From a conversation between Ladybug and I about her crush on Alex, a boy from her preschool:
The Ladybug: Don’t. Tell. Anyone. It’s a un-prize.
Me: Do you mean a surprise?
The Ladybug: No. When you wait to tell everybody, that’s a surprise. When you don’t tell anybody, that’s a unprise.
I was particularly amused by this, and related the story to the Queen B
The Queen B: You know, you’re pretty good with vocabulary.
The Ladybug: Yes. Yes, I are.
Dear Ladybug,
This week you turned forty-seven months old. While you’re still a month away from becoming the Big Four, that doesn’t much seem to matter anymore, as this month you became a Big Sister, which to you is infinitely better.
You’ve been excited about being a big sister for some time now, which has been a little stressful at times since your mom and I were trying to keep the adoption relatively quiet. You are terribly excited about being able to hold her close to you. You can’t wait to hug her and kiss her. You are brimming with excitement about feeding her milk from a bottle. You are, however, entirely uninterested in changing her diapers, my claims to its importance notwithstanding.
As a result, you were positively thrilled when the first packet of information about your baby sister arrived in late January. You brushed past the pages of medical forms (pausing only to note that some of them were in Chinese, which you found oddly surprising) to see the three pictures of the Butterfly. “Oh!,” you squealed, “She’s cute!” Moments later you disappeared in your room, emerging seconds later with ladybug backpack crammed with shirts, socks, and snacks and announcing you were ready to go get her.
It’s going to be a loooooonnnnnnnng four-to-eight months.
Eventually we convinced you that (a) we wouldn’t need to pack for China for several months and (b) when we eventually did, you would be better served by packing pants and underwear rather than trail mix and craisins. Nevertheless, you remain excited about the prospect of finally, officially becoming a big sister.
It’s already become the new chronological benchmark for you, replacing your previous measure via units of annual age. To wit, nowadays you preface statements such as “When I am a big sister, then I can sit in the front seat,” or “When I am a big sister, I can chew gum,” or “When I am a big sister, I will rule the world with my minion, muwah ha ha haaa!” I may be exaggerating a little bit.
Of course, I’ve also been trying to explain the logical consequences of the “When I am a big sister” antecedent to you, namely, When you are a big sister, you will not longer be the only child in the family.” The concept of no longer being the daughter, as opposed to being a daughter, has troubled you of late. I suppose this is true of all first siblings, but I’ve been particularly impressed by the way you’re handling it: not with quiet grace and acceptance, but neither with tantrums and tears. Instead, as is often your way, you’ve approached this not as a problem, but as the starting point for negotiations:
You: So Dad, how about this?
Me: I’m listening.
You: How about I be your daughter, and the Butterfly by my little sister?
Me: Well, that is how it’s going to work. But the Butterfly will also be my daughter, too.
You: No, no, that’s not what I mean. I mean how about I be your daughter, and the Butterfly by my little sister, and that’s all.
Me: Well, if the Butterfly is your sister, then she has to be someone’s daughter, right.
You: Okay, okay. How ’bout I be your daughter, and the Butterfly be mommy’s daughter, and she be my little sister.
Me: But then you wouldn’t be mommy’s daughter anymore, right?
You: Oh, yeah… Maybe we could take turns.
Me: Sometimes your my daughter, and sometimes your mommy’s daughter?
You: Yes. I think that would work.
Me: But that means sometimes you won’t be my daughter, but the Butterfly will instead.
You: Oh, yeah… Okay, okay, here’s my final offer: I be your daughter and mommy’s daughter, and the Butterfly be’s my daughter.
Me: The Butterfly will be your daughter and your sister?
You: Yes. How about that?
Me: I think that’s illegal outside of Arkansas.
You: What?
Me: I’ll explain it to you later.
You: How about when I’m 6?*
Me: How about when you’re 16? In any case, the answer is still “No.”
You: You drive a hard bargain.
…And then you’ll go off to your room and furiously begin scribbling out master plans and complicated calculations in the attempt to find that perfect combination of attributes that will allow you be the an only child and, simultaneously, and older sister. I’m not exactly sure what progress you’ve made, since most of your calculations take the following form:
However, if volume of calculations is any indication of progress, I expect you’ll have a publishable result any day now.
* Unrelated to issues of the Butterfly, you’ve taken to asking questions that require explanations of increasing complexity or maturity to understand. When such questions arose, I would usually preface my response with “Well, that’s a little difficult to explain,” before launching into a (usually incomprehensible to you) answer. However, lately when I make such a proclamation, you’ve been responding with “Why don’t you tell me when I’m older,” and then specifying a particular age at which you’d like to be informed. For example, as noted above, you’ve requested to be informed of the inbreeding stereotypes of the Deep South when you’re six.
