Gentle Years

Spring is the season of change.  For us that means that Little Baby comes home from college.  If you've never had a child in college, let me explain that they have two of everything-one for their life on campus and one for their life at home-which means that when they're home, you have all sorts of stuff to store with no room to store it in.  Here is what the television room looked like on her first day back (just feet from her bedroom door, of course):

The birds are also back, which I love, though not always at 4:00 in the morning when their song wakes me up. But I saw a hummingbird Sunday and several times a day we see a robin who comes swooping down below the porch roof.  It turns out he/she has been building a nest behind one of our porch chairs, of all places:

Every day last week Aidan anxiously said, have they called yet?  I wish they would call! because he couldn't WAIT to get his glasses once he decided that he wanted glasses (which took all of about five minutes after entering the eye doctor's office and seeing the glasses on display).  So we got his call last night and here he is sporting his new lenses:

And, on the adoption front, we finally got a letter that I think (hope?) will pass muster.  I scanned it in and sent it off yesterday to our agency.  Thank you, Myra, for your help in drafting this!

Almost two weeks ago my doctor and Aidan's Tiger Scout leader were involved in a head-on collision, each driving the opposite car.  Our Scout leader has a badly broken foot and the other foot is sprained; of the four sons in the vehicle at the time, only one has a major injury-fractured jaw-but not major enough that he lost teeth.  Our doctor's thigh bone is broken and he will not be returning to his practice until the end of June.  This accident coincided almost perfectly with a request from the Chinese government for a follow-up letter to our medical forms.  Our doctor's partner is on vacation until May 9 so our request was sent to the other office of the practice.  Today I got that letter from a doctor there that I do not know.  It actually improves my profile and makes my husband's profile unacceptable for Chinese adoption.  Our doctor had been very specific on the medical form in his choice of language, making sure that he was completely truthful and that our file would be acceptable.  Our agency got our medical forms reviewed last August and were assured that they would be fine.  Our doctor offered to write a letter where he could further explain-the form is limited in space but not limited in time (it doesn't ask if you've had anything in the last two years, it asks if you have ever had any of the following).  We told him no, we were all set.  We're not.  I'm tired.

You know the joke about the guy drowning in a flood who declines the boat, the helicopter, etc., and then asks God why he didn't help him after he arrives in Heaven?  And God says, I sent a boat, a helicopter, etc.  What more did you want?  I feel like I could be that guy.  Am I ignoring signs?  Or are these signs just tests of faith?  Sometimes it's hard to tell.

Earlier this week I got an email from our agency asking for a letter from our doctor explaining a couple of things on the medical forms.  Our agency got these forms "pre-approved" in China in August because my husband takes a medication normally prescribed for depression but, in his case, that's not why he takes it.  My doctor offered to write a letter of explanation in addition to the medical form but we were told it should be sufficient.  It's not.

So I called the doctor's office Tuesday and was told he would be out until today.  First thing this morning I went there and have learned that he will not be back and they're not sure when he'll be back.  Something must be wrong with his family, I presume, because in 28 years of seeing him, I have only known him to be out for planned or expected things.  His partner can probably write this letter for us, but he's on vacation until the 9th.  He may be in today; couldn't be sure if they said that or not-stress affects the hearing, you see.

Our agency told us that we could have a LID for weeks before being notified of it.  Since another family in our group got theirs the first week in March and their LID was March 1, I contacted the agency just in case they had got ours and not notified us.  They had and had not.  So our LID is March 18!    Don't know why it's 2-1/2 weeks after theirs-they were all hand carried to China-but we'll take it :-)

Eva's best friend was adopted last month and is now living in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.  That girl's mother sent a bunch of pictures to me this week of the girls and other kids at the orphanage.  I was going to post them with our LID, but still don't have it, so I thought I'd go ahead and share a couple of them now. Thanks, Jolene! (PS-Eva is the one in red)

I have to admit I was getting a little bit nervous about our dossier.  It was hand carried to China by our agency in late February but we do not have a LID yet and we had also not received a bill.  G takes medication that is normally prescribed for depression but he takes it to control vertigo and even though our agency had the medical pre-approved last August, you never know, right?  So I was very excited (yeah, in a sick sort of way) when I opened my email tonight and had an invoice from my agency!

I’m sending this message out to our families who have recently submitted their dossiers to China.  Your dossiers were hand-delivered to CCAA by our staff while they were in China!!  Congratulations on being through the dossier step of your adoption journey.  We will have your Log In Date for you soon.

Today is the day that we get the dossier off to our agency.  Can you say tons of copying?  Not only do they need a photocopy of everything but also a copy of each authentication page-geez!  Anyway, we went this week to get the all-important photos to accompany the package.  The family shots were created through Walmart's one hour photo on-line, and they randomly scramble them for size.  The smaller ones for visas-well, you know how that goes-my husband had been wearing his baseball cap so of course his hair comes out flat and I look like I always look when it's 8:30 and past my bedtime-so I won't post those here :-)

I've been playing with the photos at the top of my pages, but when I try to stretch them out, they stretch down as well as to the side, and I can't find a way to title them-could just be limitations of my service provider.  Anyway, the photo on my front page is the ski area on our road, so the view is actually looking down at our house-we're about two to three miles from the base.  The picture on the top of this page is the lake in the town where our middle and high schools are located, and where our son lives.  We swim there as well as at other places in the summer.  This lake is cold but the beaches are great and it's one of the ten cleanest lakes in the world.  When I was young it was the fourth cleanest, but it goes up and down in the top ten now.

FedEx came today!  Very exciting, but you know how it is, it also makes you a wreck.  Deep breaths help to concentrate so I don't screw anything up!  He was bringing our dossier all authenticated, etc., from the State Dept. and Chinese Embassy in DC.  Tomorrow night we'll get our visa photos.  We tried to this weekend but had one of "those" customer service people-first she asked if she could help me, then when I told her what we needed, she told me she had to turn the machines on and wouldn't be ready for us for an hour, so I said we'd shop, and when we came back, she told us it hadn't been an hour and she was too busy to take care of us then even though no one else was in line (it had only been 56 minutes-shame on me for not checking the time).  So we'll either get them done at a "real" photo shop where we can get in and out in a few minutes or we'll get them at a different Wal-Mart when I pick up the photo collage to go with the dossier.

I have to admit I've been in something of a panic since I sent the paperwork off, not sure how we would have all of the $ that's due when it's ready to go to China, and having received denials from a couple of funding sources at the same time, but then as it always happens, I got a wonderful surprise!  A lady who adopted from Guizhou in the spring had taken pictures of Eva for me and since then I've become friends with one of her friends on Facebook.  When I posted the most recent picture of Eva (now that I feel confident talking with the "general public" about it), that lady said she had pictures of her from her own adoption-she just hadn't realized it was the same little girl.  So here is the newest photo of our sweetheart, on the right.

I got eleven in all.  Here are a couple more.