nine years

Nine years ago today, Tim and I committed to each other for as long as we both shall live.  Since then we've lived in six apartments/houses in three states and one foreign country, changed jobs on several occasions, traveled together to some spectacularly beautiful places, learned lots of new things, and become parents for the first time.  It's been an adventure, in the best possible way.

So, on this evening of momentous import, we got a babysitter...so that we could attend a required training on how to de-escalate conflict and, if necessary, physically restrain an out-of-control child.  Then we returned home for a dinner of leftovers.  Romantic, huh?  :-)  Lest anyone is inclined to feel sorry for us, I should mention that I don't think we've celebrated our anniversary on the day itself for the majority of the years we've been married.  Last year we celebrated by going to a play...in February.  It still counts, right?

But truly, I am blessed to have spent the last nine years in the company of someone whom I admire, and yet feel as comfortable with as I do in my own skin; someone I can share a vision with, and work together as partners to see it come true; someone who inspires me to grow and become a better person without ever making me feel less than completely loved and accepted for who I am.  When marriage lives up to how God designed it, it is a very, very good thing.

Happy 9th, my partner!

We interrupt this series to bring you Joy to the World!

Last year Esther had a favorite Christmas carol, O Come, O Come Emmanuel.  (I'm not sure  if she "got" that it was about Jesus, however; she seemed to think we were signing about  a neighbor boy named Emmanuel.)  She wanted us to sing it every night during advent, and she would chime in with the "rejoice, rejoice" in the chorus, if she hadn't wandered off by the time we got that far into the song.

This year, Esther can actually sing Christmas carols!  Given how much unfamiliar vocabulary there is (e.g. "ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here"), she can chime in with surprisingly many words on five or six different carols.  And she will go around singing snatches of them to herself, occasionally with alterations ("Joy to the world, the Lord has made!").  Her favorite carol this year is definitely Joy to the World.  All the children were supposed to lead the adults in singing it at the end of their Christmas play, so I worked with Esther on learning the words, and she did a very good job.  Then every time without fail that we sang it as part of our advent family time, she had to stop after the first sentence and announce, "I sang this at Emma's church!"  (Emma is the first friend she made there, and it appears that the church is going to be "Emma's church" indefinitely.)  Hearing her singing carols, reciting our advent verses, and understanding and appreciating a good bit of the Christmas story, I realize how much she's changed in the past year.  I can't wait to see what the next year brings!

Anyway, here are some pictures of our Christmas season.

Esther was an angel in the Christmas play.  You wouldn't guess from this picture that she spent the time between getting dressed and heading into church by running through the Sunday school area and play-fighting with one of the Three Wise Men.  For some reason, she seems to think that ten- and eleven-year-old boys are her peers.

Esther's part in the play was (thankfully!) very small.  After the main angel announced Jesus' birth to the shepherds, Esther and a gaggle of other little angels walked down the aisle hand-in-hand, made a circle around the main angel, and walked clockwise while somebody sang a song.  Then the main angel led them to the manger, where they were followed by the shepherds, and they all remained contemplating the baby for the duration of another song.  Esther had wandered off and had to be forcibly retrieved by the main angel at this point during rehearsals, but did alright during the real thing.  One of the bigger kids said that she tried to take the baby out of the manger, but I didn't see anything, so it must have been discreet.  The picture above is of the angels and shepherds gathered around the manger.  The picture below is of all the kids singing Joy to the World.  I'm not sure what words Esther was singing for the 2nd and 3rd verses, which she doesn't know nearly as well as the 1st, but she was singing something with gusto.





Another fun Christmas activity was making gifts for Grandma and Grandpa.  I thought they came out really cute!  (Another gift isn't pictured because the recipient hasn't gotten it yet...we were late on getting things out this year.)






























And finally, there were presents for Esther herself.  For the past month, she has been asking for two things for Christmas: a belt, and lime juice.  (Sometimes I let her have a few drops of lime juice on her tongue when I'm cooking with it, and she has been wanting her own container so she can have as much as she wants.)  She found both items in her stocking, and she was thrilled.  (She is also now the only person I know who would follow up an Andes mint with a swig of lime juice.)  I hadn't thought about the fact that a belt, of course, requires pants, and that I had had a particular darling Christmas dress in mind for her to wear.  She consented to put the dress on for a photo shoot, but only after I promised that she could change back into pants and a belt as soon as the photos were done.  Then our camera had an unfortunate mishap.  I had balanced it on a rather shaky piece of small furniture so we could use the self-timer function and get a family portrait, and Esther, in rushing to look at the picture on the digital screen, accidentally bumped into the furniture, sending the camera onto the floor and jamming the smaller ring of the lens down into the larger one, from whence it could not be dislodged.  It remains to be seen whether repair is possible, but the remainder of our Christmas pictures were taken with our video camera's still function, and are somewhat dark and grainy.

