Life will change

Stacey, Mei, Fen and I are not the only ones who have a big life change around the corner.

As many of you who know us are well aware, our little dog Maggie is a central figure in our lives.  She has had to endure a great deal of affection, which she does not always appreciate, and has been under  close supervision at almost every moment of the day during the five years we have had her.

Maggie had a rough start to life as a puppy mill dog, but she has made incredible progress over the years.  She will never be as comfortable as most well-adjusted dogs are, but she enjoys life, as is apparent in the photo.

Life for Maggie is certainly going to be different with a much busier and louder household, with even more food to discover on the kitchen floor and some wonderful smells only a dog can truly appreciate.  We are expecting that she will enjoy being around the girls, but it is hard to predict.  She has shown great interest in the kids in the neighborhood as well as our nieces and nephews.  A few years ago when our youngest nephew Simon was just starting to crawl, he and Maggie had a funny exchange.  They got nose to nose and Simon reached out and grabbed Maggie's mustache.  She slowly pulled away and then came back in for another nose to nose sniff.  Simon took the opportunity for another touch of her facial hair and the dance continued back and forth for a while.

I think Maggie feels more comfortable with kids than adults, but we'll see if that remains the case when the girls begin to run around.  Hopefully as the girls grow they will learn to be gentle with her and she will get the space she needs.  She is a really sweet dog.

Is this love?

One of my colleagues recently asked me what the experience is like to suddenly love Mei and Fen.  Honestly, for me this has been a struggle.  Since we were matched with Mei and Fen in March, all we have had to build a bond with them is a few photos and our imaginations.

I have seen changes in myself during this time.  For example, I am more careful when I drive and think to myself that it is important for me to be around to take care of them.  I have more of a feeling of protection at this point than a bond with them.

I expect this will change as soon as we meet.  But in the meantime it is a strange sensation to refer to Mei and Fen as my daughters when I have not yet had the opportunity to establish a deep connection with them.  All this despite the fact that Stacey and I have spent years talking about this experience and are transforming our lives to be together.

I can't wait to develop that bond with the girls.  I hope it is something they want too.

Finally, a travel date

Yesterday, Stacey and I learned that we will be able to travel to China on June 2nd, returning to the US on June 19th, with our little ones.  We have been on the edge of our seats for the past couple of weeks since we thought we would hear this news as early as 5/1.  In the meantime, the US Consulate had an emergency situation that resulted in its closure for four days, delaying the process, and the annual Dragon Boat Festival is coming up in early June, so our scheduling had to account for that national holiday.

According to our agency, we will meet Lian Fen and Lian Mei on Thursday the 6th.  In China there is no transition time, so once we meet them they will have to put up with us from that moment forward.

Now it is a matter of getting our plane tickets.  Very exciting!

Overwhelmed with generosity

A little more than a week ago, our friends Samantha and Lisa arranged a baby shower for us.  They both have babies of their own, not to mention jobs and many other responsibilities, so it meant a great deal to us to have them put so much effort into the event to help us out.  It was also a lot of fun to have many of our friends come together.

Support like this has been really moving and surprising to us.  I think people are especially supportive since our wait has been so long and the fact that we were matched with TWINS, which seems to have a universal appeal.  When I attended my professional association conference a couple of weeks ago, I was given plenty of opportunity to show off the girls' photos.  The enthusiasm people shared was incredible.

Since we are not exactly going to be young parents, we felt funny about all the attention and support, but it has been very nice for us.  I have to work on being more graceful in accepting people's generosity and good wishes rather than feeling silly and awkward.

I am thankful that Fen and Mei will be coming into a community and family that will provide love and support for them.

Busy days

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind.  The news of the babies is enough to have kept our minds racing, but we have had many other events that also contribute to a fast pace.

As I write, Stacey is preparing for a final Master's thesis presentation tomorrow, as she finishes her Interior Design degree at the Corcoran College of Art & Design.  The whole year has been intense for her in the academic program and with her part-time jobs at two design firms.  The intensity has only increased during the past few weeks.

I also had a busy spring since until about two weeks ago I was serving as the president of my professional association, which was nearly a second full time job for me.  Our recent annual conference meant the end of that role for me, and it has been a great relief to be able to turn my attention to helping Stacey through the last stretch of her program and to continue preparing for our daughters.

As I am reminded frequently, I know our lives are not going to slow down with the addition of twin infants.  Although I love my work and have been very lucky to have great opportunities, both in my job and through the professional association, I am ready to make a shift in my focus.

On the fringes

Stacey and I are part of an interesting sub-culture, but have really remained on the fringes.  It is the adoption community - and more specifically the China adoption community.

When we started this process seven years ago, our adoption agency provided us with information to join a listserv for people who had started the process at the same time.  It seemed like a good, fun idea to connect with others in the same boat.

When I got the first few listserv messages, I knew I was in the wrong place.  I do not say this to detract from the others who were posting messages, but there was way too much intensity and anxiety for me to want to participate.  I also think I was probably one of the few males on the listserv.