As a second example, the other night we were watching the kid-friendly time-traveling movie Meet the Robinsons. Near the end of the movie, the protagonist Lewis and the antagonist Goob fly through a disruption in the film’s time-line, and watch the effects of one potential future (a grim industrial one) change into another potential future (a retro-utopian one) through a cascade of bubbles. “Dad,” you asked, “what’s happening to the city?” “That’s a little hard to explain,” I replied, and mentally began the process of distilling the A- and B-theories of time at a level appropriate to a 3-year-old pretend princess. “Why don’t you tell me when I’m older. When I’m 5, I think.”
So there you go: my current docket for back-logged explanations
- Temporal causality and paradox — age 5
- Southern stereotypes — age 6
So, yes, you’re full of love this month. I guess that’s particularly timely, what with this month also including Valentine’s Day, which you celebrated by passing out (and thereby collecting) cards and candies at preschool. This year you opted to give out Phineas and Ferb valentine cards and heart-shaped lollipops, which was fine. You also wanted to give each valentine your own personal touch, which meant signing your name by yourself and affixing heart-shaped stickers on each card of various sizes indicating the relative degree to which you liked the person to whom the card would be given. The upshot of this is that it took me about ten seconds to properly label attach a lollipop to each of the 24 valentines we needed to make; it took you the better part of a hour to sign your name and stickerly bedazzle each one afterward.
I should have paid particular attention to the size of the heart you stuck on “Alex”’s card, because the day after Valentine’s Day you announced that Alex was your new boyfriend, and that you loved him. When I asked why Alex was your boyfriend, you replied “Because he said he loves me.” Then you danced up into the clouds on a sea of hearts and rainbows that unexpectedly burst forth from your head.
On the one hand, I was relieved to hear that bad-boy Jevon was out of the picture (literally, apparently — he was bad enough to be removed from daycare); on the other hand, I’m still not ready to deal with this particular brand of drama. As a result, I laid down the following edict:
Me: You’re not allowed to love any boys.
You: But Dad, I love you, and you’re a boy.
Me: Good point. Okay, you’re only allowed to love one boy.
You: Oh daddy, sometimes one boy is not enough. Sometimes you just have to love two boys.
Me: And why is that?
You: Oh, it’s a little hard to explain.
Okay, kiddo. Why don’t you explain it to me when I’m older, like when I’m 40.
In the mean time, I love you!
–Ba ba
PS. NO BOYFRIENDS!
Sunday coincided with two holidays: Valentine’s Day and the Chinese New Year. As the former celebrates the concept of love and the latter celebrates the cycle of life, today seems like a good time to make an announcement about the intersection of the two:
I’m a daddy again!
Ladies and gentlemen, introducing the Ladybug’s little sister, the Butterfly:
In case it isn’t immediately obvious, we are once again adopting a little girl from China. She’s ten months old (today!) and living in an orphanage in the Guizhou Province of China.
Wait, what? You didn’t know we were adopting? Looks like I got some ’splainin’ to do.
We started this adoption about a year ago.
The Queen B was feeling a new little-girl-shaped void in her heart, and started looking into the process of adopting a second child. I was admittedly fearful about the prospect, partly because I was worried if I’d be able to manage my dadly responsibilities to a second kid and partly because I was worried about the practical issues of needing a bigger house and a bigger car and (of course) a bigger paycheck to handle a second kid, but mostly because I was worried about the karmic implications of a second kid. You see, the Ladybug is an awesome kid, and I know it: she smart, beautiful, funny, self reliant, and very loving. The only way I could see the universe balancing out the positive surplus of karmic goodness we’d received from bring the Ladybug home would be if we now adopted Damien Thorn.
Of course, the Queen B had a secret weapon in her arsenal: a seemingly never-ending supply of pictures of her online friends returning home from China and Korea and Haiti with beautiful happy children. Besides, the Queen B added, the Ladybug is acting more and more like the empress of the home, and a kid sister will dissuade her from believing real fast.
Her logic was irrefutable, and so consequently we started again down the long and windy road to adoption. But this time, we noted happily, we were experts on the process, which was comforting.
…briefly.
It turns out that in the intervening three years, the U.S. government has overhauled itself. In particular, there is no I.N.S. anymore… it’s now the U.S.C.I.S., which sounds more like a crime series spin-off than a government agency. Part of the re-branding of the agency meant changing all the paperwork, so the forms we had agonized over when we adopted the Ladybug (and from whom we were hoping to copy this time as exemplars) had ceased to exist in a puff of bureaucratic smoke. Instead, they were replaced by forms with names like the I-8562384-B and the W-867354 and notorious U-R-S-O-L.