We (or rather, Esther) opened gifts off and on throughout the day.  We also enjoyed playing in the snow, talking to family on the phone, watching a couple of Esther's new videos, and eating a feast (Tim's and my first time to cook a turkey ourselves; it turned out great!) by the light of all the candles on our advent wreath.  It was a lovely and memorable day.

I'll leave you with one last picture that was too cute to pass up.  This is how Esther felt about opening up a Dragon Tales video.

And now Christmas is over.  I miss our advent traditions, and I will miss our decorations when we put them up.  But I'm glad that Jesus doesn't really come just once a year, but that we can enjoy his presence with us all year long!

The Plan. Revised. Part III.

[Recap from the last entry:  Tim and I had received an e-mail about a an older boy in China who was listed for adoption but was about to become ineligible due to his age.  We sent off a "long shot" inquiry to the U.S. agency that had listed him, and were somewhat unnerved when the response came back that yes, if we worked hard at getting all our paperwork done, we could realistically adopt him.]

The first couple of days after we got that affirmative reply to our e-mail, I was all jumbled up inside.  I had a hard time focusing on anything for thinking of this child, and the decision we had to make.  We were pretty sure that we were the only family that was considering adopting him.  And since the window for him to be adopted was rapidly drawing to a close, it seemed there was a good chance that we were the only family that was going to consider him.  So our decision was going to define the course of his life.  Would he get a forever family, at the expense of moving to another country and culture where he would spend his teen years sticking out like a sore thumb and might never fully fit in?  Or would he stay where he was, where his opportunities--even opportunities for significant relationships--would be limited by his orphan status and his disability, but at least he understands how the system works and knows how to play his role in it?  I HATE being responsible for decisions that mess with other people's lives.  But we had asked the question and now we were stuck.  We had to decide.

We learned that we had the opportunity to pursue this adoption on a Monday afternoon.  On Tuesdays Tim teaches an early morning class, followed by office hours.  He takes Esther in with him and puts her in the daycare there for the morning.  It's good social experience for her, and gives me a chance to get extra stuff done.  So on Tuesday I was praying about this child and hoping desperately for a clear answer.  I had so many questions.  How would bringing this child home affect Esther?  What if he did something that hurt or scared her, potentially leaving permanent scars?  How would taking him away from everything he's ever known affect him?  Was his orphanage director right in pushing so hard to find him a foreign family, or did she have an over-idealized notion of the advantages of being raised by "wealthy Americans" and an incomplete understanding of how traumatic it is to move to a totally different world?  What if we did adopt him, and he grew up to decide that it wasn't worth it, and hated us for doing that to him?  I felt so helpless--how could I even make a responsible decision when so much was unknown, and unknowable?  I remember washing dishes and repeating the Jesus prayer over and over: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."  Me, a sinner.  That can mean a lot of things, but to me that day it meant falling short, incomplete, inadequate.  In and of myself, I simply didn't have what I needed to even make the right decision on this adoption.  Oh, how I longed for the One who did know all the answers to my unanswerable questions to step in and take over.  I knew I couldn't rely on myself, and what I wanted most at that moment was the comfort of being  able to depend on somebody else.  Mind you, one of the areas in which I have been wanting to grow these last few years is to become more dependent on God.  And even though I was confused and anxious and frustrated and racked with anticipatory guilt about all the ways I was going to mess up my child(ren)'s lives, it also felt very right to be throwing myself on God's mercy.  If I could just live in that frame of mind, I thought, then I wouldn't have to be afraid of getting myself into a situation that I couldn't handle.

Anyway, the heavens did not open and no voice declared either "This shall be your son" or "Leave that child alone; I have other plans for him."  But I was able to lay down, at least temporarily, my anxieties about myself, and reflect deeply on this child, and grieve for his hurts.  I wondered what important relationships he has now, and what the chances were that they would stay with him into adulthood.  I thought about how he would be considered doubly unlucky in China, both as an orphan, someone with no family pedigree, and as a person with an obvious disability, and how that would make it difficult if not impossible for him to find a wife.  The thought of him never having a family at all, neither by adoption nor by marriage, hurt.  And I thought about God, and how God is in the business of healing internal wounds, even those that seem like they should leave permanent scars.

