Because I need a Buca pick-me-up.

Ok, so maybe not so calm.

The latest referral rumors are that referrals will go up to 11/7/2005. Argh! It's not that we expected to be included in this batch, but we had really hoped referrals would go far enough into November that we could be super confident of getting a referral at the beginning of July. I am starting to panic now. Please, please, please don't let us have to wait until August to see Isabella's face in her referral photos. I really want to take advantage of not having to teach until January 2008...I want to maximize the amount of time I have home with our girl. Please, please, please do not let the whole summer go by before we have her home.

Ok, so I am not sure who I am talking to.

Oh, and insomnia reigns once again. I am not sure if it's the end of the semester stress getting to me, the referral business, or what. At least I got to list a few books I want to sell on ebay.

Speaking of online shopping, a comment on my last post suggested shopping and pointed me to Heather's Lanterns and Lotus Blossoms site, which linked to this site, Forget Me Not Kids. Oh my word. I am so in trouble. I have bought Baby Lulu clothing for friends and it is adorable. But what's worse: I really, really want this for me. But they appear to only have small left in stock, and I am a medium. And SchnauzerKing now breathes a sigh of relief. And no honey, that doesn't mean we should buy you a plasma TV instead.

Memorial Day weekend.

I am sitting here, not wanting to grade a batch of final exams. So not wanting to grade. So, instead, I'll talk about the weekend.

- Gorgeous weather here in New England. Absolutely stellar.

- Yard work. Tim and I did some on Saturday, and then on Sunday slavedriver Carla came to spur us on. We have pulled up most of our Skelatore trees. We have freshly mulched beds. We have our whiskey barrels planted. Tomatoes and basil planted. Our patio set is out. Amazing! Did I mention Carla showed up?

- On Saturday Tim and I discovered a great dog park. Stoddard's Nek in Hingham. Dogs can run off-leash and it's surrounded by water on three sides, so they can also take a dip. I got knocked right off my feet by a dog, and then run over by two more and have the bruises to show for it. But, it was great fun!







- The referral situation. I am strangely calm. I expect referrals will come in the next week, and we will not make the cut-off. But I do expect that we will see CCAA get far enough into November that we can be confident of a referral in the beginning of July. Again, I am strangely realxed and optimistic (well, except for this grading exam business). It must be sunstroke.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

As you know if you've been reading this blog, SchnauzerKing and I are not far away from receiving a referral for our first child, to be called Isabella.

We do not expect to receive a referral in early June...we are thinking early July. Nonetheless, I think we've both begun to think about having a daughter and protecting that daughter in a more concrete way. Therefore, we will no longer have a public blog once our adoption is complete. I haven't decided if the MAA will end with our referral or with our trip to China, but it will be ending in the next few months. Our life will be about raising our daughter and that will be the real adventure.

I will be starting a new blog over on Typepad (this will be a separate blog from my personal, pwp "Finding Family" blog on Typepad). The new blog will be password protected and devoted completely to Bella. So there won't be any rants about my career, chatter about what I am reading, gushing about dogs or any of that. I'll keep all that stuff on "Finding Family" and the new blog will be all about our girl.

I have mixed feelings about this, because I feel like I know some of you that I have never met. But the reality is that I don't. And site meters can only tell me so much about who's reading the MAA. I am not willing to take unnecessary chances. And I don't think it's fair to expose my daughter to whomever has Internet access.

We have set up an email address to handle the conversion. If you want the URL and password for the new blog, send an email to tammytimisabella@yahoo.com. When the new blog is up and running (either post-referral or post-China), I'll be sending out the information to the people we choose to share the new blog with (this information will be sent sometime between July and September). If I don't respond positively to your request, please don't take it personally. We are simply trying to walk the line between staying in touch with family and friends, and keeping our daughter's life reasonably safe and private. I'll have another post closer to shutdown time reminding people of the email address. In the meantime, this blog will go on, at a minimum, until we receive our referral, and at a maximum, until we return home from China.

Pics from the baby care class.

18 months today, the 18th.

Our dossier has now been logged in 18 months at CCAA. I am guessing we will hit the 19+ month mark, but thankfully perhaps not the 20 month mark. I am really hoping by early July we will finally see Isabella's face.

A moving story in Sunday's NYT.

May 13, 2007
Modern Love
My First Lesson in Motherhood
By ELIZABETH FITZSIMONS
I SAW the scar the first time I changed Natalie’s diaper, just an hour after the orphanage director handed her to me in a hotel banquet room in Nanchang, a provincial capital in southeastern China.

