up and handing off projects at work and dining a few more times with friends and co-workers. Sorting and packing is to happen this weekend. We're planning to pack about six days' worth of clothing and do laundry twice while we're in China. The challenge will be to prepare for three climate zones: one that's pretty similar to where we live now, one where a friend recently told us, "once you come back from there, you'll never feel cold again," and one where walking around in short sleeves will probably be comfortable. Lots of layers and every thermal undergarment in the house, for sure.

Clea's canine spider-sense is tingling with the notion that something's up. I can't tell if she knows we're preparing for a trip, or that we're leaving for two weeks to adopt a 33-month-old girl from Northern China and stopping in Hong Kong and Tokyo along the way, but she knows something. The good news is that she's been played with, tripped over and poked at by enough toddlers -- and gotten good enough at coaxing food from them too -- that we're pretty sure she and Xiao Ya will be fast friends.

To that end, here's a photo from this past summer of Xiao Ya, Little Clea and a picture of the big one.

Three Friday Bites.

2012-01-20T17:08:00.002-05:00

11 Days Before Departure.

Nothing big to report on the preparation front, but I have three interesting news items that go to the relationship between the United States and China in advance of the Lunar New Year. Have a great weekend!

Clock Still Ticks.

2012-01-19T09:39:00.000-05:00

12 Days Before Departure.

Looked at my calendar today and realized it's been quite a few days since my last post. Lindy is busily preparing her lesson plans for the entire semester at school, to cover her substitute for the rest of the school year. Our travel itinerary is finally locked after a good number of emails, phone calls and online research.The car seat is in the Prius, properly and securely thanks to an inspection by a helpful DC Fire and EMS employee. And our list of things to do before we travel, specifically related to the trip or the adoption, is down to three:

Cook for the freezer.
Go to the bank.
Pack!

Meanwhile, you're looking at a treasure trove of various artificially-flavored instant noodle soups from China. I stopped by the grocery in Chinatown after reading the blogs of a few new adoptive parents whose children love them some noodles. If Xiao Ya craves some familiar flavor from her homeland after coming to DC, we've got some ready to go. Lindy and I couldn't resist the urge to sample, so we ate one (I think it was "mushroom and artificial abalone" or some such) the other night. In the words of Marge Simpson, "The secret ingredient is salt."

Speaking of dinner, we had the pleasure of hosting some fairly new friends over the weekend. One is a colleague of mine of Chinese descent, and another is a friend of hers, who happened to grow up in Changchun. (I've mentioned her before.) After an evening of great conversation with them and their significant others, I'm pleased to report that we also have lists of vegetarian restaurants in two Chinese cities and little laminated cards that say "We are Buddhists, we don't eat any meat," and "We are vegetarians, please don't cook our dish with animal fat or meat." We'll see what happens.

Warning... travel and logistics geekery ahead!

We made two changes in the travel itinerary this week, both involving hotels. The first was straightforward, and the second nearly made my process-oriented INFJ head explode. We decided to change hotels in Langfang, the city outside Beijing where we'll be staying for one night before heading off to Changchun. The agency's travel coordinator had chosen a very new property that's close to Harmony House, which we'll be visiting that day. But the website was still under construction, and TripAdvisor had only one review in English that sounded a little cautionary. So, for our penultimate night as non-parents, we are staying at the DoubleTree.

The second, and much more brain-racking, was our hotel in Hong Kong. I'm pleased with the way this turned out, but as our family's self-appointed travel genius, it took me an unusually long time to wrap my head around how everything will work. It was actually a domino decision that affects how we're leaving the country to get back to the States.

To recap, we're ending our adoption process in Guangzhou, in southern China, which is where the United States Consulate will administer our oath and issue Xiao Ya's visa to come home to the U.S. It is both more time-consuming and more expensive to return home from Guangzhou because of the way connecting flights to the East Coast are configured. So all adoptive families from the U.S. end up in Guangzhou, but they usually leave via Hong Kong. We are scheduled to receive the visa on the afternoon of Wednesday, February 15, and take a train from Guangzhou to Hong Kong early that evening.

The original plan was to arrive in Hong Kong by train, and go immediately to the SkyCity Marriott that's right near the airport. We would spend the night there and head to the airport in plenty of time to catch our 10:30 a.m. flight on Thursday. Simple, right?

Not really.

After the train ride, we'd need to go through customs and immigration and change money (Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of China, and still has its own border control and currency), then either:

Find the right type of taxi (there are three) and hope to communicate our destination to a likely non-English-speaking driver, sitting through some of Hong Kong's notoriously bad traffic, or
Take a free shuttle to the high-speed Airport Express train, then walk 10 minutes from the station to our hotel. This would be cheaper and likely faster, but would involve more schlepping of luggage and child.

My best guess is that we'd get to the hotel by 10, exhausted and likely hungry. The next morning, because the Marriott is near but not at the airport, we'd need to catch the free 5-minute shuttle that runs once every 20 minutes. In either combination, this was a lot of hops and hauling, and a fair amount of money, all with the idea of getting a good night's sleep and not stressing over getting to the airport. Perhaps there was a better way?

There was, and I had to fight through my initial "get as close to the airport as you can, as early as you can" intuition to find it. There is a hotel, the Harbour Plaza Metropolis, directly across the street from the train station where we're arriving from Guangzhou. For the next morning, it has a free shuttle to the Airport Express station in Kowloon, where trains run every 10 minutes. United has a counter at the Kowloon station, so we actually check in for our flight and hand off our bags before getting on the train, which takes us directly into the terminal in 21 minutes.

So we will check in earlier, hopefully get to sleep earlier for our last night in Asia, and make it to the airport the next day in roughly the same amount of time -- minus our bags, which will already be checked through to Dulles. I had a heck of a time figuring out if we could have a kid in a queen-sized room at the Metropolis, and it took two frustrating phone calls and an email to discover that the answer is yes. Done.

The prices of the two hotels were roughly equal -- ouch -- and we get to see a tiny little bit of the city instead of the airport. I also discovered after booking that there's a vegan noodle and dumpling stand in the mall attached to the hotel! No needing to figure out what to eat or costly room service after we arrive... bonus.

That's a pretty long story to cover setting up a night in a hotel room. But it's an important part of the journey, and I don't know what else I could or should be doing at this point -- short of freaking out quite a bit -- to continue to prepare for the fact that I'm going to be a first-time parent in 2-1/2 weeks.

Oh yes... photo time! This one's more of a classic that we recently discovered.

Odds and ends.

2012-01-11T13:18:00.002-05:00

20 Days Before Departure.

We have a little less than three weeks to go before the big trip, and not a whole lot to report. A few little bits and pieces are falling into place...

Agency meeting. We had our last in-person meeting with the adoption agency late last week, and went over all the details of our trip -- including which documents we would need to take with us, and when we would need them. Everything we need to fill out in advance is now filled out, and I have scanned the entire bundle and emailed it to myself as a Google document just in case.

The weather. Packing clothes probably won't happen for another couple of weeks, but I've started to keep an eye on the climate trends for the three very different areas of China we'll be visiting. To the right is what Changchun looks like today: just barely in the single digits! I'm sure in three weeks' time, it will be even more delightful.

More blog friends! We have started to discover more families who will be in China around the same time as ours, and another family who has adopted from Harmony House and had more pictures for us.

More dinners! We continue our round of last dinners before the trip. This weekend, we had the pleasure of dining at the home of a couple of longtime friends and their son who is a little younger than Xiao Ya. Last night, it was pizza with a colleague of mine and his family, who made a similar trip almost exactly two years ago. They've been an indispensable source of inspiration and information.

The Giant Box. Lindy and I have assembled a large, clear plastic box of donations for Harmony House and small gifts for the various officials and caregivers we'll encounter on our trip. Our next trick will be to beg United for mercy on its baggage fees, as the airline has now started charging for a second piece of luggage on most international trips, and we actually have clothing and supplies of our own to take. I'm told the folks at the airport have a little bit of discretion in this regard. Ironically, because we're flying back through Japan (not sure why that matters) and will have a third passenger, we're entitled to six free pieces of checked luggage on the way home. Anyone who thinks we'll be schlepping six suitcases, three carry-ons and a toddler back from China might also be interested in a bridge I was thinking of posting on Craigslist...

Chinese studies. We're continuing our march through the Chinese in No Time audio CD I snagged from the library. Though it's a bit of a misnomer at four hours and counting, I am pleased to report that both of us can now count to six in Chinese and state such timeless classics as "Mommy, daddy, long time no see!" and "My nose hurts."

China in the news. The Associated Press ran a story about adopted Chinese kids and blended families during Chinese New Year this week. On Sunday, the Washington Post Travel section's cover story was about Guangzhou, where we will spend the last third of our trip.

Photo time. No blog post would be complete without it. Thanks again to our new friends in Texas for this one. Wish I'd heard the joke too...

Almost New Year's.

2012-01-04T16:39:00.000-05:00

27 Days Before Departure.

As Lindy and I continue on our methodical (maniacal?) path to China, we're steadfastly addressing the little details such as figuring out how to install a car seat and making sure we have enough Band-Aids. At the moment, we don't.

But Chinese New Year is coming up. It's actually the reason we're not traveling to China sooner, because the government largely shuts down for a big national holiday. Here in the District, we have a small but growing Chinese community and a "Chinatown" that is much smaller than it once was. You're far more likely to see Chipotle and Urban Outfitters, both with signage in Chinese, than you are to see a small business owned locally by a person of Chinese descent.

Every year, the regional Chinese community puts on a party and parade in what's left of Chinatown. I remember suffering in the cold one year not too long ago, watching my boss read a speech I'd written to kick off the event. This year, we'll definitely have to wander down to check it out and make it an annual tradition.

The Washington Post has more, both on Chinatown and Chinese New Year:

Organizers of D.C. Chinese New Year parade aim for a bigger show (Washington Post, 01/04/2012)

And we have another picture. What a crowd!

What is "Ready?"

2012-01-02T20:29:00.001-05:00

29 Days Before Departure.

Happy new year, everyone. We returned home today from a great weekend getaway in central Virginia with nine other adults, six of whom were parents (and one aunt) of the six children they brought along -- ages 3 months to 5 years. Last night, I received a very practical lesson in what it takes to get a meal on the table, on time, for a group of kids and have them actually want to eat it. We enjoyed catching up with this bunch of mostly longtime friends and watching their parenting in action up close.

In less than a month's time, a wide-bodied United jet will whisk us away on a trip that will forever change the trajectory of three lives. At the moment, Lindy is busily sorting though the various toys and items of clothing that found their way to us from generous friends and relatives in the last few weeks. It's been incredible to experience all the love, support and enthusiasm from the community that will welcome Xiao Ya and watch her grow up.

For the most part, folks have been telling us our lives are never going to be the same, and asking if we're excited. (We agree, and we are.) What surprises me a bit is that I've not been asked if we're ready.

I'm an introspective sort who works in the public relations business, which means I sometimes have answers for questions nobody asks. In this case, I think we'll never truly be ready. But we're pretty darn close to being prepared. In every major life change I can think of, preparation is the best possible outcome.

I remember lying awake at night as a ten-year-old, wondering how in the world I was going to make the transition from elementary to middle school. (No homerooms? Lockers?) Same thing from middle to high, which required crossing state lines, going to school in a city instead of a suburb, and a massive four-year commitment to commuting every day. I would never be ready until these milestones actually happened. The best I could do would be to talk to people, bring all the resources I needed to the table, and get ready as soon as I could after I started.

Being a long-term boyfriend and then a live-in fiance prepared me pretty well to be a husband. But did I consider myself truly ready the day Lindy and I walked down the aisle on the Chicago lakefront in 2001? Hell, no. With my family and best friends behind me, I took a deep breath, a little inspiration from a scene from the West Wing I'd recently seen, and I made it to the other side. In the same way, I'd argue that my time in law school and my weeks of methodical but frantic studying got me prepared to take and pass the Bar exam, but only sitting down and putting pen to paper made me ready.

