We're Not Crazy

We're moving. Rather, we're hoping and dreaming of moving. We are under contract to buy a house in Glens Falls, a grand old Victorian lady with beautiful woodwork, huge old pocket doors, a kitchen with great workable potential, a deep front porch overlooking fruit trees, and a staircase with lovely carvings and a window seat. The house has solid bones, mostly updated bathrooms, and a finished attic room that can replace the space we'll lose by leaving our finished basement. The yard is big enough, with an in-ground pool and a Rainbow Systems playground set, plus enough extra room for some landscaping and a vegetable garden. The street has old trees, interesting architecture, and is within walking distance to the newly remodeled library, the post office, dozens of restaurants, a brewery, and Crandall Park.

We're moving, but the lovely house is not the reason we're moving.

We still have to sell our house, the one we finished building (it was an unfinished spec house) and then put in the landscaping, paved the driveway, put in the stamped concrete sidewalks, finished the basement, built a deck, cleared 40+ tress form the backyard, fenced 1/2 acre of our 1.85 acre lot, installed a swimming pool, and added an enameled woodstove to the living room. We have worked hard these last five years and we don't regret anyof it, not the money spent nor the time spent nor the elbow grease spent. We love this house. It is our home, the sacred place where our babies took their first steps. We love our neighborhood, a mixture of couples and singles, young and old. There are good people here, friends we've known a lifetime and friends we've known for only a season.

We're moving, but it is not because we're running away.

We could easily stay here, stay put in this house we know and enjoy surrounded by people we like. It would be easy for us to stay put, to watch our children board the school bus, go to the prom, and graduate in this safe community. It would be easy to stay here where our friends are mere houses away. But if we stay here, our children will likely be the only children of color in their class, perhaps in their entire school.

We're moving, not because of our children, but for our children.

When we bought this house diversity was not one of our major concerns. We didn't know then that our life path would lead us to building our family through adoption. We didn't know that the two people we love most in the world would look nothing like us, that they would not, in fact, share our race. And even once we started our adoption, we didn't always think about race as mattering very much. We knew it mattered, of course, but once we knew our children and fell in love with their personalities and the amazing little beings that they are we didn't always see their differences. To us they looked to us exactly the way our kids should look, and so it was easy to forget for a little while that race matters. It does matter. In fact, it matters a lot, especially to children who join their families through transracial adoption.

From what we have learned, when children join their families through transracial adoption and are raised in nearly entirely caucasian communities, they feel as though they are, themselves, caucasian. The problem is the world will not see our children as caucasian and they will not be treated as such once they leave our cozy little nest in this nice, white community. We, their caucasian parents, cannot teach them how to be people of color because we have no point of reference. We don't know what it feels like to be called a racial slur, to have someone pull slant eyes on us (hello, Miley Cyrus). Yes, we can educate ourselves and we can try to understand how awful it must feel, but we will never be able to commiserate with them on this. We can't offer any firsthand insight on how to deal with racism. While we don't believe our current community will hurt our children, and maybe they will never have a problem with racism here (although I doubt that very much), we also know that the real world is not 99.9% white. Once our children leave our cozy nest and nice community the world will not see them as Sara and Brendan's kids who were adopted as babies, they will see them as Asian men and women and many of them will assume racial stereotypes based solely on their looks.

In adoption, the child (along with the family of origin) is the one who gives things up and most often it is without their choice. Our children didn't choose to have an adoption plan made for themselves. They didn't ask to be taken away from their country and culture of birth, from their genetic background, from all of the people who look like them. It is a lot to ask a little kid to make all of the sacrifices in a relationship, to ask them to grow up in a place where they are The Asian Kids, easily spotted and easily targeted. Like I said, it would be easy, for us adults, to stay put and watch our children grow, enjoying our friends and our own feelings of safeness and comfort.

We are moving, not because we are running away, but because we are running toward Something Else.

Shameless Self Promotion

I knit.

You know that from the bazillion pictures of bags/sweaters/dresses I knitted when waiting for Emma to come home, right?  Well, now I am happy and excited to announce that you can knit with me!  Anne's Yarn Shop in G.F. has asked me to teach a felting (fulling) class in March.  For $15 plus the cost of supplies you can learn to make a striped handbag using Cascade 220 yarn and a bag pattern that I developed.  The fee includes 2-2 hour sessions, March 14 and March 21, held from 12-2pm.

