Some Serious Thoughts

Recently a woman in the US adopted a 7 year old boy from Russia, then apparently became overwhelmed by the child's emotional and psychological needs and proceeded to send the boy, alone, via a one-way ticket, back to Moscow, where a driver hired over the internet picked him up and delivered him unannounced to the Ministry of Education with a note explaining the American woman no longer wanted to parent him. In response to the fallout and backlash due to this unfortunate story The Joint Council on International Children's Services has asked people to blog about their own adoption experiences today. I would also like to share a link to their page of resources to help strengthen and preserve families.

They are also asking people to sign a letter to President Medvedev and President Obama: The letter asks both Presidents to ensure that inter-country adoption continues uninterrupted and to aggressively investigate and prosecute anyone involved in the abuse of children. Click here to sign the letter.

This blog began 5 years ago as a record of the adoption process we went through when Kai joined our family. Back then I wrote about the steps we went through and our adoption journey to China. This blogging pattern repeated when we adopted Shen. Back then I used to write from time to time about bigger adoption issues, but then that phase of our life ended. Our family was complete, and while the issue of adoption continues to be a part of our lives, the "process" of it no longer dominates our thoughts and this blog has moved on to being more of just a fun scrapbook of our daily family life. If you were to click back through the entries for the last year or so you might think our life consisted of nothing but holidays and outings to parks. Today I would like to write a bit more seriously about adoption, and while I consider both Kai and Shen's adoptions to be happy and successful, there are serious issues we have faced that we were not necessarily expecting.

Our decision to adopt did not come about quickly or easily and the impact it has had on our family has been profound. I tell a version of our family's adoption story fairly often, and I usually give it a pretty light, and somewhat funny spin. For example: we were already parenting two boys and were drawn to adopting from China because we wanted a girl. Yet somehow we ended up with two more boys! Funny, right? :-)

But truthfully, it's not a funny story. I don't like to play up the situation our youngest two sons were in before they joined our family because I dread the "You are so wonderful for you've done", or "you saved them" comments. Because I know I can never give back to these two boys a fraction of what they have given me, but I do know that we have altered their life paths in ways that are nearly incomprehensible. I want to share a bit more of their story here then I'm usually comfortable putting out there, but I think this is important.

Kai was 33 months old when we met him. He weighed 19 pounds (that's below the 1% mark on the WHO charts). He was hosting a stew of intestinal parasites. He had a silver dollar sized scar on his scalp where hair still does not grow. He had oral-sensory issues which prevented him from eating anything but soft gruel-like foods. His developmental delays were profound and somewhat frightening. And we had no idea about any of these issues before we adopted him. His club hand, the special need we were aware of before the adoption, quickly fell off the radar of issues we needed to address with him. Still, I know we are amazingly lucky with how easily he fit into our family and how loving he is with us. In spite of all the unknown issues we were faced with, things went so well we decided to adopt again.

Shen was 44 months old when we adopted him. Again, his known special need, the absence of a right hand from birth, became the least of the issues we were faced with when he joined our family. I will never forget the first night he was with us in the hotel room in Xi'an and Tina ran a bath for him and Kai. After she had undressed him and put him in the water she called me into the bathroom. Her voice was quite serious, and I quickly saw why. Spanning the area between his shoulder blades on his upper back was the most horrifying burn scar I have ever seen on a child so young. It was as large as my adult hand and fiery red at the edges where he could reach to scratch. We still have no idea where, when or how he sustained the injury that resulted in this scar. We do know that he had been moved from the orphanage to foster-care and back again, and that he had moved between floors and caregivers at the orphanage several months before we adopted him, resulting in 4 different sets of primary caregivers in less than that many years. Shen came to us pretty healthy, but with emotional scars nearly as profound as the physical one he bears on his back.

I like to think that Tina and I are really great parents. We've raised two boys to young adulthood, Tina has a degree in early-childhood education and has been a teacher for over twenty years. We took our adoption agency's educational requirements seriously, and continue to pursue information regarding adoption issues from as many sources as we can find. Still, we find ourselves struggling from time to time trying to figure all of this out. We have had discussions with our social worker, we have used a counselor. There are great resources out there for people willing to take advantage of them.

