Garden Variety Family

Suddenly daddy, we celebrate

Four months ago today, Steven spent his first full day with our son. And now here just one third of a year later Steven is a father seasoned by being blanched in parenthood. Steven has done a really good job, he is a natural -- devoted -- sacrificing --and loving. I couldn't ask for a better father for my child. I love him more every day, seeing him as a father has given me one more facet of my husband to love. Happy Father's Day, we never would have guessed that we would be celebrating this day this year.

They are a couple peas in a pod, aren't they? I adore them both and when they are together, well I just get weak. Thank you, honey for saying yes. I can't believe how much I am loving this life.

 
  

terms of endearment

Well, we have an absolutely irresistible bundle of boy. I keep drafting a post to tell the story of how it all happened, every last detail. I feel some trepidation because as much as this is our story it is also our baby's story and some of it should be his to tell. I am in a bit of a quandary as to what to do. I want to share because it is the most remarkable story as well as a story of a successful adoption, but I want to honor my son because this blog will be for him someday too. Any suggestions? I'd love to hear them.

In the meantime I thought I would share all the pet names that seem to befall our dear baby. Everyday he gets cuter and more delicious.

Some of the usuals that you hear lots of people use. Sweet pea, love bug, snuggle bug. I call him my little nugget, nugget of love, snuggle buggle, pie face, sweetie boy, love nugget, Levi love. My favorite is truffle, because he is like a yummy melty chocolate treat filled with gooey goodness but also in the more fungal meaning: highly valued and difficult to find (both true), therefore a true prize (he is a prize all right) when found. He often reminds us of the seeker as well as the seekee in a traditional truffle hunting situation. We are enchanted by his snorts and chordles as our little piggy starts to tell us he is hungry. I call him piglet and hungry caterpillar. Steven says he is Hungarian, which should be spelled Hungrian. 

He is my First prize, the nickname my mom gave me as a baby--being her first child and all.

More: muffin, cupcake, dumpling. He is my sweetness. My joy. My pudding. ( I know I am forgetting some...a bunch) I love him, I love him, I love him. Sometimes his wondeful-ness just makes me cry.

The most pivotal day of my life

On February 19, 2009 our path to parenthood took a dramatic and sudden turn. After spending two years in line in what seems to be an endless wait for a China adoption we decided to explore the option of private domestic adoption. At 2pm we met with an adoption attorney to discuss and start the process. In an amazing turn of events, 45 minutes after leaving the lawyer’s office we got a call from the agency we used for our China adoption home study asking us if we would be interested in adopting a baby boy born two days earlier. We had about five minutes to think about and discuss it and decide.  In an unbelievable minute we became parents!

We had two hours to find a pediatrician, get a car seat and meet our social worker at the hospital. We cannot begin to describe the overwhelming emotion that was in control of us as we walked into the nursery and the most beautiful baby was placed in our arms. Less than 24 hours later we were on our way home with our baby boy whom we named Levi. Without a single baby item in our house, our wonderful friends and family rallied to bring us the items we needed to get through our first night and the next few days with our surprise baby. Everything fell together so serendipitously, so perfectly, it seemed that the creation of our family was written in the stars. Still, we had to wait out the mandatory 30 days that the birthmother had to reconsider her decision. Bonding was not hard---it was love at first sight and it just grew through every sleepless moment with our son. Thirty days went by without any communication from the birthmother. He was ours forever!

I want to chronicle the last three whirlwind months of our lives for us, mainly for our baby, so that we remember every detail and he knows as much as we can tell him about how he made us a family of three. Things will be coming in dribs and drabs as I publish things I wrote in sleep-deprived stupor and as I recall what went on and how I felt during this amazing time. There may be overlap, gaps, and things out of sequence but it is important to me to get it written down. I have three months to catch up on and current things to report. Welcome to our rollercoaster our time-machine of sorts.

A baby among the reeds

I have been away far too long. I have wanted to write but my new life took over. I wrote this about a month and a half ago (April 10), I couldn't discard it. They were my thoughts and feelings during a truly amazing time in my life. Going back and rereading it has revived that whirlwind of a time that I'll never get to relive except through writing and photos and the recesses of my memory. I have to keep it somewhere.

