13 Days Away

Yesterday, I took Andrew to the local Chinese Association's Chinese New Year Celebration. The event featured some fairly high-caliber performances and a welcome representation of people who were not either Chinese or Taiwanese in descent.

Some of the highlights of the afternoon included a professional Chinese opera performer who frightened Andrew with her (his?) dramatic makeup and unchanging smiley face. There was also a lyrical kung fu presentation by a gentleman whose graceful technique promptly dismissed the notion that Asian men can't dance.


There were several folk dances performed by young girls in lovely costumes. Judging by their last names in the Chinese School flyer, I'm guessing quite a few were adopted.


The most memorable number was the lion dance. As with the Chinese opera artist, Andrew was both paralyzed with fear and compelled with fascination. The look on his face in the picture below says it all.

Later on that evening, we were joined once again by fellow Taiwanese adoptive family, Paul and Heather. They brought along their adorable 4 year-old niece, Maudee. Juding by the squeals of delight ringing from the playroom, she and Andrew had a fun time together.

As if their company wasn't enough, they showered us with a tasty apple pie, a Chinese New Year card with a hong bao for Andrew and another for William, a giant tub of dinosaurs for Andrew to play with while we are gone in Taiwan, and a dazzling quilt for William, which Heather made herself.

The woman can quilt, bake, re-tile her own bathroom, rip up her basement, and raise three furry cats, all the while serving as a top-tier manager in a big company. What can I say? Parenthood will be no sweat.

Hey There, Sleepyhead

Psst... William. It's 1:09 p.m. in America. Mommy's thinking of you. I hope you're dreaming sweet dreams right now.

Please Sir, May I Have My Letter?

I'm happy to announce that our Criminal Records Check and Child Abuse Clearance applications are now out of our hands. I'm hopeful that we should receive our ICPC approval letter sometime in the next 7 days, leaving us about one more week before we're due to fly out.

Thankfully, the Child Abuse Clearance office is located in the same building as the Pennsylvania Interstate Compact office, so delivery time should be quick. Once received, turnaround time to receive our letter of compliance should just be a few days.

Getting our Criminal Records Checks proved to be a hair-pulling experience initially. The representative at the office with whom I spoke was dubious that she could send us our updates in under three weeks and her supervisor was not answering his phone. I was ready to pack up Andrew and head down to our local congresswoman's office to entreat her assistance. I kid you not.

However, I'm glad to report a happy ending: after much confusion, I was able to apply for our updated checks online and received the results within minutes. I faxed the results to ICPC earlier today. Don't you love it when things resolve in such surprisingly easy ways?

While we still don't have the final clearance letter in our hands, I'm grateful for how relatively easy it was to dispatch the necessary paperwork. Pessimist that I tend to be, I was envisioning a much more difficult struggle. I know some of you out there have been praying and expressing concern on our behalves, so, to you and to the God who hears, a wholehearted thank you.

Secret Asian Man and Yours Truly Go on Their Last Date

Several years ago, I was browsing the aisles at Gristede's grocery store in New York City when I first heard Johnny Rivers' song, "Secret Agent Man" playing softly through the speakers. My first reaction was to recoil in disbelief that someone would actually write a song whose chorus revolved around the words, "Secret Asian Man." Only after hearing the song piped through a few more retail loudspeakers did it occur to me that my ears were at fault, not the lyricists.

Tonight while out on a date at Ristorante San Marco, a local Italian restaurant, Craig and I were talking about what Pickup Day might be like. From what I've heard from other families who have returned from Taiwan, many of the babies tend to be uneasy around Caucasians, particularly Caucasian men. We decided that Craig should don a skin-tight Asian man mask and rip it off once William grew accustomed to him (think of the Scooby Doo reveal scene). Secret Asian Man indeed.

Following dinner, we hit up CVS for trial-sized toiletries to bring onto the airplane, Benadryl to help us cheat on sleep, and 60 watt lightbulbs simply because we needed them.

This may very well be our last date night for a long time. Until we're assured that William can generally sleep through the night without waking, we probably won't leave him with a babysitter. If it's true that all adoptions are borne from loss (ref. Sherrie Eldridge, author of Twenty Things Adopted Children Wish their Adoptive Parents Knew), we don't want to reinforce this notion should he wake up prematurely one night and discover our teenaged babysitter peering anxiously over the rail of his crib. Right now, our top priority is to encourage his bonding with us and to assure him in whatever way possible that, as his new family, we are here to stay.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

In light of our last-minute ICPC crisis, here's the good news: FEC (For Every Child, the new name of our agency formerly known as FFC) has all of the paperwork needed to send to Harrisburg. The only document they don't have, the Final Decree paper, is not mandatory. James at FEC tells me he will send out the paperwork by the end of this week. Our homestudy agency has already sent a copy of our homestudy to Harrisburg.

Here's the bad news: We were reassigned to another ICPC case worker, who immediately emailed me to inform us that our Pennsylvania Criminal Background Clearance and Child Abuse History Clearance were expired - by one week!!! Apparently, they're only good for one year. If we did not have to satisfy ICPC regulations, we would not have needed to renew them.

