My Celebrity Look-alikes

Apparently, I have a face that is unrecognizable. I tried about five different pictures, and each time MyHeritage would recognize everyone else in the photo except me. And I mean that it didn't even recognize that my face was a face in the picture. Since I am the famiy photographer, there are very few photos of me, but I finally dug this one out. Not the best photo of me since I look a little startled, but if it makes me look like Keira Knightly, how bad can it be?


My cool celebrity look-alike collage from MyHeritage.com. Get one for yourself.

My Celebrity Look-alikes

I love the fact that Rudy Giuliani showed up as a celebrity look-alike for Brian. I can't say that I ever noticed the similarity!

My cool celebrity look-alike collage from MyHeritage.com. Get one for yourself.

Xiao Dan Long (little lanterns)

I am finally working on Amelia's One Hundred Good Wishes Quilt. While we were waiting for her, I exchanged fabric squares and "good wishes" - sometimes called "squishes"- from other families who were also waiting to adopt a child from China. Supposedly this is a tradition in northern areas of China where pieces of fabric are collected from 100 different families in the community in order to make a quilt for a new child. The adoption community has taken this tradition and turned it into a fun way to pass the time while we wait for our own children. One of my goals before we travel to adopt Elena is to finish Amelia's quilt. I am also collecting squares for Elena, and it would be great if I could get started on her quilt before we bring her home as well. After all, it has only been FOUR years since I collected the fabric for Amelia. It feels really good to finally get started on it.

I posted a photo of the first finished block. I am turning all the fabric swatches into lanterns. Amelia and I often sing a song from her Ni Hao Little Friends DVD called Xiao Dan Long or little lanterns. It is a song that teaches children how to count to 10 in Mandarin, and it is one of the songs that we sing wherever we go, so I like the theme of little lanterns in her quilt.

One block down, 99 more to go!

The Wait

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the long wait we have ahead of us. Most likely it will be at least two years, if not longer, unti we get a referral and see Miss Elena's little face for the first time. I can't help but compare how different the wait will be this time around. When we were waiting for Amelia, the entire wait was full of twists and turns, ups and downs. When we sent our paperwork to China in January of 2003, we were told to expect a 14 month wait (it seemed so long back then, and now seems so short!). In the Spring of 2003, SARS hit and eventually shut down all travel in and out of China. Referrals completely stopped coming, and no one knew what was going to happen next or when China would re-open. When SARS was under control and travel restrictions were finally lifted, referrals started coming two months of LIDs at a time. Our 14-month wait dropped to just over 8 months, and we got Amelia's referral in October of 2003. It was so much like a roller coaster ride that sometimes I swear I could hear the clicking of the coaster car as it approached a hill, and the rush of exhilaration with every twist and turn. It was a wild and crazy ride!
The wait for Elena so far seems more like we are in one of those long long lines at Disney. I know eventually we will be able to get on the ride and feel the same exhilaration, but right now all we can see around every turn is the huge line and long wait ahead of us. I am so grateful that we have Amelia to focus on during this wait, and I am trying to think positively and just enjoy the time that I have to spend with Amelia one-on-one. She definitely keeps us busy! One of the hardest parts of this wait is going to be watching her wait. She is just so excited to bring her sister home. I guess we can do the best we can to keep ourselves busy while we wait and we certainly have a list of things we would like to accomplish before Elena comes home: fence in the backyard, get the flower garden looking somewhat presentable, start Chinese school in the Fall (it would be great to be able to say something more than Ni Hao and Xie Xie this time around!), replace the kitchen floor and maybe take a nice family vacation.
Honestly, the more I think about it, although I would like a little bit more of a speed up with referrals, I could do without the drama of an infectious disease outbreak this time! Maybe this time I should just hope for slow and steady and a little bit less of a wild ride! And although you NEVER could have convinced me of this while we were waiting for Amelia, everything happens exactly the way it needs to happen in order for the right child for your family to be matched with you. It still amazes me that everything lined up exactly the way it did for our paperwork to be matched with Amelia's, and I can't imagine not being her Mom. I have a lot more faith this time around that everything will work out exactly as it needs to so Elena can join our family, so I guess we just need to learn to be patient.

One month down, and we finally have a name!

Well, I just logged on to add a post and noticed that our little ladybug timeline ticker says "One Month since LID". One down, and who knows how many more to go!