Despite the high heat and humidity, her caretakers had dressed her in two layers, and when I peeled back her sweaty clothes I found the worst diaper rash I’d ever seen, and a two-inch scar at the base of her spine cutting through the red bumps and peeling skin.

The next day, when the Chinese government would complete the adoption, also was Natalie’s first birthday. We had a party for her that night, attended by families we’d met and representatives of the adoption agency, and Natalie licked cake frosting from my finger. But we worried about a rattle in her chest, and there was the scar, so afterward my husband, Matt, asked our adoption agency to send the doctor.

We had other concerns, too. Natalie was thin and pale and couldn’t sit up or hold a bottle. She had only two teeth, barely any hair and wouldn’t smile. But I had anticipated such things. My sister and two brothers were adopted from Nicaragua, the boys as infants, and when they came home they were smelly, scabies-covered diarrhea machines who could barely hold their heads up. Yet those problems soon disappeared.

I believed Natalie would be fine, too. There was clearly a light on behind those big dark eyes. She rested her head against my chest in the baby carrier and would stare up at my face, her lips parting as she leaned back, as if she knew she was now safe.

She would be our first child. We had set our hearts on adopting a baby girl from China years before, when I was reporting a newspaper story about a local mayor’s return home with her new Chinese daughter. Adopting would come later, we thought. After I became pregnant.

But I didn’t become pregnant. And after two years of trying, I was tired of feeling hopeless, of trudging down this path not knowing how it would end. I did know, however, how adopting would end: with a baby.

So we’d go to China first and then try to have a biological child. We embarked on a process, lasting months, of preparing our application and opening our life to scrutiny until one day we had a picture of our daughter on our refrigerator. Fourteen months after deciding to adopt, we were in China.

And now we were in a hotel room with a Chinese doctor, an older man who spoke broken English. After listening to Natalie’s chest, he said she had bronchitis. Then he turned her over and looked at her scar.

Frowning, he asked for a cotton swab and soap. He coated an end in soap and probed her sphincter, which he then said was “loose.” He suspected she’d had a tumor removed and wondered aloud if she had spina bifida before finally saying that she would need to be seen at the hospital.

TWO taxis took us all there, and as we waited to hear news, I tried to think positive thoughts: of the room we had painted for Natalie in light yellow and the crib with Winnie the Pooh sheets. But my mind shifted when I saw one of the women from the agency in a heated exchange in Chinese with the doctors, then with someone on her cellphone. We pleaded with her for information.

“It’s not good,” she said.

A CT scan confirmed that there had been a tumor that someone, somewhere, had removed. It had been a sloppy job; nerves were damaged, and as Natalie grew her condition would worsen, eventually leaving her paralyzed from the waist down. Control over her bladder and bowels would go, too; this had already begun, as indicated by her loose sphincter. Yes, she had a form of spina bifida, as well as a cyst on her spine.

I looked at my husband in shock, waiting for him to tell me that I had misunderstood everything. But he only shook his head.

I held on to him and cried into his chest, angry that creating a family seemed so impossible for us, and that life had already been so difficult for Natalie.

Back at the hotel, we hounded the women from the agency: Why wasn’t this in her medical report? How could a scar that size not be noticed? It was two inches long, for God’s sake.

They shook their heads. Shrugged. Apologized.

And then they offered a way to make it better.

“In cases like these, we can make a rematch with another baby,” the one in charge said. The rest of the process would be expedited, and we would go home on schedule. We would simply leave with a different girl.

Months before, we had been presented with forms asking which disabilities would be acceptable in a prospective adoptee — what, in other words, did we think we could handle: H.I.V., hepatitis, blindness? We checked off a few mild problems that we knew could be swiftly corrected with proper medical care. As Matt had written on our application: “This will be our first child, and we feel we would need more experience to handle anything more serious.”

Now we faced surgeries, wheelchairs, colostomy bags. I envisioned our home in San Diego with ramps leading to the doors. I saw our lives as being utterly devoted to her care. How would we ever manage?

Yet how could we leave her? Had I given birth to a child with these conditions, I wouldn’t have left her in the hospital. Though a friend would later say, “Well, that’s different,” it wasn’t to me.

I pictured myself boarding the plane with some faceless replacement child and then explaining to friends and family that she wasn’t Natalie, that we had left Natalie in China because she was too damaged, that the deal had been a healthy baby and she wasn’t.

How would I face myself? How would I ever forget? I would always wonder what happened to Natalie.

