Gentle Years

I had a page called The Second Time Around, but now that this adoption is moving again-all of my ducks are starting to get in a row-it is time to move the information about our little girl into the main blog.

She was six in March and when she comes home she will be in kindergarten-one year behind Aidan, even though she is exactly eight weeks older than him.  At some point, after language mastery, she may move up to be in his grade, but this will give them separate identities at first which I think is good.

Her name is Min Yu Qiang which means that she is probably called Qiang or Qiang-Qiang.  That would be pronounced Cheeyong.  She lives in Guizhou Province and is officially referred by the Anshun City Social Welfare Institute, but lives in a foster home.  She is shy and very close to her foster mother.  She has untreated club feet, the true club feet, but can do everything any other kid can.

Our homestudy visit was on March 12-we only needed the one since we are returning adoptive parents and our last one for Aidan was in November.  This week we should get our last document needed to complete that leg of the journey.

The last week of May I met with the pediatric orthopaedist who operated on our first daughter, PB, when she had a growth defect with one leg.  He also sees her youngest, Matthew, for his turned foot.  He says that, despite the way this girl's feet look, she has no pain.  When she gets home, she can have surgery right after coming home or wait a few months.  We can have one foot done at a time or both.  She will have callouses just like we do on our heels, but on the side of her ankles.  He said whether or not she has the surgery at six or seven doesn't matter, but the difference between, say, six and nine would be pretty significant and then complicate things.

Her name will be Eva, after my mother's mother who died three years before I was born.  Aidan doesn't like that name, but too bad-this will be my only chance to use it, and no one else in our family is going to since they're all done having kids.

This first shot is The Old Plantation-the house I grew up in.  My great grandfather built it in the late 1800s-you can tell that because we still had elm trees here in NH then.  The barn really was enormous, and was attached to the house by what we called "the back room", an old version of the modern mud room and under the same roof as the wood shed.  The house had five bedrooms upstairs and the formal dining room had been made into my parents' bedroom downstairs.  Good thing, since there were 11 of us kids.  The roof in the back left would be the sap house.  Our other outbuildings included a two stall garage, long garage (four stalls), chicken coop, blacksmith shop, and wagon shed.  My parents thought they might open it as a museum one day, but the barn burned when I was 12, taking the house with it (the house was still standing, but not salvageable).  The double bay in the front corner was the living room and above it was the bedroom that I shared with my sister at that time.  Our windows opened to the southwest and we could listen to the water rushing over the dam all night while we slept.  I think that's why I love the sound of the ocean as if I had been born on it.

So that is the old, and here is the new.  Below is our first photo of our daughter, Min.  Her file calls her Mindy and already I call her my Mindygirl.  She is turning six next week and she has club feet that have gone untreated, so she can stand, jump and walk, but on her ankles, and of course with pain.  After she comes home it will probably take about a year of castings before she can stand straight on her soles and walk without any assistance.  She is a peanut-the size of our average three year old at the time of her file when she was just over five.  So I'm planning to get a jogger when we go to China so that we can get around with something big enough for her to sit in comfortably and with three big wheels that can get around easily-anyone who has tried to use a stroller in China knows how crazy that is.

Anyway, this is an exciting time and I'll probably be consumed with fundraising efforts for the next several months.