I have been really encouraged this week because we finally have a name for the baby, and it finally feels right in the same way that Amelia's name did. We have decided on Elena Mae. I think I needed to know that we were using a family name that had meaning beyond being just a name that we liked, and once I saw it used in my family tree, I finally felt like I was being guided toward that name. I actually like the more traditional spelling of Elena as well, and it is nice because Elena spelled this way is a variant of Helen, which is Brian's grandmother's name. We chose Mae because it is also a commonly used middle name in the family. However, if Elena's Chinese name contains Mei, we will have to rethink her American middle name, or decide to use only her Chinese name as her middle name. At any rate, we are now very much looking forward to meeting our little Elena.

This has to be a sign.....

OK, I know I said I wasn't going to think about names for a while in the hopes that one would jump out at me as being the right one, and maybe one actually has and I just haven't been paying attention. This is too cool! For the past few weeks I have been trying to find out the middle name of my great-aunt who died when she was very young. I was sort of wondering if there were any family names that we hadn't considered. I had already asked my Mom, and she couldn't remember Aunt Margaret's middle name. Anyway, just for fun, I decided to Google my great-aunts first and last name with some other info to see if anything came up with her middle name. I ended up finding a website containing my entire family tree (my mom's mother's lineage), traced back for the last few hundred years (I have ancestors who fought in the Battle of Gettysburg!). Apparently someone (or more likely several people) have spent a lot of time putting together a huge website with all of my mother's lineage. It is pretty unusual to have your entire geneology handed to you when you type in a four-word Google search, but that is exactly what happened. I still found nothing on Great Aunt Margaret's middle name, but here is the cool thing.... I was looking at the names for my Great-great-grandmothers and found that one of their sisters was named Lucy Elena. The name Elena nearly jumped off the page at me. I can't believe that the name that Amelia has been insisting on for her sister is actually a family name. I don't think it was even all that common back in the 1800's when they were named. My Mom remembers her Great Great Aunt Lucy from when she was a kid, and I actually feel close to the women from her generation because at least two of them, Ida and Addie, were quilters, and I have inherited their quilts and have always felt a link with them because of that. So maybe there really was a reason why the name Elaina (or Elena) has been popping out at me all over the place. Now even my ancestors are throwing it at us! Maybe it really is the right name for our daughter.

And just as cool, I also discovered that my Great Uncle Olin's middle name was Clare, one of the middle names we have considered all along! We had all kinds of signs while we waited for Amelia. Maybe I just need to start paying attention to them again!

Conversations from Amelia's restaurant

Our daughter Amelia LOVES to play restaurant, and her favorite part is asking you what you would like to order and then pretending to write it down. My favorite part of this game is that no matter what we order, she never has any of it. Here is what happened the last time we played restaurant:

Amelia: What do you want to order?

Mom: How about a grilled cheese sandwich?

Amelia: Um, Mom? This is a Chinese restaurant.

Mom: Oh, okay. Then how about some steamed buns with the red bean paste?

Amelia: Actually, we are all out of that kind.

Mom: How about some tofu?

Amelia: Well, we are all out of the peppers, so we just have the tofu.

Mom: Ok, well I will take some plain tofu, and how about some garlic broccoli?

Amelia: Um, we forgot to buy the broccoli at the grocery store. We went to the store, but forgot to get the broccoli. We might still have some in the fridge.

Mom: OK, well do you have lotus root?

Amelia: Um, we did, but the box got yucky and stale and we had to throw it out.

Mom: How about some noodles?

Amelia: OK, we have noodles, and what else did you say before?......

Something like this happens EVERY time we play restaurant, and it cracks me up. It reminds me of the Monty Python bookstore skit where no matter what book the person asks for, they don't have it. She loves to help me cook, but I am not sure she has a future in running a restaurant!

Ugh! Names!

You know, when I was a kid I loved looking through name books and thinking of all the different name possibilities. So it is really surprising to me that I am having such a hard time with this naming thing. In the past week, after we had sort of unofficially decided on the name Elaina, I have been absolutely besieged by people named Elaina, (or Alaina, Alayna, Alanna, Elena....). On the one hand, maybe it is a sign that we picked the right name, but honestly it is making me feel like there are just way too many people with similar names. Now, I know that there will be other people with our daughter's name, no matter what we choose, but I really loved the fact growing up that I only ever knew two other people named Erica. For now, we are undecided on a name, and we are working on another list of names (including Elaina, Eliza-Claire, Natalie, Felicity, Claudia, Miranda, and Meredith), but I don't think we are coming to a decision at any time soon. I am officially taking a hiatus from baby names, and maybe when I think of it in a few months down the road, something will just seem right.