What I found was an endless stream of notes about the agonizing wait for many people.  I remember one of the first notes I read referenced a woman pulling her hair out and saying she could not wait another day.  This was seven years ago, so I have wondered over the years how she is coping (or if she stuck with the process).  In addition to personal expressions of frustration, there were also rampant rumors about changes to adoption policy and what the Chinese government might do.  Much of the information was false.

We have remained on the fringes of this intense community and I think it has probably served us well.  We recognized that we had no control over the speed or outcome, so it was better to keep an arm's length.  This is not to say that it has not been frustrating for us too; there have been times when we thought this would never happen.  We now find ourselves re-joining the listserv world as we prepare to travel to China to meet our girls.

I am hoping that we will be able to connect with people in a positive way, even though I am sure we are all carrying plenty of anxiety that will be alleviated when we meet our kids (and be replaced, I'm sure).

Good fortune and loss

 Stacey, Lian Fen, Lian Mei and I all have good fortune to be brought together as a family.  Many people have told us that we are "doing a good thing" by adopting, but the reality is that we fulfilling our desire to raise children and this self-serving pursuit has the nice side effect of providing our future children with parents who really want them and will take care of them.

At the same time as we are very excited (and presumably Fen and Mei have no idea what is in store for them shortly) there is also an element of loss.  Most notably, they will be losing everything that is familiar to them, including food, smells, sounds and people we hope have cared for them well.  It is also a loss for their biological families.  We have no idea about their relatives, but we have learned a lot about the difficult choice that many women must make in giving up their babies.  In many cases it is the greatest act of kindness for the children, even though it must be wrenching.

We hope to honor Fen and Mei's biological family as they grow up.  It will certainly be a challenging concept for them to grasp, but it is important for us to allow for their multiple identities as being part of our family and having roots and connections in China, even if they are unknown.

So, along with our shared good fortune comes some loss.

Who are these girls?

We only have very limited information about who Lian Fen (Clara) and Lian Mei (Lucia) are.  Information provided to us is limited and not necessarily completely accurate.

We know that they were found at the orphanage in Nanfeng, a small town in Jiangxi province, on July 28, 2012.  A note that was with the girls indicated that they were born on July 26th and that Lian Fen was born first.  We were also provided with medical information about the girls, but since the documentation felt like a template, it is hard to know its accuracy.  The papers also state that they are in foster care, which generally means that an orphanage worker brings them home at night, but they probably spend their days in the orphanage.

Despite looking at their photos for countless hours, any insight into their personalities is completely invented in our own minds.  It is fun to consider and speculate about what they may be like.  I also think a lot about how they relate to each other.  Whether they know they are sisters.  Do they have a special bond already or are they bonded to the other children in the orphanage?  Obviously, we will not ever have any answers to these questions, but all of us will be learning a lot about each other and ourselves shortly!

May 5 Status Update

I realized that although I have posted information about our adoption process, I have not posted any information about where we are in the process.

On Friday I was very relieved to pick up our passports from the Chinese Consulate in Washington with our visas.  I had been concerned since when Stacey dropped off the application we were asked for some additional information about my work, so I did not know if there would be some delay in issuing the visa.  There was some delay, but we received the visas in two weeks rather than the normal four days.

On a side note, the Chinese visa is really beautiful.  It fills a full passport page and has an image of the Great Wall.  I guess it was especially beautiful to see it since I had been stressed about it and it signified another step forward in the process.

I will leave out many bureaucratic details for the moment, but we have paperwork which is now making its way through the Chinese system and when it gets final approval we should be notified of when we can make an appointment at the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou.  Once we have that, we will know when we will be traveling to China.  We have been told that notification should arrive between 5/1 and 5/15, so we are in the period now when we should hear.  Once that is finalized, it will be a matter of a few weeks before we get on a plane.

Jumping through hoops

When we started the adoption process we lived in Princeton, NJ.  Through a referral from a friend who was also beginning the process, we selected a social worker to conduct our home study.  It is incredible what goes into a homestudy document.  We had to write the stories of our lives including information from when we were very young through our current status.

The social worker had to meet with us together twice (once in her office and once at our house) and she also had to interview us separately.  The process of completing the homestudy was delayed due to a number of issues that came up, including documents that did not list our names precisely the same way, and our social worker had a significant delay in being able to provide us with the final version of the document.  In retrospect, that delay had a big impact since had we completed that process months earlier we likely would have been matched a couple of years ago.  But as I mentioned in an earlier post, it is already hard to imagine not being matched with Fen and Mei.

Since so much time elapsed from when we started to adopt and this year, we actually had to go back through the whole homestudy process, which is even more rigorous in Montgomery County, MD.  We had a social worker who was very helpful and efficient, so that was a blessing (and we will work with her to provide our periodic updates on how the girls are doing for the next five years).  We also had to have a sanitary inspector come to the house.  We passed that somehow.  We had to get new fingerprints taken both by the local and federal law enforcement agencies.  We got letters of reference from neighbors and friends.  The list goes on.

