100 Good Wishes

I joined the 100 Good Wishes Quilt square swap with my January DTC yahoo group (a group for families whose paperwork went to China around the time that ours did), and I have to say that I have never enjoyed a swap as much as this one. The wishes and fabric have all been beautiful, and I have loved getting every single one of them. Amelia has me read each wish to her when we open the mail each day, and I think she is as excited about it as I am. I think it has inspired me to start working on some of the projects I have sitting around. In the fall I was in a flannel swap, so I think this week I will turn the squares from that swap into a rag quilt. It won't be very big, but it will be a nice cuddle blanket for Elena.

Red Threads and Forget-Me-Nots

When we waited for Amelia, I often got "signs" that everything was going OK with the adoption. Sometimes they were just little things, like running into an adoptive family at just the right moment, but sometimes they were really amazing. During our wait for Amelia, I became obsessed with giraffes. It made no sense to me at all, and I even commented to Brian once about my unreasonable obsession with giraffes, since I had really never given them much thought before. At one point I actually woke up during the night thinking about a stuffed giraffe that I had seen weeks before in a store, and I absolutely had to get it the following day. I bought drawings of giraffes for her room, blankets with giraffes on them... the list went on and on. When we got her referral and enlarged her photos to share with family, I could clearly see that her little shirt had tiny little giraffes all over it.

Some folks in the adoption community would call these "red threads". There is a Chinese belief that an invisible red thread connects those that are destined to meet and grow shorter as they get closer to meeting one another. This belief actually stems from a wedding tradition in which the bride and groom are joined by red ribbon at various stages of the ceremony, but has been used by the adoption community as a way to explain coincidences like shared birthdates between the child and other loved ones. We have had too many coincidences, and heard of other families who have had similar coincidences in their own adoption journeys, to completely ignore them. (My personal favorite: a family that we know kept asking their older daughter what they should name her younger sister that they were waiting for, and the older daughter always answered "Boy", despite the family explaining to her that "Boy" is not a name, and especially not a girl's name. When they got their referral, their new daughters name translated to something like "Beautiful Boy". Strange but true!)

So because of all of this, maybe I am more willing to see signs in Elena's adoption, although there haven't been too many yet. I wanted to share this one since at the very least it made me smile. I have been feeling discouraged by the long wait ahead of us, and I have questioned whether we have made the right decision. At one point last week I thought to myself "Maybe we should just forget this whole thing". At that very moment, Brian came into the room and said "Hey, some of those plants that you got from Chris and planted yesterday have flowers on them already. They have little bright blue flowers on them. What are they?" I smiled and said, "Oh, those must be the Forget-Me-Nots" My friend that gave me the plants for my garden purposely chose plants that were not ready to open and flower yet since she thought they would have a better chance of surviving a transplant from her garden, so it was odd that they opened a day after I had planted them in my yard, and stranger still that Brian would choose the very moment that I was most discouraged to tell me that they were in bloom. But the best part is that they are forget-me-nots. Call me crazy, but it seemed like a little message from the universe telling me not to give up, and that Elena will join our family if we are just patient.

How long will we wait????

It looks like China has sent 6 days of referrals this month. Last month it was a measly two days. The positive thing for us about this month's referral batch is that our friends are expecting their referral this month (last month they missed it by a day in what must have been the smallest batch of referrals in the history of Chinese adoption). So what does this mean for us? It isn't easy to predict. The only predictable part of international adoption, or adoption in general I guess, is that it will be unpredictable. Still, I am finding it difficult to imagine what our wait will end up being. Even if China starts to send two weeks worth of referrals each month (and they haven't sent that many in a while), our wait could easily approach three years. Amelia has been home with us for a little over three years, and that seems like a lifetime ago. I am really having trouble wrapping my mind around a wait that long. When we started the paperwork for this adoption, I really wanted to time it so that we wouldn't have two in daycare at the same time. This seems ridiculous to me now because Amelia may be in school for a year or two before we ever see her sister. A few months ago I bought some medicine to take to China with us on this trip since it was something that I had trouble finding the last time we were packing. The expiration date is in early 2010, and I figured that it made sense to buy it when I saw it since we would surely be happily settled in at home with Elena long before 2010. Now it might actually expire before we go.
We want another child, Amelia desperately wants a sister, and we want them to share a cultural heritage. Our only choice at this point is to wait and keep our fingers crossed that everything speeds up for all of us who are waiting.