Happy Autumn Moon Festival!

Tomorrow night will be the Autumn Moon Festival, the second largest and second most important festival in China, and a favorite in our house. For the second year in a row, Amelia and I have attempted to make our own mooncakes, although every Chinese person I had talked to about it says that no one makes their own, they all buy them. Since we were on vacation this year, we didn't get a chance to get to our local Asian market to buy them, so we made them again. They turned out much better than last year, but still are a long way from the beautiful mooncakes you can buy. (The ones in the photo are NOT the ones that I made!) At least we have fun doing it, and Amelia really looks forward to helping me with them.

So we are looking forward to eating them tomorrow night, reading a story about Chang E, watching the full moon, and thinking of loved ones who are far away from us who might be looking at the same moon. And of course, we will think about and wonder about Amelia's birthfamily and think about our little sister/daughter that we are waiting to meet.

Happy Moon Festival!

Dolls

I just got an email from American Girl announcing the release of their new historical doll. Parents of children adopted from China have been requesting that AG come out with a Chinese doll for this series, perhaps telling the story of some of the early Chinese immigrants. The new doll is Julie, a caucasian girl of divorced parents living in 1970's San Francisco. However, I was really excited to see that they have also released another historical doll, Julie's best friend Ivy, who appears to be Chinese-American! She even has a Chinese New Year's dress available for purchase. I am looking forward to getting the new catalog and checking her out! She comes with a book as well, and I am interested in finding out what it is about. She is wearing her Chinese New Year's dress on the cover. They also have an Asian doll available in their Just Like You line, and Amelia seems to point that one out when we look through the catalog. As long as we are talking about AG, I should mention that the only baby doll that Amelia will play with is her Asian Bitty Baby doll. It is also the only doll she has that she has named - Isabel - which tells you how special this doll is to her.

For those of you who might be wondering why this is a big deal, I have always been a firm believer in providing my daughter with dolls to play with that look like she does. She does have caucasian dolls and African-American dolls as well, but they hardly get played with. She almost always chooses, on her own, to play with the dolls that look like her. In fact, she has a set of Ariel and Prince Eric dolls from the Little Mermaid where Ariel is wearing her wedding gown. They never got played with until last week when Amelia decided that one of her Mulan dolls was much better suited to marrying Eric, and Ariel was pushed aside. Mulan is currently wearing Ariel's wedding gown (and yes, it is a bit strange to see our brave hero Mulan in puffy sleeves and beaded brocade!). Amelia has a blonde Barbie, but also has a Yu Sai Wa Wa doll (Chinese Barbie-type dolls) and two Mulan dolls, and they are the dolls she plays with. (By the way, Amelia has no Asian Barbie-brand dolls because the company stopped making them. Boo Hiss!)

My point is that I have often really had to go out of my way to find a variety of Asian dolls for Amelia to play with (it isn't as easy as it sounds since there are very few companies who make affordable play dolls that come in an Asian version). Fisher-Price consistently comes out with Asian versions of their dolls, but they are difficult to find in the stores near us. I have had to order them directly from the Fisher-Price website. But it turns out that it does seem to be important to her to have these dolls to play with. Let's hope that more companies will recognize the importance of providing little girls with dolls that look like they do and will start to produce many multicultural versions of their dolls!

Seven months since LID and an upcoming milestone

I know my last post was about the wait being slow, but I had a realization today... The total time we waited for Amelia from our DTC date (not log-in date since our agency never gave us that date, but back then it wasn't so important since China matched whole months) was 8 months and 9 days. Today marks seven months since log in and tomorrow will mark 8 months since our dossier went to China for Clara. In just over one week's time, we will have officially waited longer for Clara than for Amelia. It just seems like a milestone that we should mention. We are actually marking that day by doing something REALLY fun (I will share when it is over!), and it is sort of funny to me that it was something we planned months ago, and it just happens to coincide with the first day of the official longer wait for Clara. Part of me really feels like this will mark the beginning of the real wait for me since we made it through this long of a wait before. I am not sure what the proper way to observe the beginning of a much-longer wait is, but it seems like we should be doing something fun instead of feeling discouraged, and we will be! I can't wait to post photos!!!!

This is painfully slow.....

Today I saw on the Rumor Queen site that China has finished matching LIDs (log-in dates) through November 25th, 2005. That means that they have only matched four days of LIDs again this month. Even more depressing is the other stat on RQ... apparently China has only matched about four months of LIDs in the past year. Just for comparison's sake, when we were waiting for Amelia, referrals were sent as full month LID batches every month. I am keeping my fingers crossed that things will speed up again after the Olympics, or maybe even once we get into 2008. Only time will tell, but it is getting harder to be patient.

For those of you keeping track of our baby name saga, we have changed our minds yet again (really, I am not usually this indecisive, and this has been a very frustrating process and embarrassing as well since I keep posting a different name every month or so!) First, let me explain.... I have a new hobby - geneaology - and have found some really interesting things out about my family, and also have been able to put some pieces together. I had a box of photos of children taken in the early 1900's and I couldn't figure out who they were. I finally figured it out with the help of ancestry.com (and the fact that their names were all on the back of the photos - thanks Great Aunt Emeline!) It turns out that they are all my Great Grandmother's cousins. Anyway, through all of this research, I found that one of the names that was on our list of potential names actually had some significance in my famiy and was used in one form or another for middle names of several people. And then I found out that this same name was also the first name of Brian's great grandmother. This is exactly what we were looking for, a name that we all like that has family significance for both of us. So our frontrunner name is now ....

Clara Elizabeth.

I am pretty sure that this one is the one, but Jenn - who is going to make us letters for the baby's room that spell out her name - says that she is going to make one of each letter of the alphabet, just in case we change our minds again. :)

I am so ready for a speed up in referrals!