I don't mean to sound all doom and gloom here. Most of the time our family life is pretty sweet, but there is more going on than what I regularly share here on this blog. Raising two young boys with both physical and developmental special needs in an inter-racial family definitely has it's challenges, but the rewards are pretty amazing too. If you are considering adopting a child, please think carefully about what this means. We publicly swore a solemn oath to never abuse or abandon Kai and Shen. I consider my attachment and responsibility to them no different than that to our two older sons. If you are going through difficult times with a child in your family please seek help. You are not alone.

And now I'd like to share a couple of my favorite videos...

Kai Has Lost Something

It has been wiggly for months now, and all it's former neighbors are loose as well. Kai has been quite excited about the impending tooth-fairy's visit, but not enough to really work at getting this tooth out. He let me try tugging on it last week, but it still seemed pretty well attached, and the sensation of having it pulled on kind of freaked him out, so he has been quite reluctant to let us feel it the last few days. Tonight though it was obvious that it needed to come out. So at bedtime Kai finally consented to let me try one more time. He started to fuss as I gently gave a tug, but this time the tooth popped right out. I asked him if he wanted to see it and you should have seen his face! Instantly he quit fussing and his eyes went big as saucers! There was a tiny bit of blood, but he was so excited and proud to have it out that he was all grins!

Here he is displaying the new hole in his head and the special glow-in-the-dark tooth holder the dentist gave him to help the tooth-fairy find her prize.



Tina and I are both very excited for Kai, he's so thrilled to have "grown-up teeth" on the way. Still it's a bitter-sweet kind of happiness, I know they can't stay little forever, and this is a sign that he is definitely growing up. I can't say I'm as upset by this nearly as much as one very jealous little brother whose teeth are all still firmly rooted no matter how much he wiggles at them. Poor Shen, it's tough being the youngest.

GeoCaching

I've been interested in this hobby for some time. A few years ago I tried Letterboxing for a little while, but didn't really stay with it. The kicker for geocaching though is that there's a great App on the iPhone for it that puts everything you need in your pocket. If you haven't heard of GeoCaching this little video can explain it much better than me...



Kai and Shen really like the idea of finding hidden "treasure" and I like the motivation to get out and muck about in the woods. Though we've only been doing this for a few days now and we're hitting about .500.
We've looked for about 8 caches and have found 4. The amazing thing is that there are over a million of these little treasure boxes out there, and plenty of them right around our neighborhood. We made a quick little visit down to my sister's on Sunday and I persuaded my 15 year old nephew and his buddy to join us on a quick hunt at a couple parks near their home, very fun exploring through the woods with a troop of boys!

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Nice Photos and Note from the Boys' Chinese Teacher

On Sunday afternoons Kai and Shen attend class at the Mei Hua Chinese Language School. We have been really pleased with their enthusiasm towards Chinese school and feel so lucky to have this local resource for them. As we were heading out of the school to run a few errands after dropping them off I noticed a couple new emails on my iPhone and was quite pleased to find the following note:

"Hi parents,

this is Mary, Mei Hua Chinese School's preschool teacher. I am really glad to teach your kids in here. I also appreciate that you keep your kids study in school every weekend. You are very kind, responsible and great parent.  your children Kai and Shen are smart and lovely kids, and they learn fast and  interest in Chinese.  I'd like to send some pictures to you, enjoy.   Mary" Here are the pictures she sent...

Vintage Books

I love books, and I like that we have a nice collection of children's books in our home. However, we are far from what I would consider book collectors. Actually I'm somewhat leery of hanging onto too many books. My father is a serious book collector. He amassed a collection which by anyone's standards would be considered a respectably sized library. As a pastor, many of his books were about religion, but by no means was this the collection's exclusive focus. He always had an office at his church as well as at home, the walls of both of these offices were completely lined with books. Than there were the multiple sets of bookcases in our living room and other parts of the house, as well as boxes of books stacked in the garage. I actually always loved that we had so many books in our home growing up, but I also remember moving that collection multiple times. Word of advice here, DO NOT use big boxes to pack books, liquor boxes work well (still heavy when fully packed) and while my parents never had hard liquor in the house there were always countless liquor boxes in the garage.

