That's a Big-Ass Wall

For some reason, my Dad was a little chagrined by the photo I posted of him the other day.  I really should be a little more careful playing with people’s vanity.  Turnabout being fair play, Dad, here’s a less than flattering shot of me at The Great Wall today. 

This was taken at the tail end of a climb and descent of a section of the Wall at Ju Fong pass, on the far northern outskirts of Beijing municipality.  Although it was hardly an overwhelming climb, note that I am sweating like a menopausal woman in the middle of Death Valley on a hot summer’s day.  Partly due to the 90-degree heat and 3000% humidity, it could be more accurately attributed to my tendency to perspire at a ridiculous rate when I do anything physically more difficult than, say, picking up a doughnut.  Also note that with the way that t-shirt is clinging for dear life to my less than flattering physique, it looks like I might actually benefit from the use of a training bra (or “bro,” as Kramer would say).  Purely an optical illusion, of course.

We all have our moments.

Except my beatific and photogenic children, of course.  Ther’s a shot of them at the base of that section of the Wall after the jump. 

Jet Lag

Hi everyone.

This is not Matthew speaking.

It’s his daughter.
I’m Naomi lets pretty much say I’m awesome.

Were in Beijing its 2:00 in the morning and I think I’m screaming.

It’s like 2 an a half days until we get ELI…

Let’s just say I’M bouncing off the walls
The hotel is very Fancy with marble and stuff

I MISS YOU EVERY ONE!!


SEE YA!!!!!

The Flying Wallendas -- Pt. 2

A diehard pirate and buccaneer, The Financier made his money the old fashioned way -- by ransacking the pleasure yachts of the aristocracy from his renowned galleon, the "Parrot's Perch."  Able to access liquid assets at a moment's notice, The Financier is a big reason why The Flying Wallendas are able to fly at all.  No circus can operate for long without an underwriter.  He continues to serve as home base coordinator, advisor, and swashbuckler at large.  Should we miss our connection in Chicago on the way home, he will also serve as emergency chaffeur and hotelier.  Hopefully he will be wearing a shirt at the time (Sorry, Dad, only pic I could find of you while typing here at the airport.  Nice pecs.  Meowrrr.)

Which brings us to the most frightening member of this circus team, a shadowy figure who goes only by the name of "The Instructor."  She is pictured here mind melding with a newborn infant, implanting black ops military expertise in its susceptible little brain.  Posing as a pre-school teacher by day, the better to access impressionable young people and recruit them into her secret army, by night she throws law enforcement off her scent by making quilts and scrapbooking mementos from quaint family trips.  "She's quiet, keeps to herself mostly," say her neighbors and friends.  "No one would have suspected."  The Instructor also enjoys optimism, encouragement, and making wicked good lasagna. 

Again, putting aside the snidery for a moment -- Mom and Dad, I love you so much.  Your consummate talent and effortless grace under fire serve as endless inspiration to Allison and me.  A big part of the reason we feel up to the challenge of expanding our family in the first place. 

I've always thought that if I ever do write a book -- a big if -- I would like to dedicate it to my children, for whom; to Allison, with whom; and to my mother and father, without whom.  Thanks for making me possible, and then sticking around to see how I turned out.  See you on the other side. 

Travel - Live

3:20 a.m. EDT -- Up.  Moving.  Dad would be proud.  Mental function:  8.3%

5:06 a.m. EDT -- Beautiful Burlington airport. Through security. Looking forward to 75 action-packed minutes in the butt end of a commuter plane on the way to Dulles. The children are drinking caffeine. That can't be a good idea.

8:39 a.m. EDT -- Breakfast at Dulles. Airport is like a maze for bipedal mammals designed by sadistic aliens. Kids already restless. 3.5 hours until our next flight. Mood: hazy. Fellow ISC'ers -- we made it to Washington before you even got to the office. Slackers.

11:40 a.m. -- Safely boarded the 777. Naomi and Townes have died and gone to heaven. Free pillows, blankets, headphones, personal TV screens, meal service. Even if we never made it to Beijing, their lives would be complete. We're all ready to be in Beijing. Only 15 more hours to go. Communications blackout begins now - next update from the heart of the Middle Kingdom.

2:20 a.m. EDT, 2:20 p.m. local time in Beijing -- Touchdown.  As always, a long-ass flight.  I was a little concerned when the children started asking if we were almost there yet, only two hours into our fourteen hour flight.  But they were fantastic really, considering.  Allison somehow managed to sleep (or so it seemed to me) the entire fourteen hours, due most likely to a strong cocktail of tranquilizers, benadryl, and pseudofed.  She keeps asking us if we saw the silver elves and a man in a disturbingly bright chartreuse frock coat.  Charles and Gloria also appear to have weathered the trip surprisingly well given that this comes so close on the heels of their trip to France.  We're all just happy to be here at last.  There's a lot of wonder and anticipation mixed in with the bleariness.  Off to the city...

