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.

Letterboxing

Jilly-Bean!

We found treasure!

We went to visit our friends this past weekend and picked up a new hobby that is fun for the whole family - letterboxing! Basically there are letterboxes hidden all over the place, and you can find clues to find letterboxes in your own area by visiting atlasquest.com or letterboxing.org and typing in the name of your city/town. The clues read somewhat like a treasure map, and when you find the letterbox that you are looking for, it will usually contain a rubber stamp, an inkpad and a log book. You bring your own rubber stamps, leave a stamp in the notebook in the letterbox with your stamp, make a stamp in your own logbook using the rubber stamp in the letterbox you have just found to prove that you found it, and then put everything back where you found it so someone else can find it later. To Amelia and her buddy Liam, it was like a hunt for buried treasure, and I think they both really enjoyed it. I think it is also fair to say that my friend Jenn and I are also hooked on this new hobby. I can just imagine how much I would have loved it as a kid.

The rest of the weekend was great as well. Our friends Jenn and Mike adopted their daughter Jillian (aka Jilly-Bean) from Korea in January, and Brian and Amelia finally got a chance to meet her this weekend. Amelia is completely in love with her, sings songs about her, and now is a little mad that her friends Liam and Carly both have their little sisters home and she has to wait. For me, Jillian reminds me that this long wait will be completely worth it in the end!

Happy Easter!

Today Amelia and I went to the zoo for their Easter Egg Hunt and then for Lunch with the Easter Bunny. We had gone to Breakfast with the Bunny at the Zoo many times, but this was the first time that we went for an Easter Egg Hunt. Well, we never got the instruction sheet with the rules on it, and Amelia quickly filled her basket with eggs. As I looked around, I noticed that no other kids had nearly as many eggs as she did, so I started to tell her that I thought maybe we should put some of the eggs back. Then I started to see parents reading from a white sheet of paper, and I started to get suspicious. We went back inside, and I managed to find one of the white sheets of paper that had been left on a table. It turns out that we were only supposed to gather six eggs. Can you see the number of eggs Amelia had in her basket? There must have been thirty! Luckily, Amelia is really good about following rules that are written down, so when I read her the rule sheet, she happily went back outside and put her eggs back, counted out six, and went back inside to trade in her eggs for candy. I can just imagine what other parents were thinking when they saw me letting her go crazy with gathering the eggs! I have no idea how we completely missed the rule sheets, but we will know better for next time.
It was so cold here today (predicted to be colder on Easter this year than it was on Christmas!)so we didn't stay outside for very long, but we had a great time looking at the animals that live inside at the zoo. Brian met us at the zoo for lunch, and Amelia was so excited to see the Easter Bunny and have her face painted. This is definitely one of our favorite family traditions!

Secret Buddy

I have a secret buddy! My large Yahoo DTC group is doing a secret buddy swap where you can sign up and be assigned another waiting family, and each month or every other month, depending on your preference, you send a gift to that family. I can't say too much since we are supposed to keep our identity secret from our buddy until referral time (unfortunately quite a ways off right now!), but I am really excited to shop and send out the first package!

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.