In addition, somewhere around 2008 the U.S. joined adopted Hague Convention, a set of international guidelines for international adoptions designed to protect adoptive children and to thwart child trafficking. While noble in purpose, the Hague Conventions added a new slew of paperwork we weren’t expecting that often had to be completed before certain U.S.C.I.S. forms could be finished, although frequently such U.S.C.I.S. forms needed information from Hague Convention paperwork.
To get an idea of the changes, the old process, slow as it was, might be modeled as a flowchart of the form
The current system is a little different:
As if this wasn’t maddening enough, our adoption agency had started a new program that specialized in placing children with minor or correctable special needs with adoptive families. The Queen B and I felt comfortable with this, and communicated so to our agency. “Oh good!” said our agency, “that ought to speed up the process.” Then they mailed us a packet of paperwork approximately the size and thickness of my PhD dissertation and added “Here’s some new paperwork to fill out!”
It’s also worth pointing out that most of these forms have a dollar amount that needs to attached to them, and most have a time-sensitivity efficacy… that is, they’re only valid for XX months after they’ve been approved. Of course, the XX in question is different with each form, which means some document is always on the verge for expiring. Keeping track of which forms need updating is a bit like doing Mayan calendar calculations, albeit without the threat of the world exploding in 2012.
The upshot of this: with the Ladybug, we finished a bunch of forms, sent them to China, and then waited. This time around, we’ve never stopped sending in forms… in fact, getting the referral for the Butterfly has seemingly only accelerated the paperwork!
During this purgatory of paperwork, the Queen B and I have been pretty tight-lipped, sharing the news to adopt only with our parents and a few close friends (who we needed to write character recommendations for us) and, of course, the Ladybug. Why the secrecy?
Well, when we went through the process of adopting the Ladybug, we discovered that once someone knew we were adopting the only question they could think to start any conversation with was “Did you get her yet? How ’bout now? Now? Now?”
I know that those questions were only asked because folks cared about us, and were excited for us, and wanted to see our daughter, but it took two years to get the Ladybug home, and answering the interminable stream of bubbly “Didja get her yet?” queries with the inevitably grim “No” reply over and over and over again only served to remind us each time just how heart-aching the waiting process was. We just thought it would be easier on us to wait until we had something definite to share.
And now we do.
On May 16, 2009, while the Ladybug was making jokes about the Chinese Lunar Festival and I was frantically trying to wrap up grading final exams, half a world away in the province of Guizhou a passerby discovered a baby girl by the roadside. She was a little mostly-bald thing with a serious expression and something of a missing wrist who the police name Yan Chen, or Beautiful Morning. She was placed in an orphanage in the city of Luizhi. The authorities took her picture and file to the Chinese adoptive authority, and the process began to find her a forever family.
I previously described the process of adopting the Ladybug in terms of the red thread metaphor, a popular belief among adoptive families that in a nutshell says that children and their adoptive families are connected by an invisible red thread that, while it might stretch or bend from time-to-time, never breaks and eventually pulls to the two together. Apparently the Queen B and I had unspooled enough red thread when we went to Guizhou Province to fetch the Ladybug, because it tied itself to this little girl, and eight months later, in January 2010, we received the file that said we were getting a second “spicy little Guizhou girl.”
Just as before, we had a packet with with her medical file and three (rather out of date) pictures, suddenly giving a face and a personality to what had previously been a hopeful fantasy. We had another little girl!
According to her file, the Butterfly likes to “smile, listen to music, and urinate,” which I can only hope are not causally linked. Her left hand is a little under-formed, with a missing wrist and little nubbin fingers, but besides that she’s healthy and happy, if a little on the small side. A few weeks later we received a second packet with updated information and (even better!) updated pictures, including the fact that she’s pretty active, crawling and standing on her own. She’s also apparently hell-on-wheels in a baby-walker… which brings us back to that karmic issue I mentioned above.
She’s also very, very beautiful, and suddenly the Ladybug’s favorite thing in the world. Even more than Tinkberbell. It’s funny, too, because although there’s alomst certainly no possibility that these two girls are biologically related, they certainly bare a striking resemblance at four months:
We’ve still got a ways to go before we can head back to China to bring the Butterfly home (the Queen B has all the paperwork we’ve still yet to complete listed out in painful detail on her blog), and we probably won’t be leaving anytime before this summer. As a result, the Queen B and I are getting ready for the assault of expected “Didja get her yet?” questions sure to come now… but at least now we know who “her” is…
…and she’s perfect.
Butterfly, welcome to the family.
Today was the Ladybug’s last full day of swim practice. As we walked into the front lobby of the city swim center, she stopped, put her hands on her hips, and inhaled deeply.
“I like the smell of chlorine!” she said.”It smells like swimming.”
The only thing that would have been better is if Ride of the Valkyries had been playing on the speakers.