Now I try to be very selective about what books I keep. If I don't think I'll read it again it goes. I don't hang onto books as trophies. I'll keep reference books if I think they aren't going to become dated, and I like having classic literature around if I think it fits either of the above categories: something I might read again, or useful for reference purposes. Children's books have been the one category of our collection that has swelled beyond the others. This is mostly because as a teacher, Tina finds these a valuable resource to hang onto, and Kai and Shen have certainly benefited from this. Still, since I read to the boys every night at bedtime we end up with some books in heavy rotation. Fortunately we're moving into "chapter books", but we still read at least one picture book every night. So lately I've been trying to add to our library. A couple weeks ago I picked up a handful of titles at Goodwill, and today we went to a school fund-raiser rummage sale where I found a few more good titles.

I know I have only a few years in which I can control what books the boys will be exposed to, so I try my best to choose carefully. Often nostalgia guides my selection as I choose titles I remember fondly as a child myself. Todays finds included The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Grey Bridge (1942), A Fly Went By (1958) and a nice hardback of The Incredible Journey (1960).

The real find though, was a set of 4 slim little pamphlet style books, each one profiling a child from a different country. I told the woman running the cashbox that I wanted these sold as a single item, which meant I paid 50¢ for the whole set. None of them bore a copyright date, but I knew they were old because one of the titles was Chula of Siam. I had to look it up on Wikipedia to see when Siam became Thailand, it was 1939. But it wasn't their apparent age that caught my eye, it was the volume titled Ching Ling and Ting Ling with a picture of a little boy and girl in traditional Chinese dress holding a kite.



Here are the other color images from this book...










Here are the covers of the other three books...







As one might expect, the content is not only dated but a bit ethnocentric and racist as well. One line in Ching Ling and Ting Ling refers to "Ting's small, slanting eyes." The line I really like though is from Maria and Carlos of Spain: "As they drove along (in their mule cart), Maria and her father munched on ripe olives. Like all Spaniards, they like to eat olives wherever they go." Consequently, these will not make it into our bedtime book rotation, but the artwork in them was so pretty and quaint that for 50¢ I couldn't pass them up.

Now for my Antiques Roadshow moment, with just a little more googling around I discovered these were published in either 1936 or '37, and I found copies of them selling on eBay for as much as $30 a piece! Almost makes me want to spend more time garage-saling!

February Wrap Up Mega-Post - Chinese School and Stuff

It's rainy Saturday afternoon and the boys are busy with a box of vintage Lego, so instead of getting my household chores done I'm putting up a Kitchen Sink Round Up blog post. I tried to take a bunch of photos this month for different blog entries, but never posted them, so now they're all going into one big entry...

Tomorrow is the Chinese Lantern Festival - the last day of the 2 week Chinese New Year Celebration. I don't think we're doing anything really special tomorrow to mark it, we'll see.

Last night we went to see The Bellingham Arts Academy for Youth's production of Suessical Jr. It was a great production and the kids in it did a great job, Kai and Shen really enjoyed it.

Tonight we are going to see a Chinese New Year Celebration at the Mount Baker Theatre with the boy's Chinese language school. It's a presentation of classical and modern Chinese music. It looks a bit "high brow" so we're not sure how well the boy's will do with it, but i guess we'll find out.

Now for all the pictures...

Chinese New Year Assembly at Kai's School. His after-school Chinese class performed a really cool dance routine to traditional Lion Dance music.


Here's Kai with his Chinese language teacher, Sunny, at school (Kai's the one in the lion mask)...


Shen, the Ultimate Tag-Along Little Brother, goes to after-school Chinese lessons with Kai and actually got to be the tail of the lion in the assembly!


This is Kai and Shen with their Chinese language teacher Mary, who teaches them on Sunday afternoons at the Mei-Hua School...


They are getting to study Chinese calligraphy there too now, check out their great brush grip!


After two hours of Chinese, Kai and Shen look forward to playing on the playground outside. Kai spent quite a bit of time shooting baskets...


Shen spent his time climbing the "rock wall" with a friend...


One last CNY picture. This should have gone in the last post, but it didn't. I had a hard time trying to get photos of the boys with their fireworks, it was raining a little, and it's hard to get the camera settings right to catch moving subjects in low light, but this one kind of came out...