One highlight, at least for Stacey, was the fire inspection.  I thought it was a pain since I had to go buy fire extinguishers of a particular size, test our detectors and draw a floor plan and escape route for the house.  Our house is not exactly cavernous, so it is pretty obvious where the nearest exits are.  The final step was to have the Fire Chief from our local station come for the inspection and sign our form.  I arranged for them to come to the house, but it was Stacey who was here to greet them.  So, apparently four very attractive firemen showed up to conduct the inspection, matching every stereotype.  Stacey did not mind at all showing them around the house.

Shock of twins

Stacey and I learned the details of our adoption match on Thursday, February 28, 2013.

I had been traveling in Oklahoma that week for work and we got word on Wednesday afternoon that our agency had received child matches we would receive a call Thursday to inform us.  Although I tried to get on a flight home on Wednesday evening, I was unable to catch any flights that night, so I spent a dazed evening in Oklahoma City with a co-worker.

Stacey contacted our agency to arrange for our phone call to happen in the late afternoon on Thursday so that we would be able to take the call together.  Thursday was a beautiful and chilly day in Oklahoma City, and since my flight didn't leave until late morning my co-worker and I toured the Oklahoma City memorial and had a relaxed time before getting to the airport.

I was trying lots of techniques to calm my nerves on the return flight.  First, I decided to do some work, so I distracted myself with that for a while.  Then I tried to downplay the exciting news in my own mind.  I thought about how I already knew it would be a girl, and she would be between 9-12 months and it would be fun to learn her name and where she is located.  My mood shifted quickly when I realized I had set the time for the call based on central time, rather than eastern.  I quickly signed up for wireless access on the plane and managed to get emails to both Stacey and the agency with the hopes of pushing the call back yet another hour so I could get home.

Bad traffic from the Baltimore airport put me even a little farther behind, but I walked into the house with just five minutes to spare.  I suddenly had some nasty stomach issues (I will spare the details here), which were not part of how I had envisioned my state when receiving our match call.  Stacey answered the phone and bought me a few minutes before I was able to pull myself together.

Andrea, our contact from our adoption agency, said hello to me and then said "Congratulations, you have been matched with twins!"  We were both shocked and elated at the news.  Stacey's response was "Shut up!"  We couldn't believe it and had to take a few minutes before we could listen to the additional details Andrea had for us.  She said she was so happy to be making this call in particular since we had such a joyous reaction.  Andrea told us their names, where they are now, and some other basic information.  She also sent us an email with their photo (which is at the top of this page) and let us know we would receive a full package of information the following day.

Stacey and I immediately called our family members to let everyone know the news.  Then we took the iPad down the street, going door-to-door, showing our unsuspecting neighbors the photo.  It was a lot of fun to share this great news with everyone - and to have so much positive feedback.

(Stacey even went up to a neighbor in a car down the street and tapped on their car window.  Turns out it was a stranger.  We did not force the photo on him.)

When we were exhausted and hungry, and had run out of available neighbors, we went for Chinese food!  It seemed appropriate.

How we decided to adopt

Stacey and I first met in 1998 when we worked together at a small public relations agency in New York.  A few months after she joined the company, late in that year, we started dating.  Even from our earliest conversations about our respective hopes for building a family, both of us thought of adoption as an appealing option since having biological children did not have much importance to us.

While we were still living in New York Stacey got pregnant and had an early miscarriage.  We tried again and in the early fall of 2004 Stacey got pregnant again with Ava.  Sadly, after a very difficult pregnancy, Ava was stillborn on December 28, 2004.  Although we recognize Ava's ongoing presence, losing her was devastating.  At the time, we consulted with a physician who suggested we work with some specialists who could help with what they would have considered a high risk pregnancy, but that route was not appealing to us.  In early 2006 we started the adoption process.

We decided to focus on adopting from China since it seemed to have one of the most reliable and least corrupt adoption systems.  We heard from people about the excruciating 9-18 months it would take to get through the process before parents would actually be able to travel to China.  We thought we could handle that length of time.  As it turns out, there have been a whole series of events that have caused the wait time for China adoptions to increase from 9-18 months to more than 7 years (fewer adoptions from Eastern Europe, child trafficking in China, the Olympics, SARS, issues with large amounts of money flowing into China, a better Chinese economy, cultural changes favoring domestic adoption in China, and more).  

So, during the past seven years, or so, Stacey and I have kept ourselves busy.  Among other things, we have both gone back to graduate school, moved a few times, changed jobs and careers for Stacey, traveled, got a dog (who will be relieved when we pay less attention to her) and many other things.  Although the wait time has been difficult in many ways, we have not experienced the despair that other waiting families have expressed to us.  We did investigate other adoption possibilities, including domestic adoptions, fostering and Ethiopian adoption, but none of these worked out for one reason or another.

I heard for years that when parents and children are matched it seems like it is destiny, and I was skeptical until we were matched with our twin girls, Lian Mei and Lian Fen.  It really does feel like this is the way it was supposed to happen and we are meant to be with these children.  Although it is difficult for me to fully believe that this will happen (despite the fact we have been preparing, even with diapers and formula), it feels really great and I cannot wait to meet the girls.