So, we've spent the better part of 6 years first discussing and then pursuing adoption. We've attended numerous classes, spent significant sums of money and filled out reams of paperwork. We've watched some of our closest friends figure this whole parenting thing out and excel at it. We've had a shower and outfitted a room, booked plane tickets, started studying Chinese and read several books about attachment parenting. I've even polled my Facebook parent friends about how they approach gender and toy selection. We've stalked the online Chinese adoption community for packing lists and travel tips, and pulled our suitcases out of the basement. We've put in for family leave and health insurance, and established Baby's First Mileage Plus account. We have small towels, sippy cups and a car seat on each side of the Eastern Continental Divide.

In short, we are both prepared and confident in our ability to get the rest of the preparations done before we leave. But neither of us expects to be ready until that cold, early February day in a provincial office building, in a place that's closer to Vladivostok than to Beijing, when we finally receive an adorable but confused and likely terrified toddler into our lives. And maybe not even by then.

In the meantime? We'll keep sorting and packing clothing, we'll fill up the freezer with things that we think little kids like, continue to be nervous as all get-out, and we'll wing it. Seems to be working so far.

We'll try to keep the blog updated with our preparations in the next 29 days.

In the meantime, no blog post would be complete without a picture. This one comes to us from Texas, where one of Xiao Ya's little friends from Harmony House is now living. (She'd be the one in the middle.) Her mom contacted us after having seen our blog, and sent a ton of photos!

The Travel Details

2011-12-25T13:15:00.001-05:00

A Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas to our friends and family. Lindy and I are continuing our annual tradition of traveling around the Midwest to visit the fam. We got our detailed itinerary for China this week, and thought we'd share.

For the international trip, United won the day. We were happy to have the services of travel agent extraordinaire Todd Gallinek, who ran through all of our questions and various scenarios, and found a great deal on Xiao Ya's one-way ticket home. We also sprang for United's Economy Plus Annual Option, which gives us both unlimited access to extra legroom for a full year and was cheaper than the upgrade for two international flights. We did have to buy Xiao Ya an Economy Plus seat, even though her legs obviously won't reach the ground!

Our adoption agency handled all the logistics for the time we're spending within China.

Tuesday, Jan. 31

Depart 12:30 p.m. for Beijing. Nonstop from Washington Dulles on United.

Wednesday, Feb. 1

Arrive 3:30 p.m. in Beijing. Free afternoon and evening. Hotel: Beijing Novotel Peace.

Thursday and Friday, Feb. 2-3

Sightseeing in Beijing, including Great Wall, Forbidden City, Summer Palace and Chinese acrobat show.

Saturday, Feb. 4

Transfer to Langfang and visit Harmony House. Hotel: Arcadia International.

Sunday, Feb. 5

Depart 11:20 a.m. for Changchun. Nonstop from Beijing on China Southern Airlines. Arrive at 1:20 p.m. Hotel: Days Hotel Changchun.

Monday, Feb. 6

Receive our daughter! Visit the Civil Affairs Bureau to sign the bonding agreement.

Tuesday, Feb. 7

Visit Civil Affairs Bureau to complete adoption registration and notarization procedures.

Wednesday, Feb. 8

Visit Provincial Museum and Puppet Manchurian Palace.

Thursday, Feb. 9

Pick up all notarized paperwork.

Friday, Feb. 10

Pick up Xiao Ya's passport. Depart 5 p.m. for Guangzhou. Nonstop from Changchun on Shenzhen Airlines. Arrive at 9:10 p.m. Hotel: Guangdong Victory.

Saturday, Feb. 11

Have Xiao Ya's picture taken and medical exam done.

Sunday, Feb. 12 and Monday, Feb. 13

Visit Six Banyan Tree Temple, Chen Clan Academy & Baiyun Park. Return to clinic for reading of TB skin test.

Tuesday, Feb. 14

Make it official! Submit visa documents and take group oath at U.S. Consulate.

Wednesday, Feb. 15

Pick up U.S. visa. Depart 6:15 p.m. for Hong Kong. Nonstop from Guangzhou on a train. Arrive 8:08 p.m. Hotel: Hong Kong SkyCity Marriott.

Thursday, Feb. 16

Depart 10:30 a.m. for Tokyo Narita. Nonstop from Hong Kong on United Airlines. Arrive 3:40 p.m. Depart 4:40 p.m. for Washington Dulles. Nonstop from Tokyo Narita on United Airlines. Arrive 3:01 p.m.

So we have 16 days, 4 cities, 5 hotels, 5 flights and a train ride. You can bet there will be stories and photos!

Speaking of photos...

We have dates.

2011-12-19T21:57:00.001-05:00

Hi everyone,

The R-Hes are going to China! We received our first choice of consulate appointments today, so Xiao Ya will get her visa on Valentine's Day. We're flying out Jan. 31 and will return Feb. 16.

More details soon, including our crazy travel pattern. In the meantime, here's another photo... if it works from this crazy complicated app I just downloaded.

Room is Ready.

2011-12-18T17:23:00.002-05:00

We have a few minor odds and ends to tidy up, but our guest room has basically completed its transformation into Xiao Ya's bedroom. Tomorrow, we hope, the plane tickets!

Travel Approval, Almost.

2011-12-16T16:58:00.001-05:00

Well, this is exciting! We received word yesterday from our agency that the Chinese government had mailed our travel approval (TA). So it's not in hand yet. But we're pretty close to having a date nailed down, and we'll probably have a firm date by Monday. Because we're requesting a date after Chinese New Year and thus a few weeks later than most people are requesting when they receive TA, we're all but certain to get our first choice.

If we do, it looks a little something like this:

Tu 1/31: Depart DC
We 2/01: Arrive Beijing (sightseeing, orientation and a visit to Harmony House)
Su 2/05: Depart Beijing for Changchun (where we take custody of our daughter, do paperwork, wait, do paperwork, wait)
Fr 2/10: Depart Changchun for Guangzhou (where we do physical exams, paperwork, waiting, paperwork)
Tu 2/14: Valentine's Day and Consulate Appointment (where we finalize U.S. visa for Xiao Ya)
We 2/15: Obtain U.S. visa
Th 2/16: Depart Guangzhou for DC

It's been fun watching our name climb up the list of waiting families, and now we're basically off the chart and waiting to travel. More updates with exact details soon. In the meantime, we got some new pictures this week! Anyone want to see?

What happens next?

2011-12-07T16:32:00.002-05:00

Apologies for the lack of posting lately. Not long ago, Lindy and I said goodbye to our feeble 16-1/2-year-old cat Marty, who had a passing that was considerably more peaceful than his last few months of life. Unfortunately, Xiao Ya won't get to meet one of the four animals in the photo album we sent this summer.

In other news, we had an awesome baby shower (which we called a Xiao-er) a few weeks back, hosted by some of our favorite people. And just last week, a friend of mine from work introduced both of us to a friend of hers who lives in the DC area and grew up in the same province where Xiao Ya was born! Talk about a small world... we have a standing dinner invitation to her parents' home now, and some valuable advice about what to do when we're in frosty Jilin Province for our adoption trip.

So, what's next?

Yesterday, our Article 5 was picked up. This is a letter from the United States Embassy in Guangzhou, certifying that Xiao Ya's visa application is complete, that she qualifies for a visa, and that everything is in order for her adoption to proceed. Our agency's contact in Guangzhou has picked up this letter and delivered it to the Chinese government. The next, and penultimate step, is for the Chinese government to issue us Travel Approval (TA). This takes an average of 19 days.

Once we receive TA, it's time for the final step. The adoption agency requests a Consulate Appointment (CA) from the U.S. Consulate Guangzhou’s Adopted Children’s Immigrant Visa Unit. This appointment is when all three of us appear before the United States government as a family for the first time, do some more paperwork, and take an oath. CA is the last thing we do in China before heading home, and it's typically about two weeks after we arrive in country. With this appointment date in hand, we can book our plane tickets.

Usually, families get anywhere from 2 weeks to a month's notice that they're due to travel, unless they request a later CA because of a previous commitment. As you can imagine, having more notice is helpful when it comes to booking plane tickets and finding hotel rooms, not to mention giving notice to employers, families, dog-sitters, etc. We're actually operating at a bit of an advantage in this regard.

The Chinese New Year Festival shuts down much of the country for the third week in January. So, our options would be to keep our fingers crossed for a really speedy TA, push like hell to get a CA before the holiday, and get out of there before the festival starts -- including flying on less than two weeks' notice at a time when travel is already pretty expensive -- or go after the holiday. We've told our agency we're opting for the latter, which means we'll probably travel on or slightly after January 26.

More than likely, we'll have our TA and our CA before the first of the year. We've been passing the time by staying our usual busy selves at work, and preparing for Xiao Ya's arrival by decorating her room, making sure she has enough underwear, etc.

Another good way to pass the time, especially if one sits in front of a computer all day and is prone to compulsive behavior, is to religiously check the excellent "Steps to TA!" tracking chart posted by an adoptive mom on the China Adopt Talk Forum. It's a good way to keep track of how other families are moving through the process, and you'll notice the line for "planet-rh" has advanced to the #17 position and is yellow, indicating we're in the second-to-next group waiting for TA. We started below #200, and some weeks during the interminable wait for our Letter of Acceptance, we didn't move at all or moved slightly backwards. The other threads on the forum have been very valuable in learning what to expect in attachment, language, travel and other topics. (Both Lindy and I are amused by the fact that most of the posters seem to be the wives, though.)

So that's where we are. Just waiting for a little bit longer. We've also tested our ability to connect an iPad wirelessly to a hotel's wired Ethernet connection, which means we'll be able to blog and post photos from China. In the meantime, here's another pic of the youngster.

Late-breaking update: We just received our passports back in the mail, stamped with our visas that will allow us to enter China!

Cabled; On Traveling

2011-11-18T17:44:00.000-05:00

We received word this week that we've been "cabled," which is an antiquated way of saying that the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security and State have begun communicating electronically about our adoption case. Next step is for our agency's contact to drop off some paperwork at the U.S. embassy in China for review. This take two weeks.

Late this morning, I returned from an amazing and exhausting trip to Israel. In fact, I just woke up a few minutes ago. It was a combination work and family trip whose subject matter is beyond the scope of this blog. However, international travel isn't. Travel geek that I am, I've actually been thinking about the potential logistics for our China trip for more than a year. I got some interesting insights this time around.

I flew Tel Aviv to New York/JFK, and then New York/JFK to Washington National, both on Delta. This routing was similar to what we'll likely face for China: a long international flight on the widebody jet of a United States carrier, followed by a much shorter flight on a much smaller plane for the final leg home. In this case, the flying times were about 13 hours and then 1-1/2 hours.

The thing that's terrible about this setup, aside from being in the same tiny seat of a metal tube for half a day, is the connection. At JFK, we got off the plane and waited in a long line for passport control. Then those who checked bags (I hadn't) picked them up, and we all went through customs. Bag-checkers had another decently long line to re-check their luggage for domestic connections, and then on to the next flight.

Except getting to the next flight required leaving the security perimeter, catching a train to a station near another terminal, going outside, walking through a parking lot, and climbing or descending several sets of stairs. The next step was a trip through TSA security, and on to the gate. I had two carry-on bags and my adult boss, and we had to ask two different people for directions because the signage was terrible. Toss a slight language barrier and a foreign passport into the mix, and this is basically the same experience I had connecting between flights at the Paris airport a week earlier.

My point with all of this? Lindy and I are pretty much prepared that traveling across China with a toddler and then flying back to the States with her is going to suck. The only question is how much. The major points of connection for flights from the far east to the east coast are New York, Newark, Detroit and Chicago. I'm not inclined to repeat today's experience with extra luggage and a little person. Chicago is notorious for delays and requires traveling across four terminals to get from international to domestic. Detroit does it all within the same building, which is nice. But Detroit gets a lot of snow in January. That's just the city pairing question before we even get to the airline question, the aircraft seating configuration, etc. You get the picture.

I think the ideal solution would be a private jet, or barring that, someone to buy us all business class tickets and escort us through the various airports. Barring that, we'll just have to see what happens. On the bright side, there were several toddlers on my long flight today, and they seemed to be taking the experience in stride. I'm assuming they'd been with their parents since birth and had traveled before, but who knows?