Later in the day at a  time when Esther wasn't around, I shared some of my thoughts  with Tim.  He had, of course, been thinking as well, and didn't see any compelling reason at this point to say "no" to adopting this child.  So that evening we filled our our pre-application for this child's U.S. agency, and sent it in on Wednesday morning.  In addition to the child we had been praying about, we also requested information on another boy from the waiting child list who had really caught our attention.  We were sent the files for both boys that afternoon, along with more pictures.  We learned that the child who we had received the e-mail about had been initially listed for adoption more than two years earlier, and it sounded like the staff who chose to list him had investigated and seriously considered his feelings about being adopted by a foreign family before making that choice.  It also seemed that he had had a pretty stable life up to this point, living in the same place with the same people from babyhood until now, which is a promising indication that he has the ability to bond with a new family.  There are no guarantees, of course, but the additional information was encouraging to us.  I didn't feel quite as comfortable with the information in the other child's file, although there were some things that really touched me, and I'm waiting for the day when his profile disappears from the waiting child page and I know that he's found his family.

Somewhere around this time we started calling our extended family to let them know we were thinking about adopting this child, and to ask for their prayers.

Towards the end of the week we started looking more specifically at the requirement from China (a certain dollar figure in assets) that we thought we didn't meet.  Our contact at the U.S. agency gave us the worksheet they use for determining the  amount of assets a family has, along with instructions for filling it out.  When we sat down and filled in all the figures we discovered, to our surprise, that we now meet the requirement.  (We didn't last year.)  One more obstacle out of the way.

So we ended the week feeling like we could adopt this child, but still not certain whether we should.  And for more, you'll have to wait for another entry!

The Plan. Revised. Continued.

[Recap from the last post:  I wanted to adopt an older child from the foster care system once we moved to our new house; Tim wasn't so sure it was the right time.  Then we got an e-mail about a waiting child in China, and Tim was the one who said, "I know this is crazy, but do you think we could get our paperwork in on time?"]

Now, while Tim and I are in complete agreement about wanting at least two children from China, he had not been in as much of a hurry as I to disrupt our happy, comfortable family of three by adding a "waiting child" to the mix.  I had figured that when the time was really right, we would be of one mind about adopting again.  I had even, from time to time, prayed something to the effect of, "Lord, when the time is right, please cause us to both feel your leading."  So when Tim started wondering about how long it would take to complete the paperwork for this child, my ears perked up.  If I had gone looking for a child, this is probably not a child that I would have inquired about.  Nothing personal, there just wasn't anything in his profile that really grabbed me, and his special need was not one that I had ever pictured when I dreamed of our next Chinese child.  But at the same time, there was nothing in what we knew about him that made me feel especially reluctant.  I was already on board with older, boy, special need, and Chinese, I just hadn't thought that all of those things could come together for us at this point in time.  But.  His profile mentioned significant fee reductions from both his U.S. agency and his Chinese orphanage that made the prospect of adopting internationally the year after a move, a new mortgage, and a salary cut...if not easily affordable, at least imaginable.  And the description of this boy (written by a representative of his U.S. agency who had met him in person) specifically recalled observing him interacting with small children in very positive ways.  As for our not meeting the one requirement from China, it was one of several mentioned that the agency might be able to get us an exception for.  So, I figured, why not e-mail the agency.  I thought from the way his profile was written that he aged out in January, and I really didn't think it was possible to put together a dossier (collection of documents required for adopting from a foreign country) that fast, but I have heard some amazing stories from the world of older child adoption, and I figured the agency would know better than I what was or wasn't possible.

So, after learning of this child's existence on the afternoon of Friday, October 15, we talked it over after Esther went to bed, decided it couldn't hurt to ask his U.S. agency about him, and sent off an e-mail to them early morning Saturday.  Then we had to wait the weekend for a reply.  We felt alternately a little bit excited at the possibility of adding to our family, a little bit foolish to be wasting the contact person's time with what was undoubtedly a stupid question, and a little bit relieved that we were going to be told it couldn't be done and we would get to have more time enjoying family life as we know it before we threw a wrench in everything by adopting again.