Here's the ugly: We've now got to scramble to fill out the relevant applications, purchase the concomitant money orders, write cover letters begging for expedited processing, and overnight all of these things to the two offices. In the best case scenario, they'll process our forms quickly and get them to our contact in Harrisburg, who will then promptly issue a compliance letter on our behalves and send said letter to us prior to our travel in 15 days. I don't even want to think about the worst case scenario.

To top all that off, we just learned today that Craig's distant uncle, Walter, suffered several seizures last night and passed away in a hospital in New Mexico. Our thoughts are with his dear wife, Fran, and their children.

All in all, it has not been the best of Valentine's Days. Still, God is faithful to remind me of his goodness through the kindness of others: my Prince Charming, Craig, sent me two dozen roses to celebrate the day. After almost 10 years of marriage, he's still got it.

In addition, my eldest sister, Even/Diane, continues to be relentless in her gift-giving. Today, we received a box full of gifts including Mustela baby products, an Avent steam sterilizer for bottles, a bottle warmer, and a Taggies soft-cover baby book. She also sent us a Phil and Ted's Metro backpack baby carrier, which is by far the coolest and most comfortable thing I've ever come across. I can't wait to pop William in it and go for a walk, chuckling in retrospect at all the silly flaming hoops we had to jump through just to bring him home.

We Now Interrupt this Adoption for an Inconvenient Piece of Legislation

Get this: with 17 days left before we fly to Taiwan, we found that there is a chance we may not be able to take William out of the country if we don't meet the requirements of the Pennsylvania Interstate Compact.

Apparently, Pennsylvania and a few other states have a law that applies to adoptive families who haven't seen their child prior to the finalization of the adoption. The family's adoption agency must send in copies of several documents to the Interstate Compact office in Harrisburg, PA. Among them are a copy of the homestudy, the adoption decree, the original birth certificate, and the final birth certificate listing us as the parents.

You may ask yourself why we are finding out about this at such a late point. Good question. We are wondering the same thing ourselves. (Can you tell I'm just a little upset about this?) We had heard about some Interstate Compact thing from our friends at church, Rob and Mary, who are traveling to India in the next few weeks to pick up their son. They have been working on satisfying its requirements for their adoption over the past few weeks. However, we had naively assumed that because neither our homestudy agency nor our adoption agency had notified us about this that we were out of the clear. By divine intervention, I had contacted our homestudy agency to inquire about re-adoption procedures in Pennsylvania when the director asked me, "Oh, by the way, did you..."

So what does this mean for our family? Both our adoption agency and our homestudy agency representatives were painfully ambiguous in their responses to this question. (Hint: that is not the right answer for a family expecting to bring their child home in 17 days.) I decided to call the IC office in Harrisburg to find out for myself. Thankfully, the woman handling our case was both very friendly and knowledgeable. She explained that if our adoption agency pulls together all the paperwork and sends it to her office in time, she will send us a letter officially clearing us to bring William home. We would then take this letter with us to the AIT office in Taipei when we go to apply for his via to exit the country. Without it, we could be stuck in Taipei until the necessary paperwork comes together.

Our adoption agency has much of the paperwork on hand and ready to send, but there are a few documents that I've been warned we may have to get ourselves while at St. Lucy's. This is a chance I don't want to take. What if something goes awry and we don't get the papers while there?

Now it could be that the officer at AIT in Taipei has never heard of the Interstate Compact and won't even know to ask for our letter. After all, most families adopting from Taiwan have never had to abide by it. But I don't want to test out the scenario and find out the hard way.

I know that God has his hand in our adoption. This has been evidently clear to us in all the strange twists and turns our journey has taken. Perhaps this is a lesson in trusting him to see things through in the best possible way. However, trust is a tricky thing to render when our travel plans hinge upon other parties and their ability to push papers across state lines. But with our only recourse being to breathe down the necks of those parties to ensure they're following through, trust in God's power is the only worthwhile option. And in the end, isn't it the best?

Hi-Ya!

Here's a random thought that occurred to me while driving home earlier today: one of the advantages to our boys' being of Asian descent is that the annoying stereotype that all Asians are martial artists can work in their favor.

Consider this: when I was in fourth grade, a boy in my class approached me during recess and started making quasi-martial arts noises (you know, "chung chicka chung chicka chung chang chung chong!"). He then asked me if I knew karate. I took in his question as calmly as I could, all the time wanting to smash his face in.

"Yes," I replied coolly (ahem, I mean, lied).

You should have seen the reverence on his face. Shoot, if I told him I could fly a la Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, he probably would've believed that, too. You never know what lethal powers and ancient secrets lurk beneath that Asian mystique. Either way, it was a certainty that he would never mess with me again.

In reality, I am considering sending our boys to martial arts' school when they're older simply because I think self-defense skills are useful to have in such a dangerous world as ours. If they reinforce the Asian martial artist stereotype, well, so be it. At least they'll have a fighting chance of walking away from a potential confrontation in one piece.

Heeeeee-ya! Wa-chee! Hi-ya!