Last weekend the boys got long overdue haircuts. Shen told his stylist he wanted to look handsome, Kai told his he wanted to look like a Rock Star!


After the haircuts we took the boys, their bikes and the dog down to Zuanich park on the bay. I think I've posted more pictures of them at this park than anywhere else, but it's so beautiful down there.

Juno is getting better about letting the boys hold her leash...




Kai loves throwing rocks in the water...


Shen being a daredevil on the play structure...


And my favorite view of Mt. Baker from down there...


Kai's kindergarten class celebrated 100 Day this week (100 days of kindergarten), a great opportunity for extended counting and learning number concepts. Here's Kai kitted out from the party...


Weekdays are pretty busy around here, which the boys really love. When I get home from work Kai is usually still working out one or more of his Big Ideas, but quite often Shen is done and he and Go-jee are in their favorite chair taking a 6 o'clock nap...


Amazingly this never upsets our 8 o'clock bedtime!


Ben helped his little brothers build a marble roller coaster set their Aunt Erin and Uncle Bill handed down to them...


and here it is in action...


There was some other stuff too, but I'm done for now. I hope February has been a good month for you too!

Valentine's Day / Chinese New Year

I really should be updating here more often. February has been a busy month.

We spent Valentine's Day/Chinese New Year weekend in Cheney with Tina's dad. It was a really good visit.

Shen and Kai are wearing their "Year of the Tiger" shirts in this picture with their Grandpa. It's nice that red works for both CNY and Valentine's day!

Tina's dad, Len, had planned a special Valentine for his girlfriend Joyce. Joyce suffered a fairly severe stroke several months ago and is still pretty impaired by that. We drove Len in to pick up flowers for her then went with him to the assisted living facility where Joyce lives. A bunch of her family were there visiting her too. Len had arranged for a barbershop quartet to serenade her. It was a nice little party, and very romantic. I shot a little video of the quartet singing...



After the Valentine's party we stopped at a really great little asian market and picked up some supplies for our Chinese New Year dinner. It was fun celebrating this with Tina's dad, her sister-in-law Erin and Niece Caitlin. We picked up extra hong bao (red envelopes) so all the adults could them to all the kids after they said the traditional new year greeting of gong xi fa cai, which means "Congratulations and be prosperous". We made rice and long noodles, dumplings (frozen potstickers - still good!) and made Hui-Hui's favorite egg flower soup.

We had saved some of the fancy paper wrapped sparklers on wooden sticks from the 4th of July and remembered to bring them with us, but when it was time to light them they were nowhere to be found. We searched the house, but came up empty. Aunt Erin managed to come up with a box of the little white "popper" things you throw on the ground and the kids really liked these. Then we found one more bag of ours and the sparklers were there so Yay! We had fireworks to scare away the evil spirits and ensure good luck for the coming year!

Chinese New Year Party

We went to the annual Chinese New Year party that our local Chinese Cultural Association hosts. Kai and Shen performed with their class from the Mei Hua Chinese Language School. We had a great time and saw a lot of friends there, both adoptive families and Chinese American families from the Mei Hua School. They held the event at Sehome High School, so there was a lot more room for people to move around. The kids got to run with their friends and the grown-ups got to visit. There was a TON of excellent Chinese food too!

I took a few pictures, but Kai really wanted to use the camera today. I was a little worried about letting him use our only digital camera, but it has a neck strap and he was being pretty careful with it. Surprisingly, he got a number of really great photos of a bunch of people! Now he clicked off close to 200 shots (thank God for digital!), but that's a strategy I use for getting good photos too! I often will shoot fast and hope to hit something. Anyway, about three of the photos in the slideshow above are ones I shot, the rest are Kai's!

The Spy Next Door Starring Jackie Chan

We took Kai and Shen to their very first* big screen movie experience today. We saw Jackie Chan in The Spy Next Door, in which Jackie plays Bob Ho, a retired international spy who is called back for one last job while he’s babysitting his next-door-neighbor’s three children. I think it is more than fair to say that Kai and Shen were VERY excited about getting to go see this. While I am writing they are busy acting out fight scenes with one another, and while they always love rough house play a lot, the energy level they are exhibiting right now has definitely been kicked up a notch!