This morning, and by morning I mean an early 2am-type morning I got up and I didn't need to. Steven is on baby duty. But I awoke to the familiar chordles that bubble up from a bassinet in the corner of our room.
My first conscious thought was of a baby floating in a basket among the reeds in a river where a woman was going about the daily routine of primping and preening. Their meeting would set in motion one of the greatest stories ever told.
Several millennia later I was on my way to get my hair cut and styled a fresh look something that would give me an extra spring in my step, a mini boost. Well, something else floated into my life as I approached the water. In an earlier post I likened it more to a shooting star crashing into us and shifting the course of our lives. But was our life course really shifted? Maybe this is the course we were always on. I think our path had a hairpin turn in it, we just couldn't see it.
Buddhists believe that a baby's soul chooses it's parents. Something that I as an adoptive parent must subscribe to. We had no hint, really we hadn't even acted all that deliberately, we had yet to devise our new game plan. At that point we just carried on with the course of our lives attending to the mundane, a bank run, haircut, gosh i can't remember what else was on our docket for that day, February 19, 2009.
Sure we had every intention on being adoptive parents and yes we have been waiting. But we ended up with some of that surprise factor that we never thought we'd have.
Steven and I scheduled a meeting with a lawyer we had chosen to formally initiate our relationship and begin the private domestic adoption process. We met, discussed, talked fees, shook hands and walked out of his office like deer in headlights. Enter a whole new list of buzz words and phrases that would become a part of our daily lives as we took on the full-time job of finding our baby.

Advertise. "Business" cards. Networking. 1-800 numbers. Interviewing. Web sites. Are we starting a business? Yes.

Local, interstate. Are we taking a trip? Yes.

How to talk to a birth mother. Key questions to ask. When to refer to our lawyer. Becoming a counselor? Yes.

Creating a profile. What to write and how to write it. Distributing that profile. Are we graphic designers, why actually, yes I am! Are we English teachers, actually yes, Steven is.

So it is not as if we entered into this venture without any credentials. Ha!

After about 45 minutes of living with the shock and realization of how our lives were going to change with this monumental task before us, we got a phone call, our baby had found us. In the parking lot of my hair salon our baby floated into our lives among the cars in the parking lot. That call set into motion the most emotionally overwhelming 24 hours of my life.

 

cuteness bubbling up

all twisted up

It has been 3 weeks. We are settling in quite well. We are all absolutely in love. Ten days to go... Things seem too perfect to go wrong but I still have my fingers crossed. Oh yeah, and my legs, a few toes, I am not good at crossing my eyes and besides my baby looks weird when I do that. I am even braiding my hair. I am working on a few yoga poses that I think will bring me luck. There is so much I want to tell but I am waiting until that magic day. In the meantime I can't help but show off my beautiful, beautiful boy.

Serendipity, part I

I have been away for a long time. Not sure what to write, the waiting dragging on. We have been reassessing our path to parenthood. Dragging our feet ... China seemed so certain. It seemed time to forge a new path, as just us with no children? a different country? domestic? special needs? Suddenly we felt we were at ground zero again wading in decisions... then a star fell from the sky right into our arms.

inauguration anticipation

T minus 15 hours to take-off. I have to get really tired between now and 8 or 9. We are going down to inaugurationland at 3am tomorrow morning. We is my sister, husband, bro-in-law and me. We are going to drive all night to get to a park and ride in the DC vicinity so we can attempt to see some of the inaugural concert. We threw this in at the last minute, originally we were planning on a leisurely drive during daylight hours.

I am so looking forward to being at this historical event with masses of hopeful people from all over the country and the world. We probably won't see much but we will be in the milieu of a diverse crowd of people -- a cross section of this country and in essence the world. I look forward to the energy and camaraderie of the crowd.

 

It already looks crowded and there aren'tt even any people there yet. Yikes!  I am off to pack.

hair today gone tomorrow

So I said I was going to grow my hair until I got my baby. That was back when we thought we would be waiting 18 months to get our baby. Just typing "our baby" is bizarre because I am really no closer to having a baby than I was two years ago when we started this whole quest. We had two years to wait then and we probably have two years to wait now, uugh probably even more. Someone from my yahoo group was told by her agency that they expected the wait to stretch to between 5 and 7 years. Absurd! If this isn't fate screaming at me I don't know if I'll ever believe. So that being said, I cut my hair. Yup I have a foot--12 inches of, I must say, lusciously soft hair to donate to keep someone else's head warm. My hair is so fine that when I have wear scarves, turtlenecks, sweaters etc. my hair tangles into a rat's nest at the nape of my neck, ponytail or not. Talk about a damage disaster waiting to happen... so if my hair was ever going to benefit anyone I needed to cut and run now. Ha! Cut and run, is this foreshadowing? Should I cut and run from the very thing that brought me to this state of long-haired-ness? Should I stay on to grow another foot and maybe another foot after that? My goodness if I had continued with my commitment to grow my hair until I got my baby girl I would probably look like some mountain woman with straggles of hair fit to cushion the eggs of some other momma, like a robin. If I were ever to get that referral I would want the Chinese officials to let me in, let alone entrust me with an infant.

So this leaves me to the positive aspects of waiting the better part of a decade to get a child. I can pursue some of my other dreams which might improve my financial status. The world may crawl from the muck of recession by then. Our baby may not bear any physical damage from being fed melamine laced formula. Hey, maybe the world will achieve peace by then. While I am dreaming of the impossible, maybe global warming will be solved to the point where hell freezes over.    

It's a New Day