Tomorrow, some of our closest friends are throwing us a "Xiao-Er." Now that I'm actually awake, I'm very excited...

A Thoughtful Take.

2011-11-09T16:02:00.000-05:00

A New York Times blogger has written a thoughtful post about not searching for her Chinese daughter's birth parents. I figured it was worthy of sharing.

Why I Didn't Search for My Daughter's Birth Parents (New York Times, 11/09/2011)

Moving Right Along.

2011-11-08T16:13:00.000-05:00

We've reached a new stage in our paperwork process, where nothing takes more than 2-3 weeks. Yesterday, I arrived home to find our I-800 approval from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. This means the United States has officially approved our application to adopt Xiao Ya.

What has to happen next doesn't really involve us doing anything, but it's also a bit confusing. So I'll rely on a blog I just discovered, written by a family who just received their I-800 approval this week as well, to do the explaining. Just remember we're talking about a different kid, and the dates might be plus or minus a few days...

1. - US immigration tells US Embassy in China we are approved to adopt Chun Xiao
The US immigration approval needs to make its way to the US Embassy in Guangzhou, China. Physically, the approval is sent from Missouri to New Hampshire. When it gets to NH, they enter it into a computer system. From there it is emailed (they call it cabling but its basically emailing it) to the US Embassy in Guangzhou. This whole process takes about a week. Kind of crazy but it is what it is. We are hoping to be 'cabled' by 11/16.

2 - US Embassy reviews Chun Xiao's Visa application
Once the US Embassy has the US immigration approval, my agency will drop off a bunch of other paperwork to go with it. One of which is Emmas Visa application. The consulate needs to review our visa application for her to make sure it meets the qualifications for an immigrant visa, and then signs off that everything is in order for the adoption to be completed. We are hoping our agency can drop off the visa application by 11/18 and pick it up, approved, 2 weeks later, 12/2. The US embassy has a set process, it is always 2 weeks for this step.

NOTE - although Emma requires an IH -3 visa to come to the US, she will be a US citizen as soon as she gets off the airplane.

3. - China reviews all US approvals & gives us ok to travel to pick up Emma
After the US Embassy says everything is in order, our agency takes those approvals from the US embassy to the Chinese Gov't in Beijing. The Chinese Gov't reviews and then they issue us our travel approval and we book our flights! We hope to get Travel Approval sometime between 12/15 and 12/30. We would book the flights from there (2-3 weeks out) based on our US Embassy appointment. We won't be able to make the US embassy appt until we have Travel Approval from China.

The second thing I want to share is that Mary and her husband, whom we've been following since they got their preliminary approval the same day we did, now officially have their daughter. It's been fascinating to watch their journey.

We're continuing our household preparations, spending childless time with family and friends, and beginning to think about the big trip in January. More on that soon.

In the meantime, anyone care for a photo?

Making It Official.

2011-10-22T10:11:00.002-04:00

Well, after nearly 100 days of waiting, we received our Letter of Acceptance from the Chinese government. This means we're officially approved to adopt our daughter!

This was a pretty nerve-wracking wait, because it's the longest and least standardized part of the process. For example, we've told you about Mary, who got her preliminary approval on the same day we did but moved through the rest of the steps a lot faster. She'll be in China in less than a month to pick up her daughter. Many of us turn during the seemingly interminable pre-LOA waiting period to various online discussion groups. A poster on one of those groups characterized the process pretty well: it's like checking out at the grocery store. The shortest line isn't always the fastest, because it depends on how many items each person has, how fast the cashier is, and even the method of payment.

Anyway, we made it through the line and out the door of the supermarket this week. Or last week, if you count the date on the letter.

The document is actually in the form of a letter asking us to accept the adoption referral. It says,

Based on your application and in accordance with the Adoption Law of the People's Repulic of China, the China Center of Adoption Affairs matched a child with you. Herein, we send the information about the child to you. You are kindly requested to make your decision, sign in the proper place below, and deliver this letter as soon as possible to the adoption organization which submitted your application file, [name of our agency].

Now that it's official, we have also given the little tyke a name. Since we don't use last names on this blog, those of you who know us personally will need to fill in the gaps. She will be known as:

Xiao Ya Ellyse R... H...

What happens next? We have some more paperwork to do for both governments (of course), and won't know our actual travel schedule for a few more weeks. But according to the averages, it will likely be late January. It'll be cold in China and later than we'd originally hoped, but the good news is we'll be able to spend one last holiday with our relatives in the Midwest in December before the big crazy journey.

Stay tuned for more details. In the meantime, it's photo time!

No News Friday.

2011-09-30T12:20:00.000-04:00

Lindy and I are back in town after a fairly long string of family-related travel, and we're still waiting for word from China. We know the last piece of paperwork needed to complete our file is over there. Now we keep waiting for our LOA. We're still pulling a few items of the kid room together, bit by bit.

Here are a few interesting pieces of China adoption-related reading. The New York Times ran a piece a couple weeks ago about the fear that crosses every adoptive parent's mind: that something untoward might have happened in the process of his or her child's becoming available for adoption. That piece, response from a couple of American adoptive parents who work with the adoption process for a living, and response from the Chinese government are below.

Also below... another Friday photo!

Crib, Papers, Papers.

2011-09-14T14:24:00.002-04:00

A little bit of an update today. Warning: most of this is super-dorky, and probably won't make a heck of a lot of sense to those of you who haven't adopted a child from China. But it's illustrative of the kind of thing we have to do.

For starters, we now have an assembled crib -- our first official piece of kid furniture! Thanks go to our friends Calista and Christian, whose girls outgrew it. We don't know how long Xiao Ya will sleep in a crib as she is now, but we're ready. All it took was an extra order of assembly hardware from the manufacturer, a couple of adult beverages, and about 2-1/2 hours for two people.

On the paperwork front, we received last week our I-800A approval from United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). This is the document that says we're approved to adopt a non-specific child within a certain age range from a certain country. We received this approval already for Ethiopia in the form of an I-600A, but because Ethiopia is not a party to the Hague Convention on International Adoptions and China is, we had to apply again. Same agency, same (additional) fee, same fingerprints in the same machine, different form.

Now here's where it gets interesting.

Because Xiao Ya was technically supposed to be adopted by a family who was already in the China program and already had a dossier ready to go in China, our agency joined us in scrambling to put a dossier together in record time. The federal government does not, as you might imagine, move more quickly on these sorts of things to meet the circumstances of an individual case. So, the head of our agency's international programs was able to prevail on the Chinese government to allow our I-600A approval from Ethiopia into the dossier as a placeholder while we waited on the actual I-800A for China from USCIS. The I-600A approval was part of the big pile of papers I took through the process back in June. And we got preliminary approval from China based on the somewhat-incomplete dossier.

We found out this week that the Chinese government was holding off on sending our Letter of Acceptance (LOA) until it received a sworn, authenticated copy of our I-800A approval and thus had a complete dossier. The LOA is the document that tells us it's all basically a done deal, lets us relax and enjoy a baby shower, etc. No time to waste there.

The process of authenticating one of these things is as follows: sign it in front of a notary, get it notarized, get the notary certified by the DC Secretary, get the DC Secretary's seal authenticated by the U.S. Secretary of State, and get the U.S. Secretary of State's seal authenticated by the Chinese Embassy. Because the process of authentication is time-consuming and difficult, and because I'm actually going to be out of my office for nearly two weeks starting Friday, I decided to put in for some help this time. I wrote a letter saying that this was a true and correct copy of the I-800A approval, and signed it in front of a notary at work. I got a $40 money order for the Chinese Embassy and an $8 check for the United States Secretary of State. I went to the DC Secretary's office and got the notary certified. Then I put the whole mess in an envelope and overnighted it to the Assistant Stork, who has been helping adoptive families handle their paperwork for 15 years. She'll wait in line at the Secretary of State's office, drop off and pick up the document at the Chinese Embassy, and then overnight it to our agency early next week.

Once the placeholder document comes out of the dossier and the real document goes in, we should get our LOA fairly quickly. From that point, it's about 2-3 months until we travel. We're still looking at holiday time for now.

So that's the paperwork update for this week. There are more pieces to go, but most of these happen between and among the various governments and agencies involved, and the agency handles many for us. More soon, but in the meantime, it's picture time! Check out cherry blossom girl (not to be confused with Cherry Blossom Girl):

Pre-Weekend Quickie.

2011-08-26T16:47:00.000-04:00

Been meaning to post this one for awhile. The adoptive mom of three Ethiopian kids who writes the "Injera and Chocolate Gravy" blog has created a helpful guide to positive language surrounding adoption. Our limited experience in this area admittedly doesn't consist yet of walking around with an obviously-adopted child and hearing what people have to say. But we know that most comments are from folks who are well-intentioned but don't know exactly what to say.

This should help.

Say WHAT? (Injera and Chocolate Gravy, 07/21/2011)

Time to go wait for the hurricane. Oh wait, did anyone want to see another photo? Mommy's in this one...

Links, Update, Photo.

2011-08-24T16:14:00.000-04:00

We're still in wait-and-see mode on our paperwork. The next big milestone will be our Letter of Acceptance (LOA), which is the Chinese government's way of telling us we're officially approved to adopt Xiao Ya. We aren't really expecting to receive this until mid-September, but we learned late last week that our blog friend Mary received hers already. Mary received her Preliminary Approval the same day we did -- July 6. So this may move faster or more slowly. We'll see. We also expect to hear from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, a couple of good news articles for your reading pleasure this week:

Also, the care packages we sent to China finally arrived. We have evidence!

(For those keeping track, that is an airplane toy, a bowl of Cheerios, pictures of dad and Big Clea, and Little Clea.)

Financial Times Article.

2011-08-14T10:31:00.000-04:00

Reporter Patti Waldmeir writes the inspiring and informative story of "Baby Donuts," detailing the history and state of Chinese overseas adoptions along the way.

Little Girl Found (Financial Times, 08/12/2011)

Three Friday Links.

2011-08-05T11:17:00.000-04:00

The first two aren't all that recent, but they're new to me: a primer on the social reasons why so many Chinese baby girls are adopted internationally, and one family's adoption story that includes things all transracial adoptive families are likely to hear in public sooner or later.

The third is from the New York Times, and the sort of thing one hopes never to happen again.

Have a great weekend!

What Happens Now?

2011-08-03T17:40:00.000-04:00

How does one prepare for an international adoption? I'd imagine it's probably somewhat similar to preparing for a birth -- including the reading, the purchasing, the fretting -- but replacing the extra vitamins and trips to the doctor with paperwork and trips to the post office.

This morning, I mailed off our very first care package to Xiao Ya's group foster home just outside Beijing. She'll have a blanket that we've slept on for a few nights, a few toys including a stuffed dog that looks like Clea, a photo album of us and the flock, and some treats. The center also requested cereal for the other kids, so 8 pounds of Cheerios are now hurtling across the ocean in another box as well.

We're in the process of arranging for furniture and decorations, and having some last noisy and dusty work done to our home. Spending time with visiting friends and family. Researching attachment issues in toddlers and trying to figure out how to learn a word or two of Mandarin. A good friend has kindly offered to give us a crib and throw us a baby shower. We got a collection of stuffed animals and a few other items from my mom, and a childhood decoration of Lindy's from hers.

Based on a recommendation from a friend, we found an adoptive dad out west who runs a service to provide "finding ads" for adoptive parents. This is the ad the local authorities must place in the newspaper when a child is abandoned in China. It contains information about where, when and how she was found, and usually the first available photo. We received word that he does indeed have the newspaper containing Xiao Ya's finding ad, so we ordered it.

Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting a new friend -- a lawyer and neighbor of ours who has lived a block away for the last 5 years and now works at the same place I do. Mandarin just happens to be her first language. She says "elegant sunrise" is probably about right for a translation, and our little girl's name likely means that beauty dispels darkness.