I knew this was my test, my life’s worth distilled into a moment. I was shaking my head “No” before they finished explaining. We didn’t want another baby, I told them. We wanted our baby, the one sleeping right over there. “She’s our daughter,” I said. “We love her.”

Matt, who had been sitting on the bed, lifted his glasses, and, wiping the tears from his eyes, nodded in agreement.

Yet we had a long, fraught night ahead, wondering how we would possibly cope. I called my mother in tears and told her the news.

There was a long pause. “Oh, honey.”

I sobbed.

She waited until I’d caught my breath. “It would be O.K. if you came home without her.”

“Why are you saying that?”

“I just wanted to absolve you. What do you want to do?”

“I want to take my baby and get out of here,” I said.

“Good,” my mother said. “Then that’s what you should do.”

In the morning, bleary-eyed and aching, we decided we would be happy with our decision. And we did feel happy. We told ourselves that excellent medical care might mitigate some of her worst afflictions. It was the best we could hope for.

But within two days of returning to San Diego — before we had even been able to take her to the pediatrician — things took yet another alarming turn.

While eating dinner in her highchair, Natalie had a seizure — her head fell forward then snapped back, her eyes rolled and her legs and arms shot out ramrod straight. I pulled her from the highchair, handed her to Matt and called 911.

When the paramedics arrived, Natalie was alert and stable, but then she suffered a second seizure in the emergency room. We told the doctors what we had learned in China, and they ordered a CT scan of her brain.

Hours later, one of the emergency room doctors pulled up a chair and said gravely, “You must know something is wrong with her brain, right?”

We stared at her. Something was wrong with her brain, too, in addition to everything else?

“Well,” she told us, “Natalie’s brain is atrophic.”

I fished into my purse for a pen as she compared Natalie’s condition to Down syndrome, saying that a loving home can make all the difference. It was clear, she added, that we had that kind of home.

She left us, and I cradled Natalie, who was knocked out from seizure medicine. Her mouth was open, and I leaned down, breathing in her sweet breath that smelled like soy formula.

Would we ever be able to speak to each other? Would she tell me her secrets? Laugh with me?

Whatever the case, I would love her and she would know it. And that would have to be enough. I thanked God we hadn’t left her.

She was admitted to the hospital, where we spent a fitful night at her bedside. In the morning, the chief of neurosurgery came in. When we asked him for news, he said, “It’s easier if I show you.”

In the radiology department screening room, pointing at the CT scan, he told us the emergency room doctor had erred; Natalie’s brain wasn’t atrophic. She was weak and had fallen behind developmentally, but she had hand-eye coordination and had watched him intently as he examined her. He’d need an M.R.I. for a better diagnosis. We asked him to take images of Natalie’s spine, too.

He returned with more remarkable news. The M.R.I. ruled out the brain syndromes he was worried about. And nothing was wrong with Natalie’s spine. She did not have spina bifida. She would not become paralyzed. He couldn’t believe anyone could make such a diagnosis from the poor quality of the Chinese CT film. He conceded there probably had been a tumor, and that would need to be monitored, but she might be fine. The next year would tell.

There would be other scares, more seizures and much physical therapy to teach her to sit, crawl and walk. She took her first steps one day on the beach at 21 months, her belly full of fish tacos.

NOW she is nearly 3, with thick brown hair, gleaming teeth and twinkling eyes. She takes swimming lessons, goes to day care and insists on wearing flowered sandals to dance. I say to her, “Ohhhh, Natalie,” and she answers, “Ohhhh, Mama.” And I blink back happy tears.

Sometimes when I’m rocking her to sleep, I lean down and breathe in her breath, which now smells of bubble-gum toothpaste and the dinner I cooked for her while she sat in her highchair singing to the dog. And I am amazed that this little girl is mine.

It’s tempting to think that our decision was validated by the fact that everything turned out O.K. But for me that’s not the point. Our decision was right because she was our daughter and we loved her. We would not have chosen the burdens we anticipated, and in fact we declared upfront our inability to handle such burdens. But we are stronger than we thought.

Elizabeth Fitzsimons, who lives in San Diego, is a reporter for The San Diego Union-Tribune.

A very happy birthday to a special girl.

My sweet Indie is 5 years old today! I've loved having her in my life, and being a part of hers.

There are many ways to mother.

Yesterday was Mother's Day. A day for people who actually are mothers, right now.

