Two Years

I know we've done a terrible job keeping our family blog up to date. Today, however, marks the two years anniversary of when our family became complete. Two years ago today was the day we met the little girl we'd only seen in pictures up to that point. Two years ago today was the day we met a little girl crying in a room with two other families that were becoming complete. Two years ago today was when we were literally handed another life to care for, a girl who only knew us through pictures she'd seen. That short haired little girl was scared. We were scared. Now, we are whole.

Maire still doesn't communicate very well, but she's come a long way from that fragile state in which we were first introduced to her. She's willful and independent. She's loving and needy. She has a... shall we say "spirited" personality. She's smart. She likes to pretend she isn't. She likes things her way. But most of all, she's happy. She's rarely scared anymore. I can't say the same for us. She is most definitely a Wells.

Here are some pictures from the past two years.

A Story of Hope

Last week Americans Adopting Orphans posted this story from the New York Times.

http://relativechoices.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/test/

It goes a long way to explain just what we are trying to accomplish with this adoption. It is a wonderful story, and we could only hope to orchestrate a story just as wonderful for our own adoption one day. This isn’t just about us, or even our daughter. There is more involved in all of this than simply having a daughter of our own. We could just keep trying for that. My brother has proven that there are more than just boys in our genes. But we want someone else to have an impact on a child’s life, just like the social worker in this article did.

In bio-children news, we received an interesting e-mail from Jack’s kindergarten teacher this morning. Here it is:

“I have to tell you about Jack. His morning started off great and he
got a positive action. He turned it in for a piece of sugarfree gum. So
he was chewing (chomping) away. Father Kevin comes in for his visit
and after 15 min. he sees Jack with gum and immediately questions him
why he has gum. I explained why, but while I was explaining Jack looked
so scared. He thought he was in big trouble. Jack was really good at
answering Father’s questions through-out his visit, and he said he should
get more gum. It was so funny. The look on his face. He wouldn't
even look at Father the rest of his visit, but he was sure answering the
questions. Thought you would like to hear about this funny moment.
Dodi”

Pride and Joy

We have received congratulations from far and wide since our article ran in the local newspaper two Fridays ago. We’ve heard from clients, family, local politicians, even a couple state representatives. The response to our news has been somewhat overwhelming. We hadn’t been keeping our plans to adopt a secret since we started the paperwork back in February, so it was surprising to realize that it was news to so many people. It is also amazing to discover just how many people know or are related to someone who has not only adopted, but adopted a child from a foreign country.

Angie and I and the boys very much wish to thank everyone who has responded to the article for their well wishes and support. It is thrilling to be involved in something with this much love behind it.

On another note, it is important to remember that we are already the biological parents of two amazing little boys. Better make that “proud parents.” Angie and I attended our very first parent-teacher conference last night with Jack’s kindergarten teacher Mrs. Dierking. We’re still having trouble bringing our selves to refer to teachers by their first names. It doesn’t help that Angie’s old high school principal is now Jack’s grade school principal. Those old school habits come flooding back every time you enter a school, if you don’t do it on a regular basis. Her name is Dodi, she keeps reminding us.

So Angie and I arrive in the school parking lot a few minutes early, having just dropped the boys off at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. I suddenly panic. Did we have some homework to do? Am I supposed to be bringing something? Is there some sort of bribe we can give her? Angie assures me there was nothing we were supposed to prepare ahead of time.

We walk into the school and see some parents and kids milling in and out of the classrooms. It has that unnaturally quite feel schools always do after regular hours. We peek our heads into Jack’s classroom, with its miniature seats and tables and colored paper plates hanging from the ceiling. The parents in front of us aren’t finished yet. We wander back into the hall. And notice that Angie’s sister had met with our nephew’s preschool teacher earlier in the day.

Mrs. Dierk… um, Dodi comes out of her room with the other parents. I don’t know their names or their boy’s. I’m the dad. I think that’s normal. Angie could probably tell me the kid’s name at least. Wait! Kid? Were we supposed to bring Jack? Surely, Angie would know if we were supposed to bring the kid. Naw! Jack wouldn’t have let us come without him if he was supposed to be here. He would have kicked and screamed. He never would have let us out the door. Unless of course, he just wanted to watch Boomerang!

“You didn’t bring your kids either?!” Dodi Dierking exclaimed at us. “I think they were the only ones who brought theirs. Everyone else just dumped ‘em off at the grandparents. Anything as an excuse for a night free from ‘em! That’s great! I know that’s what I’d do!”

“So it's OK we didn’t bring him along?”

“Of course. You need these breaks,” she said. Her daughter is actually in Jack’s class as well.

So we sat down, and she asked us if we had any questions, and suddenly I’m hearing my Theater Styles professor from Hofstra explaining to me that I did not get an “A” because I didn’t participate enough in class. “Um, I d—uh, no? I don’t have any—um anything. Do you, hon?”

Of course Angie is handling all of this like an old pro. “Nope. Why don’t you start things off and if there’s anything you don’t answer, I’ll ask you after.”

So, Do… Mrs… The teacher pulls out this report card and unfolds five pages. What?! This kid can’t even put his own pants on without getting distracted, there’s no way he can score well on something so involved as to require five pages of columns and scores. But score well he did. There were three different letter grades, an S (Satisfactory?) for things had a good handle on, a P (Progress?) for things that needed work but in which he was making progress, and an X for areas of concern.