Lindy and I recently had the pleasure of a third trip to the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service facility in Alexandria, Virginia, where we had our third set of fingerprints taken. Neither one of us noticed any obvious change in our fingers from the last two times, but circumstances change. Our first trip was in February 2010, for our Ethiopia adoption. The second trip was in March 2011, because fingerprints expire in 18 months. This latest trip was because China is a signatory to the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption and Ethiopia is not. Adopting from a Hague country requires a different form, fee, fingerprints and background check than adopting from a non-Hague country. So even though it's the same federal agency, the same personnel and the same equipment we visited 4 and 13 months ago, we had to do it again.

While we're waiting on the U.S. government to approve our application to adopt from China, we're waiting on the Chinese government to officially approve our application to adopt Xiao Ya. We have received our Preliminary Approval (PA), as you know. We are now waiting on our Letter of Acceptance (LOA), which is a formal document we need to sign and send back, signifying our agreement to adopt Xiao Ya. According to a very helpful parent who tracks the progress of such things online every week, the average wait time between PA and LOA for families who did not have a dossier in China before beginning the process (like us) is 59 days. This means we'll likely have our LOA sometime in early September. It's a somewhat ignorant guess, but I think we will travel in late December.

There is a very helpful rundown of the process here, if you're curious.

We will likely spend two weeks in China, picking up Xiao Ya near Beijing, traveling all the way across the country to her home province of Jilin (near the North Korea/Russia border), then south to Guangzhou before returning home -- likely via Hong Kong and Chicago. It's a lot to process and a lot to prepare for, but at least we know it's coming. Xiao Ya has no idea she's in for two solid days of travel in two weeks with a couple of large, benevolent strangers who don't look, sound or smell like anyone she's ever known. We're hoping some photos, the comforts of home we've already provided and quite a bit of patience will make the trip easier. This kid already has one hell of a life story, and she doesn't even know it yet!

Oh, did I mention she's also just a bit adorable?

Backstory, Part Two.

2011-07-15T11:43:00.000-04:00

So... how exactly did we get from exploring alternatives to Ethiopia to a smiling little Chinese girl in a Disney princess shirt?

Lindy and I had never seriously considered adopting domestically, because in the area where we live, there seemed to be fewer opportunities than there are adoptive parents. In the District, Maryland and Virginia, kinship care (where grandparents or other relatives step forward to take care of the child) is very common. Kids who need homes from the public system are usually school-age or even older, and have often been through more than one foster-care placement. And to top all of that off, Lindy and I each have a colleague who was pursuing a local domestic adoption and had the birth mother change her mind at the last minute. This disruption scenario is completely understandable, and is in fact the reason no state will allow a birth mother to terminate her parental rights until after the child is born. But it's devastating for the adoptive parents, and it never happens in international adoptions because the kids are orphans under international law before adoption proceedings can begin.

Nonetheless, we did start exploring a couple of domestic-adoption agencies in Texas. In Texas, kinship care is apparently less common. And there are two other aspects of the adoption universe down there that are at once concerning and appealing to the prospective adoptive parent. First, the birth mother is not allowed to terminate her parental rights until 48 hours after the birth, but after doing so, the act is irrevocable. This is a contrast to other states, in which she could retain the right to revoke her original decision for several weeks. How did we feel about a situation in which a disruption was less likely, but the laws seemed a little less protective of the person who would give life to our future child? We didn't quite settle that discussion.

The other discussion we didn't quite settle was about race. In Texas, as one might imagine, adoption agencies place quite a few babies of Latino descent. One might find surprising, as we did, that placing African-American children is a challenge for many agencies -- to the point where some of the agencies use the same techniques as for other children they consider hard to place, such as older children or children with special medical needs. These techniques include reaching out to out-of-state parents, and subsidies to help cover the fees. So how did we feel about a situation in which we were essentially receiving a discount for adopting a black child -- which we had planned to do from Ethiopia in the first place? Uneasy. But on the other hand, why couldn't the open-minded parents who approached their adoption process from a race-neutral perspective benefit from the other, racist parents who had to pay full price because they didn't feel the same way? Our friend Future Mommy did a nice job of covering this dilemma on her own blog.

While we were grappling with these various and serious issues, we were also in the process of updating our home study with our local agency. Nothing had changed since the last time, but we had a nice series of chats with our social worker. During one of those chats, she mentioned how she'd spent some time working with the agency's China Waiting Children program. These were kids, she explained, who didn't become part of that country's massive and longstanding regular adoption program because of age or some kind of special medical need -- a need that had often been met in China before adoption took place. She encouraged us to take a look at that program because, she said, she had a sense it might fit us well. We said we would do so. She emailed over a program brochure, we looked at it, and we continued to go about the rest of our busy spring.

It wasn't that the program didn't sound interesting. But we were still exploring the Texas options at the time, and the waiting children process sounded intense and somewhat intimidating. The way it would typically work was somewhat similar, at least in my mind, with buying concert tickets. Every month or two, the Chinese government would release a master list of eligible waiting children to all of the adoption agencies in the United States that had programs. At that moment, usually around midnight in this country, the coordinators for all of the agencies would go online and "lock" the files of particular children while keeping in mind the needs and wants of the adoptive families. The lock meant no other agency or family could touch the file while it was under consideration. As with a referral in other international programs, like Ethiopia's, the adoptive family would have just a couple of days to consider and accept. This would then trigger the paperwork process that led to the adoption of the child. The social worker mentioned that most of the families in the China Waiting Children program were already accepted to the agency's standard China adoption program and had their paperwork in place, but had grown tired of the wait (now up to 7 years!) before receiving a standard referral. The prospect of having to find a place among all of these other folks, and having to do a completely different set of paperwork for a completely different country after just renewing our Ethiopia files, didn't seem terrific. So we just sort of let it go.

A few weeks later, we received an urgent email from the head of international programs at Barker, our agency. The email went to everyone waiting to adopt, including Lindy's and my colleagues, and to us. It announced the availability of a very special list of China Waiting Children, and the list was attached. Without opening the attachment, Lindy and I gave this email a kind of collective "meh," and kept about our work- and travel-intensive spring schedule. Our social worker emailed us to insist we take a look at the list. We demurred, saying this was a busy time, and maybe we would just take a look at the next list?

She wrote back to explain that there probably wouldn't be a next list. That this was an unusual circumstance, a list of specific kids assigned to our specific agency because of its specific relationship with a specific orphanage. That this was quite unlike the usual concert-ticket process because there was no midnight locking of files, and in some cases the adoptive parents didn't even need to be part of the China program yet if they wanted to proceed. At this point, several weeks had elapsed, and we figured with all of the hundreds of parents in domestic and all the other programs at Barker, someone would have spoken up for those kids. But we decided to take a look anyway.

We looked. There were boys and girls, some with obvious medical needs, some older than others, and some who seemed perfectly ordinary if not also perfectly adorable. Of a dozen or so kids on the list, with photos and a few sentences of description each, we decided we might like to know more about three of them. Of the three, our eyes kept being drawn to the picture of a little girl identified as "Ya." I thought she had a nice smile. Lindy thought she looked like her late grandfather on her dad's side. We emailed our social worker and the international programs chief, and asked for more information on the three kids.

What we got back was that two of the three kids had already had their files requested, so we couldn't see them. The third... was Ya. All we knew at that point was that she was two years old, had had a cleft lip and palate and some kind of heart condition repaired already in China, and that she had a smile vaguely reminiscent of my wife's Scotland-via-Tennessee-and-Michigan ancestry. So we asked for her file. The response was that yes, we could see the file. But the family adopting Ya was technically supposed to be part of the China program already and have paperwork in place. So if we decided to move ahead, we would need to have our dossier to China by the end of June. It was May 24, 2011. Without waiting for Lindy and speaking a little out of school, I told the agency that if we decided to proceed and if it was humanly possible to assemble a dossier in a month, we would commit to doing so.

I went online and requested our birth and marriage certificates from Illinois, knowing that we would need these if we moved ahead and that they took awhile to process. Express delivery, multiple copies, and we'd anted into the game for $100. We got the file from the agency, just in time for Memorial Day weekend and a trip out of town. It was a pretty impressive collection of information, much more than we had expected to receive for our eventual referral from Ethiopia. We had multiple photos, a couple of quick YouTube videos of her on a playground, developmental milestones and surprisingly complete information from the two surgeries she had. The heart condition was a hole between the two chambers that didn't close on his own -- a completely correctable situation that was also common in the United States. We sent the information off to two pediatricians, one in Georgetown and one in the Maryland suburbs.

This being a holiday weekend, we didn't hear anything from the doctors. For days. We kept reviewing the file ourselves, getting more and more interested. We stayed in touch with the agency to make sure we still had time. Finally, the medical reviews came back. From the Georgetown doc: no serious cause for concern, and neither surgery seemed as though it would require future therapy or medication. He said a cleft lip was cosmetic, but a cleft palate was functional, so it was important to make sure she was eating and speaking properly. He suggested a follow-up session with a speech pathologist after adoption. Dispassionate and clinical opinion from the Rockville doc, who herself had adopted from China: "If this was me, I would do it!"

So we decided to pull the trigger. Her full name, we learned, was Ji Xiao Ya. She'd been found in Jilin Province at about a month old, and now resided at Harmony House, a group foster-care facility run by Americans outside of Beijing and dedicated to making Chinese orphans with special medical needs ready for international adoption. She could speak, and she could run. We began running too, running to beat the clock on our dossier. The process of assembling our dossier for Ethiopia, by comparison, had taken several months.

Also by comparison, the process for Ethiopia was much less certification-intensive. For China, every document from our birth certificates to our financial statement had to be notarized, certified by the Illinois Secretary of State or DC Secretary, then the U.S. Department of State, and then the Chinese Embassy before it could go to China. Which would explain why, exhausted and sick from a stomach flu while Lindy was in Michigan, I bounded out the door of the Chinese Embassy visa section for the third time with a bundle of documents and a considerably lighter wallet. I went to FedEx Office and painstakingly hand-copied each of about 60 pages. And then I zoomed up to the Barker office in Bethesda and spiked the package down in front of an applauding receptionist. Our dossier was complete in three weeks and six days. I felt like I'd run a marathon.

The agency overnighted the dossier to China, where the international programs director happened to be at the time. She was able to get the dossier logged in the same day it arrived, locking Xiao Ya's file for us the same way as if she'd been on the concert ticket -type list. We could afford to relax a little, because the agency's concern that the file might be swept away with no notice was no longer a concern. The next step was to submit, electronically, a "Letter of Intent" to the Chinese government indicating our intention to adopt Xiao Ya and giving details on how we planned to address her medical needs after the adoption. We obliged, and three days later (July 6, 2011), we received our "Preliminary Approval." In the translated bureaucratese we'd already come to know and appreciate, it said:

"It is hereby advised that with a review of the Rehabilitation and Nurture Plan for the Child made by the family, the China Centre of Adoption Affairs agrees to move this application file into the procedure for adoption of special-need children."

Congratulations, it's a procedure!

With the preliminary approval in hand, and with our agency's assurances that never in anyone's experience had an adoptive family not succeeded in moving from preliminary approval to bringing home an actual child, we were free to relax a little and free to tell the tale. We were also free to start furiously learning everything we could about toddlers, China, adoption of waiting children, etc. that we could in the approximately six months it would take to finalize everything, go to China, and bring Xiao Ya home. This was last week, the date of our previous post.

The next post will cover what happens now. In the meantime, in gratitude for your interest in our meandering and exceptionally procedural tale, here is the photo of Xiao Ya that first caught our eye.

Backstory, Part One.

2011-07-07T17:48:00.000-04:00

And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
-- Talking Heads

February 13: We're renewing our paperwork and still on the waiting list to adopt a baby from Ethiopia.

July 6: We've received approval to adopt a toddler from China. By the way, it's a specific child. Her name (at least for now) is Xiao Ya.

You're probably thinking that this is a pretty dramatic change of circumstances. And you're absolutely right. So how DID we get here?