Can I tell you about my friends? Cheryl became a mother to Mya this year. It was her first Mother's Day home with her beautiful little girl. Same goes for Sparky, who became a mother to Amazing Grace this year. Then there is Anne, who became a mom this year to Lea, and was celebrating her first Mother's Day. And there's LaSalette, who became Emma's mother in 2005. She and her family are currently waiting for a second daughter, Sophie. And last, but never least, there's Carla, whose path to motherhood has not yet revealed itself.

All of these people had their own joys to celebrate, or their own reasons Mother's Day could be a tough day. And yet.

And yet all of these people thought of me this week, and let me know it.

Cheryl, Bruce, and Mya gave us a beautiful card, and several gifts. Onesies, a formula storage/dispensing container, diaper wipes, infant Motrin drops. Unbelievable.

LaSalette, John, and Emma also gave us a lovely card, with a beautiful detachable bookmark, and a red onesie that says "My Heart Belongs to Mommy". Most of all, Emma sent kisses.

Carla gave us a stacker, with plastic rings and a rocker bottom...the classic toy. She also gave us two gorgeous picture frames, one that says "Family" and one with a family of ducks. A wonderful card for me. And a bag of Starburst for Tim, so that he wouldn't feel left out.

Sparky left me a sweet note on her blog. On a day she called "The Best Day Ever", she thought of me.

Anne sent me a very thoughful note earlier in the week, in the midst of enjoying Lea.

Wow. I am just blown away. Trust me, few things leave me speechless, but the kindness of my friends during this adoption journey has left me at a lost for words. I just don't know how to say "thank you" in a way that is meaningful enough.

It occurs to me that I am a pretty selfish person sometimes. When I've got a lot going on, either outwards or inwards, I tend to hunker down. I either complain endlessly (ask Tim), or I say nothing, and try to be strong. There's never a moderate reaction...it's always an extreme with me. At 34, I am still learning how to manage my feelings.

This time has been strange, because I am very happy for all my friends that have realized their dream of parenthood. And I love their children. I love my nieces Amber and Leah, and my nephew Ben. Truly. If Emma, Mya, Grace, Lea, Siya, Aman, Markus, Oscar, Abigail, or Amber, Leah, or Ben, were in trouble, and there was something, anything, I could do for them or their parents, I would do it in a heartbeat. It's that simple.

What's not simple is all these feelings around motherhood. Feelings about my own mother. Feelings of fear that I won't be a good mother, no matter how much I want to be. Feelings of fear that this has all been surreal...that it is not going to happen. That the universe is teasing me. And I know all of that is old news...people have heard all of this from me before. I know that there is no one to be mad at...it is no one's fault that we've been waiting for so long.

But yesterday I felt loved. And a bit mothered, as though my women friends were gripping my hand, and saying "I know. But it will be OK". As if somehow God had sent me these people that have cared for me, not only on Mother's Day, but for a long time, in many ways. There's that expression that when God closes a door, he opens a window. Yesterday, I believed that. So, to all the women that have cared for me as their friend (to Carla, Cheryl, LaSalette, Anne, Donna, Lisa, Betti, Daphne, to name a few), and to all of the women that have tried, in some way, to mother me a bit, even when I have been uncomfortable being mothered (to Carol, to Karen Murphy, to Mrs. Serpa), Happy Mother's Day. You're all teaching me, every day. Thank you.

Sometimes he gets it right.

Yesterday I got home from work and there were flowers waiting for me. Irises, which I love, and lilies. They were from SchnauzerKing, but he got home before I did, so he brought them in. They are lovely, but the best part was the note.

To my wife on Mother's Day
'cuz you are special in many a way,
here be some color-pink and blue,
in anticipation of parenthood for me and you.

Awww. What a poet. I also received a replacement for a Christmas 2005 present that arrived busted...a sculpture. (I am very big on copper, bronze and wood figures. And I could definitely use the inner peace). At first I didn't notice it, but then SK made some offhand comment about how I was not very observant and keep saying "Ommmm". I figured he was just losing it, but no, there was a point to all that. Thanks, babe.

Tomorrow, SK and I are taking a 4 hour class called "Baby Care for Pre-Adoptive First Time Parents". And oh yes, I am bringing my camera!

Congrats to all the new families out there!

Referrals have made it to the US, and include up to November 1st 2005. Our agency received referrals for 3 families...the children were all around a year old.
Congratulations to Colleen, Joyce Gorgas (a secret pal), Sharon Wise, and many others out there!

13 days worth of LIDs remain before our date, 11/18/2005, comes up. I don't think we'll be in the next batch, but maybe baby for early July?

In honor of my very nerdy husband.

What You Know About Math - Click Here for more great videos and pictures!