The Flying Wallendas

Allow me to introduce the first two members of our traveling circus.  First up:  The Professor.

The Professor enjoys smoking cigars, conducting statistical regression analyses, and traveling.  Having just returned from France two days ago, he is unfazed at the prospect of departing for two weeks in China tomorrow morning.  Hopefully his back and his disposition will prove just as prepared for the struggle.  Having retired from his days leading the A-Team, he no longer goes by "Hannibal," preferring his given name, "Charles."  He still loves it when a plan comes together, and remains familiar with building weaponry and small explosives out of items left lying around junkyards and old barns.  We expect this will come in handy.  He also doubles as Allison's father and sometime benefactor. 

This leads us to The Professor's lifelong companion and partner in crime:  The Social Worker

Hubris

Pretty tired today... I had plans to introduce the merry band of circus performers who will be going on the trip to China, and thus appearing in this diary over the next few weeks, for your reference and edification, but not today.  I do have plans to "live-blog" (did I really just use that word?) the travel to China itself as best I can, starting at around 3:30 a.m. EDT on Wednesday.  I know you'll all want to set your alarms for that one so you can sit close by your computers and wait for the updates as they come in. 

But today I don't have anything much to say.  I was ruminating this morning on the fact that I will meet my son in exactly a week, and remembering the same feeling I had before my first two children were born:  just who do I think I am, anyway?  I mean, doesn't it take some brass f***ing balls to think that you should be a parent?  What makes me think I should be entrusted with a little kid, who will then grow up imitating my bad habits, inheriting my pessimistic and jaded worldview, successfully copying my inability to throw a ball properly, and will probably end up someday thinking that somebody on the Internet (or Etherspheroid, or whatever they'll be calling it then) would be interested in his aimless thoughts randomly jotted down?  Why do I think I would be any good at parenting -- more to the point, what gives me the right to do it at all?

Hubris, maybe.  "Excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance" says the English dictionary.  And then there's the more interesting meaning of the original Greek hybris:  "Presumption against the gods."  That sounds about right.  Icarus, Arachne, Oedipus, Ajax, etc.  All proud, all cured of it with good old-fashioned divine comeuppance.  Odysseus is another one.  Got away from the Cyclops and couldn't resist crowing about it, taunting the blinded monster, telling it his name so it would know exactly who had got the best of it; so Poseidon says all right, you think you're so great, try wandering the ocean for 20 years while all your friends die and your wife and son grow old and you go half-crazy.  Still feeling cocky?  Would you rather plummet to your death, get turned into a spider, be blinded and unwittingly sleep with your mother, or just plain be smote with lightning?  All fitting ends for the overly proud, apparently.  I forgot Sisyphus.  There's a happy fellow too.   

We flirt with similar forces when we choose to be parents, meddling in cosmic affairs with a frightful, and perhaps even idiotic, lack of humility.  It seems breathtaking that we've got the guts to do it at all.

The mind takes weird turns when it's tired.  Back tomorrow with (hopefully) a lot more lucid thoughts and a lot less Greek mythology.  Peace.

Sweet & Sour

I have to start off this one with a little bit of the sweet stuff.  For those of you who are into that kind of thing. 

Allison and I work at the same place.  People often ask how we can manage to work at the same office all day, and live together, and not go insane.  A big reason is the people we work with.

Joan has been quite the world traveler, and has lived in Japan and England.  While in Japan some 25 years ago or so, she adopted two great Japanese kids.  They're in college now.  When she was living in England a short time later, she bought a book called "The Boy and His Kitten" at a local market, for 50 pence.  I know exactly how much it cost, because it's still got the price tag on the front cover.  It's a Chinese story by a Chinese author, translated into English.  Joan bought it because the kids in the book are Asian, and she thought it would be something her kids could relate to on a visual level.  It's a little worn from being read over and over and over again, but the book's still in great shape, and invested with a lot of family memories.

So of course she gave it to us.

Shopping for Irony

I'm sure those of you who know me, and how hyper organized I am, expect that we began prepping for this adoption trip a year ago.  Surely we started with a cloth-bound, multi-page color-coded Gaant chart with a week-by-week breakdown of tasks to accomplish, items to acquire, meditations to perform, and things to pack.  We then proceeded with characteristically military precision, rewarding ourselves for accomplishing tasks on time and punishing ourselves severely for lagging behind even by a few hours.  As such, we are now completely prepared for our trip, and need only be ready to drive ourselves to the airport next Wednesday.  Like Swiss clockwork. 