As I mentioned in my Feburary update, things had started to change in the international adoption process in Ethiopia. The first step in that process, from the Ethiopian government's point of view, is called the referral. It consists of matching a waiting family with an eligible child. The family has a few days to consider and accept the referral, which then triggers the rest of the process. The referrals were slowing down. When we were approved, the estimated wait time was 12-18 months for a referral. It then grew to 16-22 months, and 18-24 months, and is now 22-28 months. Basically, this could mean:

The number of the youngest children who need homes is declining, likely because of the large number of families waiting to adopt them overseas.
The children are coming into the system more slowly.
The Ethiopian government is processing the cases more slowly, perhaps as a means of ensuring that every story checks out and every child is actually an orphan under international law.
Some combination of 1-3.

Our picture of the number of children needing homes was changing. We realized that of the millions of orphans we mentioned in our very first post on this blog were probably still out there, but the vast and overwhelming majority were not babies. In fact, the reason we were waiting so long was almost certainly the ratio of waiting parents to children.

The second major change was to require adoptive parents to travel to Ethiopia twice instead of once. One of the attractive aspects of the Ethiopia process as compared to other countries had been the requirement of a single weeklong trip. Other countries require multiple trips, or trips lasting weeks or even months. In Ethiopia, the adoption agency, with power of attorney from the adoptive parents, actually went into court to complete the adoption on their behalf. Your son or daughter was yours, legally, before you even set foot in the country or met him or her. This was convenient and less expensive, but somewhat perilous. We had read about a few cases where a less-scrupulous agency than ours had misrepresented the age or condition of a child and completed the adoption on the parents' behalf in court, only to have the parents come to Ethiopia and refuse to take the child home. This created a new category of children in legal limbo that the Ethiopian government had to handle. The response was to require a first trip for the court appearance, and a subsequent trip a number of weeks later to complete the rest of the adoption process. We were a little concerned about the extra time and money, but not far enough along in our wait to be too troubled, and comforted to know this step was taken in the best interests of the kids.

The third, and most important, major change came this spring. The Ethiopian government announced that it would process cases through court at an intentionally and dramatically slower rate. The rate was to go from 90 cases a day down to 5, with the rationale of making sure each case was done exactly right. Because the number of overseas adoptions, largely to the United States, had skyrocketed, so had the possibility of shortcuts, payoffs or some other kind of malfeasance. But this new policy would mean a drastic gap between referral and court date, added to an uncertain and increasing duration between trips. Several adoption-related groups were passing petitions online to get the Ethiopian government to reverse its decision. We did not sign these, because we didn't think pressuring a foreign country into serving OUR needs instead of trying to do what's best for its own population of children was the right thing to do.

At the same time, we started getting a few subtle warning signs from our placement agency, the one responsible for handling the Ethiopia side of things. The weekly update emails would show the number of referrals slowing down to a trickle -- single digits most months, with none at all during others. This from an agency that had facilitated more than 1,000 adoptions from Ethiopia through the years. And without saying anything to those of us already in the program, the agency stopped accepting new applicants into the Ethiopia program.

We'd been around the international adoption community long enough to recognize a bit of a pattern. Procedural changes and slowdowns preceeded the eventual shutdowns of the international adoption programs in Colombia, Guatemala and Vietnam (twice), just to name a few. It was time to look for some other options.

I do want to point out that many of our original reasons for choosing to adopt from Ethiopia are still perfectly valid. We have several friends and blog acquaintances who are at various stages of the process and sticking with it, and we continue to offer them our support as we wait to hear about their news. I would never want the change in our plans to serve as any kind of judgment or invalidation of theirs. In fact, we have not yet withdrawn from the Ethiopia program, and have been prepared to proceed in case none of the alternatives we pursued would come to pass.

So... did someone in the United States Government, which approved us to adopt internationally last May and renewed that approval this spring, simply call up a friend in China and put us on the fast track?

Not even close. That's the topic of the next post.

Next installment: Backstory, Part Two. But in the meantime, how about a photo of the little one?

It's (almost certainly) a girl.

2011-07-06T14:14:00.000-04:00

Friends, Family,

With great joy and anticipation, Lindy and I write today to share the following. Early this morning, the government of the People's Republic of China granted us preliminary approval to adopt a little girl who lives outside of Beijing.

Wait... what? China?

A few months ago, we began quietly researching other options to our original plan of adopting from Ethiopia. With today's news, one of those alternative paths is almost certain to become a reality.

Her name is Xiao Ya (晓雅), which to the best of our understanding means "elegant (or graceful) dawn." She is 25 months old, in good health despite some early challenges, and is meeting all of her developmental milestones.

We're sure you all have questions -- we do too -- and we will get to those in short order. We will also have some photos.

Please visit our blog, http://planetrh.blogspot.com, in the days and weeks to come. And keep us in your thoughts and prayers.

With love,
Alan and Lindy

A Sort-of Update.

2011-02-13T11:08:00.000-05:00

"So, what's happening with your adoption process?"

Lindy and I get this question a lot, especially from friends or family members we haven't seen in awhile. "Really, nothing at all," is probably the best answer, because one spends most of one's time on a waiting list, well, waiting.

We were officially approved to adopt by the United States government on May 17, 2010. It is this date that our agency uses to determine the order of its waiting list. When all of our paperwork was complete, WHFC (our placement agency) estimated the wait time for a child 0-12 months old to be 12-18 months from approval to referral. (The referral is the agency's match-up between child and adoptive family; accepting a referral triggers the legal process that takes several months more, but results in legally becoming the child's parents and bringing the child back to the United States.) The wait time has since increased, first to 16-22 months, and most recently to 18-24 months.

The expanded wait times are a consequence of increased interest in Ethiopia by American parents, of increased scrutiny of the adoption process by both the Ethiopian and American governments, and of agencies with sterling ethical reputations such as ours simply taking their time to make sure they get it right. On the opposite site of the ethical spectrum, one agency had its license revoked this week amid accusations of child trafficking.

Waiting a bit longer, especially if it's for all of the right reasons, isn't a huge deal for two people who have been in no rush to head down their own unusual road to parenting. It gives us more time to save up, and to enjoy doing things we'll have to give up for a good long while once Baby R-H arrives, like frequent travel and sleeping in on weekends. Still, we've reached the point in the process where the timetables of the various entities involved -- adoption agencies, governments, law enforcement agencies -- are no longer aligned. As a result, we now have to begin renewing things, and may have to do so one more time during our waiting period.

The first example is our Homeland Security fingerprints, which are part of the State Department's approval process. These expire in a few months, so we are sending a request tomorrow to get them renewed. While it's hard to imagine how one's fingerprints might have changed in a year, it would be too easy to get wrapped up in how the pieces of this vast puzzle don't exactly fit together in the name of convenience or expediency. Instead, we do as we're told and keep an eye on the other things that tend to change from time to time, like the requirement that we go to Ethiopia twice instead of once now.

It's been five years since we started discussing international adoption, and a little less than two years since we actively started the process. We now estimate that we'll have our referral between November of this year and May of next year, and we'll be home with our child sometime between February and December of 2012.

In the meantime, we'll continue to keep our community posted on what happens next.

At Last, We Wait.

2010-05-25T11:23:00.000-04:00

Planet R-H returns from its three-month hiatus. It's not as though our lives have been boring, but literally nothing happened on the adoption front from February until late last week. We received our fingerprint appointment in February and went down to the nondescript federal office building in Alexandria that handles all things immigration for our region. We pressed our fingers onto the glass multiple times. And then we waited.

And waited some more.

Until we received, last Friday, a notice that our fingerprints had cleared and our application to the Department of Homeland Security for permission to bring an orphan into the United States was approved. This was literally the last approval we needed before ending up on our agency's official waiting list. The wait time is 12-18 months for a referral.

So we're officially waiting, having transcended the point in the process where we were simply waiting to start waiting. Everyone who has to approve us to adopt a child, except the Ethiopian government (which actually does the matching too) has done so.

I've been looking forward to this waiting period. I changed jobs, finished school, took and passed the Bar exam while we were assembling our paperwork, and Lindy is finishing school in August. When all of that is said and done, we'll be able to travel, read, go out and do all of the things that non-parents do. We'll also be able to start preparing our house, and our lives, for the arrival of the little one.

For those of you who are keeping track, we mailed our first piece of paperwork August 1, 2009. So we're roughly nine months from start to waiting list. Pretty big milestone. I think this means we're now officially "expecting."

CBS News Story

2010-02-17T10:33:00.000-05:00

Watch CBS News Videos Online

A little late jumping on this, but CBS News ran a story this week alleging baby-selling by an American agency in Ethiopia. If the story is true -- and the former television reporter in me has a few nagging questions -- it would be an understatement to call it disturbing. It follows on a similar story from Australian television about the very same agency. Because Lindy and I are adopting as our first choice, and because we were drawn to Ethiopia by the great need in that country, it's extremely difficult to read stories about kids who had a legitimate shot at being raised by their biological families but were prevented from doing so by greed and corruption.

Even if the story isn't true, or is only partially true, it has the unfortunate effect of undermining the efforts of legitimate agencies and social welfare organizations in Ethiopia. Too much of a chorus like this, and a country will close its borders to international adoption -- as Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala and others have all done at various points in the past. This eliminates corruption in the system, but it punishes those who act ethically as well, and leaves behind millions of real orphans who need real help.

This week, I learned that Wide Horizons (our agency) is taking additional steps to capture and verify the story of every child's birth family. That's reassuring.

I don't have a lot more to say at this point because I'm supposed to be studying for the Bar exam. Also, two bloggers I admire have beat me to the punch and made most of the points I would have anyway.

in the news (Uninterrupted Prosperity)
Ethiopian adoptions in the news again (Chasing Saints)

I'm a PC.

2010-02-01T16:58:00.000-05:00

I'm turning in my iPhone tomorrow.

It is a sleek, shiny device that plays music and videos, has enriched the lives of thousands of developers through its embrace of apps, and has an interface so simple a toddler can figure it out.

It is the best mobile browser I have ever used. It is barely the size of a pack of cigarettes, yet is more powerful than any of us could have imagined a desktop computer being when I first started banging around on Apple products as a kid. I still feel a little guilty that privilege even allows me the choice I'm about to make. And yet, I have decided I'm sending it back.

I wanted to like the iPhone. Every one of my peers at work has one, and our award-winning tech chief swears by it. And what's not to like about Steve Jobs? I'm vegan like he is, would cheerfully fill up my entire closet with black mock turtlenecks and jeans if I could get away with wearing nothing but, and I still crack up when I see Fred Armisen's parody of his iPhone introduction. Still, after about four weeks' time, I can't take it anymore.

I have never unwrapped the headphones. I know all about iTunes (though I prefer Amazon), and Lindy swears by her iPod Touch. Still, it seems weird for me to be relying on a work device for entertainment. I've only downloaded a couple of apps, and I never really use them. I find the web browsing to be terrific and the camera pretty decent. It's neat that I can take a picture and post it directly to Facebook if I so choose. But I never have.

Meanwhile, the iPhone's two major drawbacks have turned out to be dealbreakers for me. The first is that the battery life is an absolute joke. My phone is a month old, and I used it for a fair amount of making decisions and issuing assignments by email while I was in the field all day today. I made perhaps 5 minutes worth of phone calls. By the time 8 hours had elapsed since I unplugged it from the wall this morning, I got a warning saying less than 20 percent of the battery life was left. This is only going to get worse as the device gets older, and unlike most mobile phone manufacturers, Apple doesn't let the user swap out the battery -- either on a regular basis, so you can keep spares handy, or ever, such as when it needs to be replaced for good.

The second drawback is that the iPhone really is a toy when it comes to email. Seems like the messages trickle in when they feel like it, and when the signal is good enough, unlike the instantaneous stream I'm used to with a Blackberry. When a message does come in, it takes a good 15-20 seconds to open the text, unlike the instant view from a truly synchronized device. And, though I've been practicing for nearly a month, I've never gotten used to typing on a touch screen instead of a keyboard. I'm pretty good at it by now, but it's not fast and it's not accurate. The phone knows the mistakes I'm making fairly well, but I wouldn't be making those mistakes in the first place with a real keyboard, and I feel like it's making me a more careless typist.

Bottom line? The iPhone is a superior multimedia device and would make a fantastic personal cell phone, if I needed such a thing. I don't. I need something that will handle email in a robust way and hold a battery charge for more than 8 hours.