Well, it was a card full of S’s. I mean there were a few P’s here and there, but as she explained it most of the P’s were for subjects they had just begun to work on. Now, these weren’t subject like Physics of Light or anything. They encompassed things like tying shoes. But still, hey, hey, hey!!! There was one area of concern. He had an X under telephone number. Sadly, I have to say I don’t think I’ve ever tried to tell him his telephone number. But we quizzed him as soon as we got back to Grandma’s house and he knew it without any prompting, so that X was bogus.

I know, I know. I’m doing that whole parent gloating over their amazing children thing, but darn it! if that isn’t my job now! And I take that task on with pride! The bible says pride can be a bad thing, but it is your job as a parent. Am I wrong? Of course not! I don’t think I’ll get any nay-sayers out there on that one.

But here comes the best part. He also had to grade his own progress in class. What a great idea! I love this school thing. So there’s this chart with columns with boxes for “yes”, “no”, and “sometimes”, and there are categories like “Do I pay attention in class?” My kid, the honest little jerk (that is meant affectionately) checks “yes” to the question “Do I listen when others speak?” But then he had crossed that out and changed it to “sometimes”. He’s one of those kids who will never tear that tag off a mattress for fear that the mattress police will discover what he has done and lock him away from 20 years.

A couple of quotations from his fill in the blank section of his self evaluation:

“My favorite subject is recess because I get to pla.”
“My least favorite subject is lunch because I have to eat a lot.”
“I do my best work in patterns” and “I need to try harder in math.”

Incidentally, his two best subjects were patterns and math.

The school is having an auction next Saturday, a big annual fundraiser. And one of the things they are auctioning is a cookbook of recipes made up by the kids. Does my kid make up a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, or cake, or even mud pies. No, Jack wrote a recipe for exactly what Angie would have predicted: corn cakes. They are pancakes made of corn bread. Jack’s favorite dish in the world.

Jack's version of corncakes require “50 pounds of corn, 1 eg, a sprinkle of flor, 1 tabl spoon of baking pwr, bake for 10 min.”

I love that kid!

The Long Road

I know it has been a very long time since I made an entry in this blog. I had lofty goals at first of making weekly entries even when no progress was being made toward the adoption, but life gets busy and every time it stopped long enough for me to consider composing an entry, there seemed too much to catch up on. Now, so much time has passed, I feel I can just overview most of those details of life that don’t really pertain to the adoption of our little girl.

We’ve gone through house training for our Corgi. She is now in a training program so we can control her barking and chewing on Angie. She doesn’t chew on me, just Angie.

Jude’s terrible twos have firmly set in since his 2nd birthday in July. He’s gotten so terrible lately. But he's also so awesome. He’s still so cute and full of guile. I’ve started referring to him as “Busey,” after the actor Gary Busey, because he acts so crazy. He likes to rub various substances into his hair, giving him the appearance of a celebrity mug shot.

Jack has grown so much. He participated in his first sport team season this summer. He was in the town t-ball league. He took the term “magnet ball” to a new level, running anywhere on the field the ball would go. By the end of the four game season he actually was beginning to learn to stay in his position. And then our little boy started school this year. I suddenly know why my parents would go all nuts about how they were losing me to each stage in my life. The time goes by too fast.

We placed Jack in a parochial Catholic school. We are not Catholic, but we felt he would stand a better chance of getting the proper attention in a private setting as opposed to a public school. He’ll go to the public school eventually. The parochial is only for the lowers grades. But he loves school. And he finally gets enough activity that he doesn’t wake us up at 6 a.m. every day.

We entered the hellish world of home improvement this summer. We remodeled our kitchen, dining room and living room. We started with a bogus contractor, ended up firing him and going with a much more expensive one and did some of the work our selves. That would be why it still isn’t finished. But we are much happier with it.

But the really big news is that while all of this other stuff was going on, we have finished our adoption dossier. We got the doctors to admit there really is nothing wrong with my liver, so we could finish our home study. We’ve been finger printed by CIS. I don't know what happened to the newspaper article the local paper was supposed to run on us. I guess they decided the town gets to see my ugly mug on the front page often enough.

We’ve had all of our paperwork authenticated and re-authenticated. And just last week the Chinese Embassy in Chicago confirmed that we had everything we needed and it is ready to send off to the Chinese adoption authorities in China. Now, if we just hadn’t blown through our fee to them fixing up our kitchen.

That whole process would have taken much less time if we had let our adoption agency do it all, but by doing it ourselves we saved a great deal of money. Now, once we send our fee and dossier off to China, our real wait begins. I think it is still about an 18 month wait. Hopefully, that will change... for the shorter. We think it would be just great if it would time out so our little girl would be born at about the same time as our new nephew/niece. Congratulations on pregnancy number two Dan and Lisa!!!

Now, in order for that to happen our wait would have to shrink by a couple of months before April. We would still have a considerable time to wait even if they are born about the same time, but if we can get a log in date by the end of the year it would be possible. They wouldn’t get to meet each other until they were each about a year old, but that would be cool.

Anyway, we are very happy to finally be approaching our log in date, the date which our wait begins for the Chinese government to send us through the system and assign us a daughter. I’ll be sure to make a big deal out of the log in date for everyone, so you’ll all know when it happens. It been a long road, and there’s still such a long way to go, but it will be well worth the wait.