Yeah. 

It's a mad, random scramble punctuated by periodic failure and moments of abject panic.  We'll be lucky if we show up at the airport with our pants on frontward, let alone fully prepared. 

Don't Eat The Watermelon

Chinese nightmare fuel

Today we had our pre-travel briefing with the adoption agency.  As someone who travels to China pretty frequently for work, I found this to be somewhat amusing.  They want to be sure they cover all the little things you might not be aware of, I suppose -- you'll cross the dateline going over and lose a day, your hotels will have all the amenities you've come to expect as a spoiled American, western toilets are available and will be standing by, etc. 

And don't eat the watermelon.  Actually, this advice comes as part of a larger injunction not to eat any fruit you can't peel yourself, which sounds perfectly reasonable on its face.  You don't know what peseticides might have been used in growing the fruit, and you don't know how it's been handled or whether it's been washed before being served to you.  As background, it may help to know that most every traditional meal served in a Chinese restaurant ends with fresh fruit.  This can consist of apple or orange slices, pieces of dragonfruit, grapes, and almost invariably, sliced watermelon. 

Since watermelons aren't peeled, however, its inclusion in this part of the spiel was a bit confusing.

Why Adopt?

Shock. Incredulity. Blank stares. Quizzical eyebrows. Rueful headshakes. Murmurs of sympathy. Pointed questions about our mental health.

These are some of the common reactions we get from people -- people of all ages, backgrounds, and family situations -- when we tell them we are adopting a third child to go with the two biological children we already have. When we go on to tell them that we hope to adopt a fourth child as well at some point in the future, they occasionally lose control of their bodily functions.

So there seems to be a question on the minds of some: why adopt, when you already have children and things are getting easier as they get older?

Liquidity

Today, class, we re-learned the difference between "liquid" and "illiquid" assets. "Liquid" assets are funds that can be accesssed quickly and transferred from one party to another to complete a financial transaction. For example, let's say (hypothetically) that an agency with whom you have a longstanding relationship informs you quite suddenly that if you really want your son, you will need to provide them with a cashier's check in the amount of several thousand dollars within 3 days. If you can do that, you have liquid assets. Congratulations -- please move to the head of the class.

If you can't, you have illiquid assets (or maybe you are just plain broke and have no assets). Now you will need to pursue one of two options: 1) pleading with friends and family for a quick loan to float you until you can liquidate something or other that you own; or 2) old-fashioned $5 street-corner hooking.

Waiting for Eli

Imagine that you've been waiting not nine, but eighteen months for a new child. You've jumped through hoop after bureaucratic hoop, filled out numerous forms for the governments of two major world powers, disclosed every intimate detail of your personal and medical histories to bureaucrats around the globe, and spent more on this process than you would have spent on a brand new car.

Now imagine that you were matched with a living, breathing, waiting child nine months ago. For all that time you've known his name and age, what he looks like, the circumstances of his birth, his favorite toys and eating habits, the status of his physical and mental development, his exact location, the language he speaks, his medical condition, and the quality of the orphanage where he lives.

Imagine that by law, you are permitted no contact with him whatsoever over all that time. You can send him no letters, no pictures, no gifts. Despite the fact that your job requires you to travel to a location just 6 hours away from where he lives several times a year, you are not allowed to visit him. As the months tick by, you receive no additional updates regarding him. The information you do have falls more and more out of date. For all intents and purposes, as far as you are concerned he is arrested in time, receding into the distant past like a slowly fading memory. You found him, only to begin losing him immediately, by degrees. He is beyond your reach.

He has no idea that you even exist.

This, despite the fact that somwhere your boy -- your son -- is speaking his first words, growing by leaps and bounds, bonding with his caregivers, throwing tantrums and suffering sudden fits of joy and laughter, learning to share and play and create and engage, becoming his own unique self.

And you wait...

And wait...

And wait...

And wait...

And then one day, almost, but not quite thoroughly out of the blue (or so it seems), someone calls you and tells you that your entire family needs to be on a plane to China in 8 days; and that despite the fact that your son has no idea who you are or what is about to happen to him, in 2 weeks he will be handed over to you, to have and to hold and to love forever.

Now imagine that today was the day that call came. Have you caught your breath yet? Are you ready? Tickets and visas and clothes and medicine and thoughts and emotions and lives all in order? Do you know what the hell you are doing? Can you make this work? Can you afford it? Does it matter?

Hang onto your hats and suspenders, if you plan to come along for the ride.

Lei XinXing, we are coming to get you.