This is the longest time I've spent without a Blackberry in nearly four years. Tomorrow, I'm going back. Bold 9700 time.

Why Vegan?

2010-01-27T05:46:00.002-05:00

One of the more challenging aspects of my new job is that I'm on call for the press in case of emergency every other week. This means I'll occasionally get a phone call in the middle of the night, wake up, ask a fairly standard set of factual questions, write down a phone number, and relay those facts to a member of the media on a second phone call. I've gotten pretty good at staying coherent through this little process, but it sometimes comes at the expense of being able to get back to sleep.

This is one of those mornings. And to top it off, I've had this blog post percolating in my head for awhile now.

Lindy and I went vegan about eight years ago. It has become such a routine part of our lives that I often find myself thinking about it less than the person I happen to be dining with or talking to about it. So, if I'm called upon to explain it, I'm happy and able to do so without any trouble. Since other vegans who are activists and authors for a living have done a much better job of exploring the facts and figures behind this topic, I will leave most of the history, numbers and images to them. What you have here is simply one man's opinion. Please visit the links at the bottom of this post for further reading.

How about a definition, for starters? To me, a vegan is someone who does not knowingly consume products made from animals. I could spend paragraphs on why I'm not a perfect adherent to this particular philosophy, or how those of us concerned with animal rights and animal welfare get wrapped up in labels or tend to call each other out on not being pure enough. I've been there. Let me just say that I do the best I can to put the ideals I believe in into action. I don't think anyone really wants animals to suffer, but we all have our own boundaries.

My main purpose is pretty straightforward: to avoid causing other sentient beings to suffer as much as I can, and to strive to do more. For example, I wear suits and ties at work. All of these are made from wool and silk, which come from sheep and worms. I have either owned them for more than eight years, or bought them used. Plant-based alternatives for men's dress clothing are few and far between, but I do wish they were more commonly available, affordable and generally better looking. In the meantime, I'm somewhat content that my wearing them has not caused additional animals to suffer as a result. In short, I consider veganism both the general operating principle and the aspiration, even if I have to bend a little once in awhile.

So, why vegan? I'll start with something I think few people would have trouble understanding, even if they don't agree: why I refuse to eat meat. I would not physically or mentally be able to approach an animal, kill it, drain its blood, remove its organs and dismember it. The thought of me, or anyone else, doing this to our dog -- who has been part of our family since 2002, happily eats a vegan diet and is sitting next to me as I write this -- makes me shudder. Yet the animals people eat in this country are just as alive and capable of suffering. (In the case of pigs, they're actually smarter than dogs.) So I don't see it as ethically consistent to pay someone else to take on this gruesome task for me -- especially because that person would be subject to low pay and high probability of workplace injury. If faced with the choice between life or death for myself, I suppose I could probably take out a fish. But I've never been in that situation, we're generations upon generations removed from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and the fact that I live in an affluent society with many dietary options makes it even more important that I eat in what I consider an ethical way. The 56 billion land animals killed for food in the world every year, along with countless sea creatures, don't die because of me.

The environmental impacts of animal agriculture are vast. The amount of land, energy and water it takes to produce a calorie of animal protein is vastly higher than for a calorie of vegetable protein. The air and groundwater pollution from waste lagoons at large animal facilities is devastating to rural communities. I know there have been some small-scale attempts at crop and animal rotation and the grazing of cattle on otherwise unfarmable land. But this is not the way the majority of meat is produced. I also know it wouldn't make much sense for an environmentalist who composts, carpools in a Prius and hasn't bought coffee in a disposable cup for almost four years to take part in an industry that the United Nations says contributes more to global warming than any other.

I am a journalism major with a law degree on the way -- not a doctor or a nutritionist. I don't presume to know what's best for everyone and their bodies.

But I know there have been vegetarians for millennia. Thinkers, like Pythagoras and Gandhi. Athletes, like Carl Lewis and Billie Jean King. And politicians, like Cory Booker and Manmohan Singh. I also know that for my own health, it is absolutely unnecessary to eat any animal -- from land, air or sea. Assuming I still had the inclination, which I no longer do, to eat meat, I'd be doing so purely out of habit, societal convention or pleasure. And those reasons wouldn't be good enough for me to justify the suffering, death and environmental destruction inherent in the practice.

I credit a couple of old friends with opening my eyes years ago to the contradiction of being an animal lover who also happens to eat them. My late discovery, and my early enthusiastic and often militant approach to the topic wasn't a terrific way to endear myself to others. The friends in question deserve my apologies, and also my gratitude for sending me on a path of inquiry that led me from vegetarian to vegan in 2002.

Alright, but of the three great symbols of America -- Mom, ice cream and apple pie -- ice cream and apple pie aren't vegan and Mom probably isn't either. Why remove myself even further to the fringes of society by at least attempting to avoid consuming all animal prducts? After all, they don't kill chickens to get eggs, and they don't kill cows to get milk, right?

Well, not exactly.

To start with, gender roles in animal agriculture are very important. The whole system relies on exploitation of the reproductive capacity of females. With eggs, regardless of how the hens are raised (more on that later), about half of the chicks from hatcheries are male. They can't lay eggs, and they don't grow fast or big enough to be of economic value for their flesh. Again, these hatcheries supply farms of all sizes and the unfortunately popular backyard chicken movement, neither of which have any place for roosters. So the chicks are disposed of as quickly or as cheaply as possible. This might include gassing, if they're slightly luckier, or plastic bags, garbage bins or grinders if they're not. By the hundreds of millions every year. I don't want to be complicit in this kind of suffering, so I don't eat eggs. (Lindy makes some pretty mean cupcakes and cookies, and that we live down the street from a vegan bakery. I can get along just fine without quiche or omelettes.)

The question of the unwanted male is similar in the dairy world. We are the only species on Earth that drinks any kind of milk beyond childhood, and also the only species that drinks the milk of another species. Cows only produce milk at the same time as human females or any other mammals produce milk -- when they're pregnant. So dairy cows are artificially inseminated and kept pregnant almost all the time. When cows are pregnant, they give birth. If the calf is female, she's a future dairy cow. If the calf is male, he doesn't have the right genes to grow up to be steak. He won't grow fast or big enough. So he's now a veal calf. Many meat-eaters I know wouldn't dream of giving up their cheeseburgers or chicken wings, but they know enough about the world of animal welfare to consciously avoid eating veal because of how the calves are raised. That's great. But the principal reason veal calves exist in the first place is because they're a byproduct of the dairy business. This reason alone would be enough for me to avoid supporting the business, and it's the reason I initially stopped eating dairy products. As an added bonus, I discovered that I was no longer having stomach discomfort or headed to the bathroom in extremely short order after many meals. (Like most people on Earth, I'm lactose intolerant.)

Leaving aside for a minute the question of what happens to the males, it's the females that do all of the work in egg and dairy production. Thanks to some conscious consumers and my good friends at groups like the Humane Society of the United States, the living conditions of those females are finally starting to get some attention. Still, far more often than not, hens are debeaked without anesthesia, crammed by the multiples in cages the size of a sheet of copier paper, and stuffed with antibiotics so they can push out eggs until their production declines. Then they're shipped off to meet the same fate as the chickens that are raised to be eaten in the first place. Some hens have happier lives than others, especially those on small family farms. But these are the exception rather than the rule, and there is no legal definition of "cage-free," "free range" or "natural." If the egg industry figured out a way to eliminate the hatching of male chicks, and transformed itself into a system where mutilation was unacceptable and hens could live out their natural lives engaged in natural behavior, I'd have much less to say about why I don't eat eggs. But it hasn't happened yet.

As for dairy, cows produce milk for their calves, not for humans. But we take it instead. To do so requires separating the calf -- regardless of gender -- from its mother almost immediately after birth. This is traumatic for both animals. Meanwhile, mom remains a milk machine and is often pumped full of antibiotics to prevent infection and hormones to increase production. Even on small family farms, cows don't have to be milked for their own health and comfort. They have to be milked because they're impregnated by humans who take their calves away. Like the hens that lay eggs, dairy cows are sent to slaughter when their production declines. Even if my digestive system could handle it, I'd never drink a glass of milk again.

What about other things we do that cause animals to suffer? Sure, I cringe when I see women in fur coats on the subway. I admire my circus-protesting friends and have mixed feelings on the idea of taking my future children to the zoo. But the vast and overwhelming majority of exploitation humans inflict on other animals comes in the name of food. That's where I've focused my attention, my advocacy and my charitable donations. It's where I would recommend anyone focus as well -- whether they've decided to become the world's newest and strictest vegan or to eat 20 meat-centered meals each week instead of 21.

To that end, here are a few resources I like:

Further reading:

Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer. The best book on this topic I've ever read. I can't guarantee it will change anyone's mind, but it's fascinating and well-written without being preachy or gross.
Compassion Over Killing's Vegetarian Starter Guide
A Meaningful Life: Making a Difference in Today's World
Activism and Veganism Reconsidered

Adopting from Haiti.

2010-01-26T07:11:00.000-05:00

As the prospective adoptive parent of a child from another country, I've had a few people ask me of late, "Why not Haiti?" Lindy and I have asked each other that question as well.

The answer before the earthquake was that Haiti, despite obviously having many children in need of homes, had a politically unstable regime, a fairly long time in country for adoptive parents, a long process, and a State Department travel advisory.

After the earthquake, one naturally begins to think of C-130s filled to capacity with little Haitian children airlifted into the arms of their new American parents. But this probably isn't a good idea. The national and local governments down there, to the extent that they're functional at all, are struggling to deal with rescue and rebuilding. Any procedural safeguards that are in place to make sure children are truly orphans -- and thus available for adoption under international law -- would be at risk in such an environment. If nothing else, it could take many months to find the missing parents of these kids. And along with health issues, lack of attachment and dirty looks from strangers in the grocery store, one of the things international adoptive parents worry about most is any coercion, fraud or mistake that might have resulted in them adopting a child who actually had living parents who could have raised him or her.

So we're sticking with the Ethiopia plan. But in the meantime, it's fantastic to read that our own State Department has stepped up to expedite the approval of adoptions from Haiti that were already in progress before the earthquake -- especially because many orphanages were destroyed. Here is one such story from our area.

For Md. couple, dream of adopting Haitian orphan comes true (Washington Post, 01/26/2010)

Big Dinner Gathering.

2010-01-24T08:38:00.000-05:00

Lindy and I went out for Ethiopian food yesterday.

That's not unusual, of course. But this meal was. We went out for Ethiopian food at 4 p.m. in Baltimore, with a big bunch of people who had either adopted children from Ethiopia or were about to do so.

The group meets every couple of months at Dukem in Baltimore, which is owned by the same family as the Dukem down the street from our place. The food was decent, but the company was excellent and fascinating.

Aside from about a dozen well-behaved kids, Ethiopian and otherwise, there were parents and prospective parents of all different ages. And the gathering was a virtual who's who of mid-Atlantic Ethiopian adoption bloggers. We sat next to our friends Kelly and Craig, along with Jamey and Andrew, whom we'd just met and were trying Ethiopian food for the first time. We also met Zoe and Brian. We took up the entire top floor of the restaurant.

Most of the folks seemed to live in Maryland. I like this group because it's full of people at all different stages in the process -- so we can find out how the kids who are already home are adjusting, and compare notes on the paperwork with pre-adoptive parents who are using different agencies. This was our first time at the gathering, and we'll definitely be back. Baltimore's not exactly close, but it's not far enough to keep us away from a dinner every two months. I think it would be great to bring our son our daughter there someday.

As for the son or daughter process, we're in the final stretch of wrapping up our home study, which will end the involvement of the Barker Foundation (our local agency) until after our child comes home. The home study document goes to Wide Horizons (placement agency) to be translated and sent to Ethiopia, and it goes to the Department of Homeland Security so we can get fingerprinted and approved to bring an orphan into the States. Then we go on the official waiting list -- which I'm hoping will happen in February. From that point, it's 12-18 months to wait.