On Monday, October 18, mid-afternoon, we got a reply from the U.S. agency.  The child we had inquired about didn't age out until early summer.  His case worker thought that if we pushed it, we could complete all his paperwork with a month to spare.

Wow.  We kind of looked at each other like, "This is serious.  Now we have to actually decide."

[To be continued...]

The Plan. Revised.

When we were doing our home study to adopt Esther, we initially wanted to adopt an older child.  Neither one of us feels that experiencing infancy is necessary to feeling like a family, and neither one of us thinks it's just that older children who need families get passed over in favor of babies.  However, due to various circumstances, we ended up requesting a healthy infant.  We were referred our dearly beloved Esther, and are so blessed to be her family!

We still felt the urge to adopt an "older" child, though, so we resigned ourselves to waiting a long time for our next adoption so that we could request a child who was "older" but still younger than Esther.  But as we got to know Esther and see how adaptable and social she is, we (or at least I!) began to picture her with an older sibling, and to wonder if that might work after all.  I researched, as best I could, the reasons why out-of-birth-order adoption is sometimes discouraged, and I concluded that if we got a child who was enough older than Esther that they occupied very different ecological niches in the family, maybe she wouldn't feel displaced.  Or at least, no more displaced than any only child feels when a new baby comes along!

I didn't see us adopting that child from China, though.  We definitely wanted another Chinese child, so Esther won't be a minority within her family, but information available on "waiting children" in China is limited and not always accurate.  We feel that our first responsibility at this point is to keeping Esther safe and developing in a healthy way, and we specifically wanted an older child who had a track record--that we could verify!--of interacting appropriately with younger children.  Besides, since we adopted Esther, China has added some new requirements for adoptive parents, and there was one that no matter how many times we did the math, we were well short of meeting.  So, I thought, how about adopting an older child from the U.S. foster care system, where we can actually talk to the foster parents and make sure that the child's past behavior has not posed any danger to younger children in the house.  Then once we met all of China's requirements again, we could revisit our original plan and add an "older" child from China who would be younger than Esther.  Tim and I talked about it, and he agreed in theory to having three children instead of two.  But in our Maryland apartment we really didn't have enough space to put another child and their belongings, we couldn't afford a bigger apartment, and anyway, we kept thinking we might move in the next year, which would not have worked at all if we were in the middle of a foster-adopt placement.  So I waited...and enjoyed Esther... and daydreamed of an older sibling.

When Tim got the job offer that moved us to our current town, one of the things that I got excited about was that we were finally going to stay put long enough to adopt!  And the housing market is a lot less (a LOT less) expensive, so we could afford a bigger place!  Even before we moved, I researched adoption agencies in our new state and picked out which one we would use.  Once we were settled in our new house, had unpacked enough that I felt like I could function, and had gotten into the rhythm of Tim's new job, I started filling out this agency's application form.  I figured that we could take care most of our home study requirements in the fall, do our required training in the winter, and be approved in the spring, hopefully in time for a summer placement.  I shared my plan with Tim, and he was much less enthused than I.  Was I sure this older child adoption thing could work out well?  It was okay in theory, but work was so busy, and Esther was too young to understand what was going on, and maybe it would be better to wait for another year.

Literally a day or two after this conversation, we got (drumroll, please!) The E-mail.  It was generated by a woman who, two years ago, had adopted a child from the orphanage in the city where we used to live in China.  While she was there meeting her daughter, the director had pulled her into her office to plead for her help in finding a family for an older boy who had the same disability as her new daughter.  Two years later, she had just found his file listed with a U.S. adoption agency, and was following through on her promise to advocate for him if she could locate him.  He was close to aging out (orphans in China are considered unadoptable once they pass their 14th birthday), so time was short.  She had sent the e-mail to (among other places) the yahoo group for that child's orphanage.  It went from there to a woman who has visited that orphanage a number of times as part of her ministry as a globe-trotting Christian clown.  She in turn forwarded the e-mail to all her China connections, including Tim.  (Mind you, we met this person on two occasions, several years ago, and hadn't been in contact since.)  I read the e-mail first, and offered up a prayer for this child.  Tim read it and said, "I know this is crazy, but do you think we could even get our paperwork in on time?"

*To be continued...*

You know winter has begun when...