The movie was about what I expected, it is definitely aimed at kids. I knew this going in, so I wasn’t expecting much for the adults. I got my enjoyment from watching the boys see the movie.

The opening credits play over a montage of action scenes from earlier Jackie Chan movies set to the song Secret Agent Man. The immediate gratification of seeing their man in action was immensely satisfying, but Kai found the following scenes that set up the plot and characters a bit tedious, “When is the Kung Fu?!” he whined to me after about the 10 minute mark. Fortunately he didn’t have to wait long. While Jackie had plenty of hi-tech spy gadgets, there were lots of classic examples of him using his environment and found objects (including a bike, ladder, folding chairs, frying pans and a refrigerator) in humorous ways to take down the bad guys.

A couple of things in the movie that Tina and I found quite touching were when Jackie’s character sang Chinese lullabies to put the 4 year old girl to bed, and when he explained to the 13 year old half sister who felt she didn’t belong, that he had been an orphan and had grown up in a group home. He told her that family wasn’t about whose blood you had, but who loved you.

The Spy Next Door is far from being a timeless classic, but Shen and Kai were thrilled with it so we were very glad to have taken them to see it. We were also presently surprised to see a preview for Jackie Chan’s next movie, a remake of The Karate Kid with Will Smith’s son, Jaden starred in The Pursuit of Happyness with his father. Interestingly this remake is set partially in China and the "Karate Kid" learns Kung Fu.



I have written before about our family’s fondness of Jackie Chan, who has a special place in our hearts because he built an entire new children's building at Kai's orphanage in Baoding, China. After we wrote and thanked him he sent Kai an autographed picture that now hangs in the boys' room. Yep, bonafide Jackie Chan fans in this house! To read what I wrote about that four years ago CLICK HERE.

*we took Kai to see Curious George in the theater four years ago when he was three, but he doesn’t really remember it.

Padden • Mindport • Rocket Doughnuts - Playday in B'ham!

What a Great Saturday! We had nothing mandatory on the schedule today, the new house is looking pretty well put together. Sure there's stuff we need to get done, but nothing we absolutely had to do today, so we made it a super fun play day! The boys let us sleep in a little, I made pancakes for breakfast and we had a nice lazy morning. Then we packed up Juno (the dog) and headed to Lake Padden to let her play in the dog park there. The place was pretty busy, with a lot of big dogs so she was a little overwhelmed by the pack, but she's used to big dogs and held her own pretty well. It was a beautifully warm day out for January, and we even had some sunshine! After Juno was done playing, Kai and Shen got to play on the climbing structure and run around in the main park. Now that we had all had some good outdoor playtime, we headed back home to drop off the dog and get some lunch before heading downtown to visit Mindport.

It's kind of hard to explain Mindport. We used to take Cam and Ben there all the time when they were younger, but we haven't been there in years, and Kai and Shen had never been before. It's kind of like a science museum, but it's more like an interactive art gallery. The exhibits feature many different science principles, but they are so beautifully designed and presented that they truly are art. While there are high-tech electronics featured in many of the pieces, most presentations are designed of wood and other natural materials. I was pleased to find that many of my favorite pieces from when we were last there years ago are still just as beautiful and fun to play with. Kai could have spent the whole time just playing in the stream of water. Shen was fascinated by the floating ping-pong balls. Tina and I both enjoyed watching the two of them explore the space.

When we were finally able to pull the boys away, we walked down the street for a doughnut at Rocket Doughnuts. This is another great little Bellingham spot, which I'm embarrassed to say we had never been to before. We are pretty hardcore fan's of Lafeen doughnuts which was very close to our old house, and while I still love Lafeen's, Rocket makes an excellent doughnut and a great cup of coffee!

Happy Birthday Kai!

Look who's 7! It's amazing to us that he has gotten so big so fast! We had a special birthday dinner for him tonight with his favorite, egg flower soup, and dumplings. We didn't go very big on presents for him this year, but he really enjoyed all the little things he got. And of course, the cardboard boxes they came in were even more fun! One of Kai's favorite expressions is "I gotta idea!" Here he is building a space ship after everything was opened...