Waiting doesn't sound like such a bad thing right now, as I just started a new job a couple of weeks ago and I'm getting ready to take the Illinois Bar exam next month. Then I can start the reading, painting and buying phase of getting ready to be a parent.

More soon.

Happy New Year.

2010-01-03T10:57:00.001-05:00

Welcome to 2010, the year that in all likelihood will be the least active on the adoption front. After spending quite a bit of the latter half of 2009 arranging our paperwork, we're just waiting for our home study to make its way over to the placement agency and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. After that happens, we do another set of fingerprints, (hopefully) get approved by the federal government, and officially land on the waiting list. Given that the waiting list is 12-15 months long at this point, I think it's pretty safe to say we won't be parents until 2011.

Which is absolutely fine.

I turned in my last law school final on December 11 (still waiting on the grade), and I start a new job on Tuesday. So there's plenty to be busy with. We've already started down the path of doing things we couldn't do with both of us in school, like cleaning out the closets at home and actually having a social life.

We actually had three great live music experiences within blocks of home this week. Two of them had an Ethiopian connection. After seeing Wale at our local venue, the 9:30 Club, on Friday night, we decided to get something to eat. We went to Little Ethiopia, a recently opened restaurant that's become one of our favorites. The late-night dinner crowd was enjoying some live Ethiopian music and a little dancing. We probably stayed twice as long as we would have if we were only there for the sambusas and yemesir wat, and we would have stayed longer if it weren't close to 1 in the morning at that point.

Friday night made me extra-glad we're adopting a child from Ethiopia. I don't think we could be anywhere else in the United States and accidentally stumble into great Ethiopian live music at any one of a dozen different places within the same block and within walking distance of our house. One of the most common questions we get is "why not [other country]?" The answer depends on how much time I have, but an obvious first step is that in nine years of living in the District of Columbia, I have yet to meet a Chinese person of any generation who lives here. I have yet to meet more than a handful of Korean people who live here. But you can walk out our front door, turn in any direction and see or hear the Amharic language within a block or two.

Last night, we saw Gogol Bordello, also at the 9:30 Club. I don't really know how to describe that show, except that it's extremely high-energy gypsy punk music. Twice during the show, the lead singer took a moment in his heavy eastern-European accent to thank the Ethiopian community in the District for giving the band its bassist. And I woke up this morning to find a profile of Tommy T in the Washington Post. He's done some solo work I plan on downloading later.

So this will be a pretty dull year in terms of news on our adoption. On the other hand, if the past couple of days are any indication, our encounters with the Ethiopian community will continue to get more numerous and exciting...

Dossier Has Sailed.

2009-12-07T13:10:00.000-05:00

The first snow of the season this weekend finally made it feel like we're in early December in the District of Columbia. It means cold fingers and toes, but I still prefer December here to August, which is when we began assembling and completing our paperwork for the adoption.

Last Friday, we had our last interview with our social worker -- a home visit, which will culminate in her report to both of the adoption agencies we're working with. Today, a little more than four months since we began, I mailed the last envelope to Wide Horizons in Massachusetts. It contains the package known as our dossier. This is the file that the agency will send to Ethiopia on our behalf, once the Department of Homeland Security approves us to bring an orphan into the United States. (To that end, we expect to receive an appointment for fingerprints shortly.)

Once we're approved by Homeland Security and our home study is final, we'll officially be on the waiting list. We're looking at a year or more on the waiting list before we receive our referral. In the meantime, it feels great to get the dossier in the mail, because once it's approved, we're basically done with paperwork until we're referred a child.

Some of the paperwork we assembled for the home study was acceptable for the dossier; most was not. Also, we were required to send the entire thing, in order, along with two exact copies. We had sent the home study paperwork in batches. I put the paperwork we were able to use for both in italics.

Here's the list, if you're curious to see what one of these looks like.

Substantial check
Power of attorney form for Ethiopia program staff (signed and notarized)
Power of attorney form for Ethiopia program staff (signed, notarized and authenticated)
My two-page statement of reason for adopting an Ethiopian child (signed and notarized)
Lindy's two-page statement of reason for adopting an Ethiopian child (signed and notarized)
Two passport-sized photos of each of us
Two photos of the outside of our home
Two photos of the inside of our home
My employment verification letter (signed and notarized)
Lindy's employment verification letter (signed and notarized)
Financial statement (signed and notarized)
My birth certificate
Lindy's birth certificate
Our marriage certificate
My declaration and attestation of health (signed, also by doctor, and notarized)
Lindy's declaration and attestation of health (signed, also by doctor, and notarized)
My police clearance letter
Lindy's police clearance letter
Two reference letters (signed)
Obligation of post-placement contract (signed and notarized)

I have two exams this week, and if I pass them, I'll be done with law school. Lindy's thisclose to being done with another semester of work and another quarter of school. It's amazing to see all of these major projects wrapping up at the same time and in time for the holidays!

Mixed Thanksgiving Feelings.

2009-11-26T09:09:00.002-05:00

It's a rare Thursday morning without obligation from work or school. I get to catch up on my sleep and spend some extra time around the house with Lindy and the creatures.

Still, as I bent to retrieve the six pounds of newsprint that make up today's Washington Post, I'm reminded that Thanksgiving can be an awfully depressing holiday.

For someone who's conscious of power dynamics and is about to adopt a child of color, it's a holiday that celebrates the systematic conquest and oppression of a native people.

For someone who tries as much as possible to avoid causing animals to suffer, it's a holiday when 45 million turkeys will be raised in filthy, unspeakable living conditions and die a fearful, painful death to become the centerpiece of a meal.

For someone who wants the world to be free of hunger, it's a reminder that one in eight families in the District of Columbia don't have enough to eat, and it's a holiday when the critical nonprofits and their volunteers will work to fill the gap by contributing to the suffering and death of animals.

'Grace': PETA's Thanksgiving ad

For someone whose small family is spread out around the world, it's a holiday about traveling great distances to spend time with relatives and friends.

For someone who attempts to be a conscious consumer, it's a holiday weekend about trying to get up the earliest and move the fastest to try to keep the next guy from getting the better deal on a Christmas present.

Last year, we decided to skip the roads, airports, malls and even the vegetarian buffets and have a small, quiet weekend at home. We put together a bunch of side dishes. Lindy made pie. And yes, we had the much-mocked Tofurky. We took part in Buy Nothing Day. We spent the weekend catching up on movies and our reading, took the dog on long walks, and got ready to tackle December with the energy that people with full-time jobs and part-time degree programs need to succeed.

Today, we're going to do it again.

Outsourcing the Farmland?

2009-11-23T07:03:00.000-05:00

Uh oh. I'm an expert in neither agriculture nor economics, but it strikes me that this can't possibly be good.

The Ultimate Crop Rotation (Washington Post, 10/23/2009)

Slight Paperwork Fail.

2009-11-22T10:43:00.000-05:00

We are making our way through the series of interviews with our local social worker, the last of which will take place here at the house a week from Friday. (Let the dusting commence!) I think it's also safe to say we've more than passed the halfway point on all of the papers we need to assemble for this process. After that last interview, we'll focus on the paperwork for the dossier, which is the file on us that the placement agency will assemble, including our home study from the local agency and send off to Ethiopia.

There were a few paperwork-related frustrations in the past week. First, a check we mailed to the Barker Foundation was returned "no such address" by the post office, despite the fact that it was properly addressed and we've probably sent half a dozen such mailings in the past few months. Next, Lindy received her medical report from her doctor last Saturday, and it was incomplete and incorrect -- leading to a frantic phone call to the doctor's answering service and more frustrating phone calls with her ambivalent staff later in the week. And finally, we received our I-600A immigration form back in the mail yesterday from the Department of Homeland Security because I'd somehow goofed up the amount for the check, overpaying by $20.

These are, of course, minor bumps in what has been a very smooth road so far. But I wonder if we'll look back on this stage in the process in a year and know that we're closer, but yearn for something a little more exciting than "we're still on the waiting list" to tell our friends and family when they ask how the process is going.

Long Overdue Post.

2009-11-10T13:41:00.000-05:00

Blogging is like exercising. Get out of the habit for too long, and the struggle to get back in the habit becomes more about the struggle than the habit itself. I struggle to keep up with both blogging and exercising, though I was happy to read that our friend Kelly is having better luck than I on both fronts of late.

Anyway, to the adoption process. We have completed the vast and overwhelming majority of our paperwork, save for a few pieces on the international side that we don't want to start yet for fear they will expire. We have filled out and mailed off our I-600A, which gets the Department of Homeland Security involved in our family-building plans. A copy of our home study, and another set of fingerprints, will accompany our request for federal approval.

To the home study. We spent one Saturday a few weeks back at the Bethesda office of the Barker Foundation, for what is called Pre-Adoption Group. It's a daylong class for prospective adoptive parents regardless of whether they are adopting domestically or internationally, or from which country they are adopting. We probably had a dozen couples in the room, all at various stages of the process and only one other couple considering adopting from Ethiopia. We went over policies and procedures, issues related to infertility, and an overview of all of the agency's programs.

There were several guest speakers, including a Colombian teenager raised by white American parents, whose story left not a single dry eye in the house. She'd grown up quite resentful toward her adoptive parents and birth mother for placing her in between nations and cultures. This sentiment changed just a couple of years ago when her parents took her and her brother (also adopted from Colombia) on a trip to her birth country. She had the extraordinary experience of seeing a young teenage mother, who looked very similar to her, painfully surrendering her newborn at the home where she herself had been surrendered by her own birth mother. She was forever moved by this experience and realized how difficult and selfless an act it was.

The other exercise that stirred some emotions in the group was the game of the colored pom-pom balls. Each participant was given an empty bowl, and bowls were set on the table with different colored balls to represent different races of people - African-American, Latino, Asian, mixed-race and white. We were asked a series of questions, and told to grab a ball that best answered each question and put it in our bowls. The facilitator asked us which ball best described most of our friends, our co-workers, our bosses, our neighbors, and even our doctors and dentists.

I was slightly pleased to see that our two bowls contained about half white balls and half multicolored ones, with a sprinkling of a few solid colors as well. I'm well aware of the fact that our city and our neighborhood are more diverse than our individual lives, and that this will have an impact on our yet-unborn child of color. It's an area of life that needs some exploration and improvement for sure. But some of the other pre-adoptive parents in the room, all of them white, who ended up with nearly all-white bowls got pretty defensive about the whole exercise. They suggested that simple awareness of different cultures was enough, and that the color of their dentist's skin doesn't matter. To keep the discussion away from acrimony, the facilitators told us that this was just an informational exercise. But I got the point.

Lindy and I had our first meeting with our assigned social worker the following week. It was a two-hour session, and the discussion ranged from how we met to our joint philosophy of parenting. I think it went well. The social worker has spent the time since then talking to our references on the phone and in person, trying to get a sense of who we are as people and what kind of community will surround our son or daughter. Each of us will meet with her individually once more, and she will come to the house for a final interview session.

Our social worker will write up a home study report, which will go to the federal government as part of our I-600A application, and to our placement agency as part of the dossier that goes to Ethiopia. We will gather a few more letters and verifications, get a bunch of documents notarized, and send off that whole bundle in a few weeks. If I had to guess, I'd say we'll probably be done with paperwork by the end of this calendar year.

When our I-600A is approved, we will officially be on the waiting list for Ethiopia. We're looking at 12-18 months from that date. As I will be done with school in four weeks (yay!) and Lindy is in her last year of grad school, this wait time will be our chance to catch up as a couple, get the house ready, and hopefully have a little fun.

More soon.

Famine Aid Requested.

2009-10-23T08:50:00.000-04:00

We have our first interview with the social worker next week -- not much to report on the process until then.

In the meantime, here's an Associated Press article about famine in Ethiopia.

Ethiopia seeks aid to feed 6.2 million
Food shortage stems from drought afflicting Horn of Africa

By Elizabeth A. Kennedy
Friday, October 23, 2009

NAIROBI -- Ethiopia said Thursday that it needs emergency food aid for 6.2 million people, an appeal that comes 25 years after a devastating famine compounded by communist policies killed 1 million and prompted one of the largest charity campaigns ever.