...the weather forecast calls for a high of 33 (Fahrenheit!) and you rejoice at the prospect of a balmy day.  We have now started on our second snow event in less than two weeks.  The previous one featured snow falling gently but pretty steadily for more than four days.  I think we got about eight inches altogether, and it was COLD!  However, Esther is a snow lover, so we went outside at least once each day (twice most days) that there was enough snow on the ground to play in.  16 degrees (-9 C, for our friends on the metric system) isn't that bad if you're dressed for it, which Esther was, but I was sorely regretting not having gotten around to buying new snow boots.  (I threw my old ones out last winter after they got cracks, and I've been holding out on getting new ones till we can go to a sports store or some other place where I can get really warm, sturdy ones.  With as much time as I spend standing out in the snow these days, I'm willing to pay for quality!  Any recommendations for stores or brands are welcomed.)  So I put plastic bags over my (non-snow, fashionable) winter boots, and we came inside when my toes started to get numb.  It was still fun, though.  :-)  My favorite part was finding cat, rabbit and bird tracks in the snow.  Esther says that was her favorite part too, but she found plenty of things to do.  Here is a sampling of the first snowfall in our new home:

More Esther stories

When Grandma was visiting us, we went out to eat.  Our server introduced himself as Thomas.  Esther's jaw dropped, and in a stunned tone of voice she said something about a train.  Apparently, this was the first time she had met a Thomas other than Thomas the Tank Engine.

At our church's fall dinner, Esther begged to sit next to the director of children's ministries, whom she loves.  At some point during the meal, while this woman was conversing with someone else at the table, Esther decided to be a helper and offer her something else to eat.  I heard her saying, "Hey, woman.  Woman!  WOMAN!!  Do you want this?"  (I told this to a parent of a similar-age child whose son as been known to say things like that and she said, "At least she got the gender right!")

Esther has become quite a backseat driver, taking it upon herself to make sure nobody overlooks a stop sign, or fails to start driving when the light turns green.  But she really demonstrated how much she has been paying attention one day when she first reminded me to bring my driver's license, and then gave me a lecture on how to back out of the driveway (complete with a mimed demonstration of changing gears and looking back over her shoulder).

Shortly after Thanksgiving Esther and Daddy were discussing turkeys.  Daddy asked, "What does a turkey say?"  Esther wasn't sure.  So Daddy told her, "It says, 'gobble, gobble, gobble.'"  "Not anymore!" she pointed out.

Esther was "reading" a folder of information to me.  In her most literary voice, she announced, "By Suzanne Beck.  Pictures by The Cow Jumping Over the Moon."

When Esther and I were putting angel decorations on the Christmas tree, I started singing "Angels We Have Heard on High."  Esther was quite taken with the "Gloria" chorus, and a little while later I overheard her singing, "Gloryluia to the Lord of Jesus!"

We were eating animal crackers when Esther suddenly held one up and exclaimed, "Jesus, Jesus!  Look, Mommy, Jesus!"  It was a mountain goat.  (She was holding it sideways, so maybe it resembled a man in a robe?)

advent

I didn't grow up in a very liturgical church, but have discovered as an adult that celebrating liturgical cycles like Advent and Lent really helps me connect to the true meaning of the celebration that they lead up to.  So a tradition that Tim and I and now Esther have made part of our household is an Advent wreath.  We do it with four candles, and we light a candle or candles each evening and have a reading related to the coming of Christmas.  Tim and I have done rather elaborate readings in the past, but with Esther now old enough to understand (sort of) what we are doing, but not nearly old enough to sit through a lot of words, we decided this year to choose a verse each week and say it every night so that we memorize it as a family.  This past week, the first week of Advent, we lit the candle of Hope each evening and learned the verse "All God's promises are "Yes" in Jesus." (2 Corinthians 1:20, paraphrased).  I also tried to tell Esther Bible stories of God making a promise and then keeping it.  Starting tomorrow (Sunday) we can light two candles each night (for Hope and Peace).  I'll have to start thinking about what verse to learn!  Then the third week we will add the candle of Joy, and the fourth week we will add the candle of Love.  I think Esther's favorite part right now is blowing out the candle when we are done, but it is good to think of this tradition being part of how she experiences Christmas growing up.

It's a small world, after all

This afternoon our family of three, two of European ancestry and one of Chinese ancestry, sat down to enjoy a meal of Thai massaman curry and jasmine rice while watching snowflakes drift down outside the window of our home in North America.  Just an everyday moment (except for the snow), but when I really stop to think about it, it blows my mind!