The crisis stems from a prolonged drought that has hit much of the Horn of Africa, including Kenya and Somalia.

Drought is especially disastrous in Ethiopia because more than 80 percent of its people live off the land. Agriculture accounts for half of its domestic production and most exports.

Mitiku Kassa, Ethiopia's state minister for agriculture and rural development, appealed to donors Thursday for more than $121 million. In January, he had said that 4.9 million of Ethiopia's 85 million people needed food aid.

Ethiopia has long struggled with cyclical droughts, which are compounded by the country's dependence on rain-fed agriculture and archaic farming practices.

In 1984, Ethiopia's famine drew international attention as news reports showed emaciated children and adults with limbs as thin as sticks. The crisis launched one of the biggest global charity campaigns in history, including the Live Aid concert.

This year's drought appears to be slightly less severe than the one last year, which was exacerbated by high food prices. A year ago, Mitiku appealed for aid to feed 6.4 million people affected by drought. Many humanitarian groups have said in recent years that they believe the number of people affected by hunger is higher than government estimates.

Because of Ethiopia's large size and poor infrastructure, independent observers have difficulty collecting data. The worst-affected areas in the country's east are the site of a fierce insurgency and are off-limits to journalists. Aid groups say their movements in these areas are limited by military restrictions.

Nick Martlew, an official with the aid group Oxfam in Ethiopia, said that the country's east should be green and healthy now but that crops are wilting in the sun and will not produce a sufficient amount of food.
"Really, until June next year there is going to be insufficient food around," he said. "Where we are in eastern Ethiopia you can look out and it's completely barren as far as the eye can see." Drought and water shortages are also increasing in Ethiopia's south because of a changing climate, Martlew said. Oxfam is helping villages collect rainwater for long-term use.

-- Associated Press

More on Health.

2009-10-03T18:08:00.000-04:00

Three more parts of Hanna Ingber Win's series "Mothers of Ethiopia" for Huffington Post. Staggering excerpt this time:

Ethiopia, a country of 77 million people, has 2,085 physicians, according to the health ministry. Of those, there are about 200 gynecologists, according to Dr. Ashebir Gaym, the president of the Ethiopian Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. During my time in the country, doctors, students, journalists and non-governmental workers all repeated the same line to me: there are probably more Ethiopian doctors in Chicago than in Ethiopia. The statistic comes from the International Organization for Migration, which estimates that some 20,000 professionals migrate out of Africa each year.

On Human Origins.

2009-10-02T08:32:00.000-04:00

Here's the Washington Post on another link between the beginning of our species and the future of our family.

"Ardi" May Rewrite the Story of Humans

Mothers of Ethiopia.

2009-09-30T13:29:00.000-04:00

I'm learning a lot from Hanna Ingber Win's series for Huffington Post. Even as our nation's leaders debate the best way to reform health care, there is no arguing about the difference that access to care can make.

In the U.S., a woman has a 1 in 4,800 chance of dying from complications due to pregnancy or childbirth in her lifetime. In Ethiopia, a woman has a 1 in 27 chance of dying.

Two-Week Update.

2009-09-26T09:50:00.001-04:00

Been a couple of weeks since our last post, and there isn't a whole lot to report. We were pleased to receive the results of our FBI background checks in the mail this week -- all clear -- and now have only two missing pieces of paperwork for our home study. These are the results of Lindy's physical (not scheduled until October) and the certificate of completion for an all-day adoptive parent class at the agency in Bethesda (also not scheduled until October). The good news is that we will be assigned a social worker next week. The social worker will begin interviewing us and writing up our file.

I'm going through some transitions at work, and Lindy is doing her best to stay clear of H1N1 despite working in an environment with hundreds of children. Meanwhile, we're headed out with two friends and 91,000 others to see U2 at FedEx Field on Tuesday. We saw them a couple years ago at an indoor arena here in town, and earlier this year on the National Mall at the inaugural concert. I'm sure it's going to be an amazing experience.

For a little diversion this weekend, here's the video for "Magnificent," which is my favorite song on U2's latest album. To me, it represents everything that's great about a great band.

And of course, who could forget that blustery January day in front of the Lincoln Memorial, when U2 performed the then-president-elect's campaign song for him?

Another Paperwork Update.

2009-09-11T16:55:00.000-04:00

We're preparing another packet of papers (not to be confused with pickling another peck of peppers) to send to Barker for our home study. Of the gigantic list in the last post, we have now completed everything that depends solely on us, and put in motion everything that depends on other people. Lindy and I spent some rare, quality midday time together a week ago today as we got our fingerprints done for the FBI background check. I had my physical this week, and both of us have now finished writing our autobiographies. This was the most difficult writing assignment I can remember, and it's also the first time I can remember exceeding a recommended page limit. Distilling almost 34 years of life, with a focus on childhood and parenting philosophy, into a mere 9 pages, was rough.

So... here's what we have left to do in this wave of paperwork. Mostly because we're waiting for paperwork to come back our way from various family members, law enforcement agencies and medical professionals.

General medical forms completed by physician. (Alan's physical complete; Lindy's pending)
Self-reported medical form signed by physician. (Same)
Guardianship agreement from designated guardian.
Police clearances from Metropolitan Police and FBI.

I'm pretty happy with our progress, given the size of that list just two weeks ago. As we start our weekend, let me share the latest Newsweek cover story. Definitely food for thought for a prospective transracial adoptive parent. And, I would argue, plenty interesting for everyone else who'd care to read it.

Newsweek: Even Babies Discriminate

Growing the Binder.

2009-08-30T10:28:00.004-04:00

Since we last wrote, Lindy and I have been up to our local agency's offices in Bethesda one more time. We had a great intake session on Wednesday with a social worker, who asked us about our marriage, our reasons for adopting and our thoughts on race relations in the District and in our country. The session also came accompanied with a new sheaf of paperwork for us to tackle.

Basically, four entities need to approve our adoption, and each has its own set of papers:

Local agency (Barker Foundation)
Placement agency (Wide Horizons)
U.S. State Department
Ethiopian government

Because #1 and #2 help guide us through the process of gaining approval from #3 and #4, some of the paperwork overlaps. Most of it doesn't.

Right now, we're mainly involved in preparing for our home study. The home study is a legal document prepared by the local agency, certifying to the governments of both countries that we are prepared to parent an Ethiopian child. It will solicit the opinions of several of our friends; our doctors, the FBI, and the Metropolitan Police Department. Once we're almost done with this set of paperwork, we'll have three interviews with a social worker at Barker (one together, and one for each of us separately), and a fourth interview at our home.

At this moment I'm glad that I'm a process-oriented person, and that I have a friend down the hall from me at work who's a notary. (In the first of two likely such sessions, Lindy and I are taking her out to dinner next week and having a bunch of forms notarized.)

In case you're curious, here is the list of what's expected of us for our home study:

Individual typed personal autobiography (5-8 pages).
General medical forms completed by physician.
Self-reported medical form signed by physician.
Copies of 1040 federal tax return for 2008.
Financial statement with supporting documents.
Monthly expenses form.
Certified copy of marriage certificate.
Certified copies of birth certificates.
Employment verification letters.
Copies of certified driving records for the last 5 years.
Guardianship agreement from designated guardian.
Signed corporal punishment statement.
Signed statement of childhood immunization policy.
Signed duty of candor statement.
Firearm policy form.
Written plan of evacuation from home.
Fire safety survey.
Proof of pet vaccinations.
Police clearances from Metropolitan Police and FBI.
Fee agreement.
Adoption service agreement.

The Paper Chase.

2009-08-15T09:41:00.002-04:00

In the last two weeks, I've been chasing a ton of paper even outside of the adoption process. I completed the mammoth application to take the Illinois Bar in February -- including a nostalgic phone call back to the property management office for the apartment complex I lived in 10 years ago in Springfield. Lindy and I have updated our wills. And I applied to renew my passport, though the Passport Office rejected the application because it didn't like my photos. Will try that again today.

Then there's the adoption itself. Since I last wrote, our local homestudy agency (Barker Foundation) acted with astonishing speed in requesting letters of support from the friends we listed as references. A social worker from Barker called to set an appointment for the two of us to visit the Bethesda office and chat. And the placement agency, Wide Horizons, sent over a packet with another set of forms, disclaimers and waivers for us to sign.

We're also requesting copies of our birth and marriage certificates from the Cook County Clerk, in preparation for filling out our I-600A and I-600, which are the federal application for advance processing of an orphan petition and petition to classify an orphan as an immediate family member, respectively. These will come along with fingerprints and hefty fees, but we're waiting for the go-ahead from Barker before submitting them, because they have a limited shelf life. We don't want them to expire before we're through the process.

So we'll be making another Saturday morning trip to CVS for photos, Staples for copies, and the post office for mailing. As of right now, the Bar application was the most daunting. I'm keeping our new friend Kelly's machete approach in mind as we await the next wave of packets and applications to fill up our big binder.

In the Mail.

2009-08-01T21:21:00.004-04:00

Well, we've mailed our first application (two pages, to Wide Horizons), and spent our first money on the adoption process -- a total of $2.65 for photos and copies. We're waiting to nail down a couple of minor details before sending the Barker application in. It's a much heftier 11 pages.

Here's Lindy dropping the thing in the mail.

From here, once we've heard from the two agencies, the process of assembling a truly serious mound of paperwork begins. That's why Alan managed to snag a surplussed giant binder from work. A serious mound of paperwork calls for a serious binder.

Also, recommended reading: Melissa Fay Greene's There Is No Me Without You. It's an incredible primer on Ethiopia, disease, poverty and international adoption.

Have a great weekend!

The Journey Begins.

2009-07-30T20:25:00.001-04:00

Family and Friends,

Lindy and I are pleased to announce the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. At some point next month, we will begin the process of adopting a child of toddler age or younger from Ethiopia. If all goes the way it usually does, our new son or daughter will come home with us sometime in the next two years.

Adoption is our first choice for raising a family. We are choosing to adopt because we live on a planet whose population is growing to the point that resources for many are becoming scarce. Millions of children in other countries don't grow up with so much as a chance.

We are choosing to adopt internationally because, generally, there is not a great need for adoptive parents of extremely young children in the United States -- or especially in the region where we live. The availability of abortion, the destigmatization of single motherhood and the increase in kinship care (children raised by relatives other than their parents) have reduced the necessity for domestic adoption and sent many prospective adoptive parents overseas.

We are choosing to adopt from Ethiopia because there is great need there, and because it makes the most sense for who we are and where we live. There are 5 million orphans in Ethiopia, and one in 13 children there will die before reaching their first birthday. The adoption agency we've chosen, Wide Horizons for Children, does extensive humanitarian work in-country, including water, sanitation, medicine and family reunification. Ethiopia is one of the only international adoption countries that allows (and in fact encourages) contact with the birth family of the child. By contrast, the vast majority of orphans adopted from China are abandoned, and will grow up having little sense of their birth-family background. Finally, the District of Columbia is home to the largest Ethiopian community outside of Ethiopia itself. All of the community and cultural centers, restaurants and shops are actually within walking distance of our house. From our experience, Ethiopian immigrants here are extremely supportive and welcoming of the international adoption process. And Lindy's school is home to a number of Ethiopian children, including adoptees.

We realize this is not an easy path to take. We realize we will face questions about racism and self-identity that young, white parents who grew up in relative privilege don't have to think about, let alone confront on a regular basis. But forays into parenthood are rarely easy, and having a multicultural family is perfectly in line with how we and many others see the world. You all also know us as a couple of people who rarely take the conventional approach to our life's adventures.

The months ahead, especially after both of us finish school, will bring much saving, prepping, planning and packing. Both of us know the journey in life is almost always as fascinating as the destination, and that in parenting, there's no such thing as a destination anyway. This experience is something we've been looking forward to for a long time, and we're happy to tell you about it and answer any questions you have.

That's why we've started a blog. We decided to share our experience with the world in hopes of helping others, much as the many, many other blogs out there have done for us. We're sticking to first names just so this doesn't pop up instantly the first time someone Googles us, but we definitely want you to read and take part:

http://planetrh.blogspot.com

With love,
Alan and Lindy