The best part of knitting and felting wool yarn is that once you know how a particular yarn shrinks you can go off-pattern and create your own originals.  It is a technique well worth learning, resulting in a bag that is sure to bring many compliments (I know mine do).  I do hope some of you local knitters will join us!  Email me for more information.

Harrison is Four

We blink and it happens: our children change and grow and mature without us even realizing it is happening, until suddenly sitting before us is the school aged version of the baby we once knew.  Our baby has grown, and where he once babbled and cooed there now sits a tall and lean little boy, independent in all of the ways that matter at his age, able to engage adults with his good manners, wit, and charm.  When I look at him I see his inquisitive nature, his love of problem solving, his ability to nurture and care when the people he loves are hurt or sad.  I see his love of a good story, his sense of adventure, his admiration of nature and the world around him.  I see his glorious sense of humor and the mischievous twinkle in his eyes.  Oh, yes, there are impish little boy parts, too, but when I look at the big picture of our son I see the strength of his character, the line sketch of the man he will one day be.



















I see him and my heart smiles.

Leftover Holiday Photos

It seems I never posted any pictures at the holidays last year, because like most everyone else I know, Facebook nearly ate my blog.  (stupid time stealing Facebook) 
In no particular order, here are the photos we just took off the camera:



They LOVE their new tents.  Harrison even decided to sleep in his for several nights, before realizing that the floor is not quite as comfy as his bed.

Bananas on the counter.  Funny, I never let Harrison sit on the counter when he was little but I plunk Emma up there all of the time so I can get other things done.  She is so happy to sit up there and watch whatever I am doing that it never occurs to her to wiggle, squirm, or reach for all of the things I keep up there so the kids won’t be able to reach them. 



Emma basks in the late morning sunlight. 

The much anticipated Green John Deere Tractor.

And the much anticipated Black Kitty Cat, aptly named Meow.

Christmas morning.

Aunt Brooke was awesome and hosted our Christmas festivities at her new pad this year.  Emma and Harrison were as entertained by Coco the Chihuahua as they were by their new gifts.

Somewhere under there is our picnic table.  We’ve had plentiful snow this year and the table is even more buried now than it was then.


Emma in the tub. with Hello Kitty and Whale.

Harrison did my hair, and his Cars toys watched.

First day of fevers…Harry looks pale.  Poor little guy.

This last one is a ghost picture that came off our old camera.  Please ignore the embarrassing mess on our counters and focus on the little fuzzy-chick headed girl and wee little boy standing by the mudroom gate.  They were so small!  I think this is not long after Emma arrived, so Harrison would have been nearing 2 1/2 and Emma almost 1.  I miss those days, but we’ve come so far since then.

On the Mend

It’s been a rough couple of days.  Emma had to go back to the doctor on Friday because she was wheezing so badly at night that I thought I was hearing a continuous old-man snore over the monitor.  I probably let it go a day or two too long, but Friday’s visit to Dr. Breen set me straight.  She has acute bronchiolitis (at first they thought she had pneumonia, but her blood oxygen count was fine, thank goodness) and has to do nebulizer treatments a few times a day for the next week, the same drugs that my grandmother with emphysema was on for ages.  So that freaks me out a little bit.  Emma takes her medicine like a champ, sitting quietly and taking good, deep breaths while she looks through a pile of books.

We’d been on a run of sleepless nights spent either trying to let Emma sleep draped over us or listening to her breathe on the monitor.  Our days have been filled with a tired little girl who feels yucky and is suddenly very much a terrible two when she’s not well.  Climbing to the top of our stairs left her spent and wheezing and she needed to be carried, a lot.  I nearly sewed a new mei tai in an effort to relieve my aching arms! 
The good news is the drugs seem to be working.  She finally slept all night last night, then stood at the bottom of the stairs this morning calling loudly and cheerfully for her Daddy, asking for cereal and demanding that he get up and play with her.  It did my heart good to lie in bed and listen to that clear voice of hers, absent of wheeze for the first time in a week.  She didn’t mention me until well later, when she realized that Daddy might not be home.  So our Emma is feeling better, it seems, and we’re all looking forward to getting out of the house today. 

It’s a Girl.

The rabbit, I mean.  We went to the vet for the first time today, a last minute decision because when we got up this morning Pepper’s head was tilted to the side, her eyes were “scanning” (horizontal nystagmus) back and forth constantly, her left ear was seemingly stuck back, and she could only hop in circles, always to the left.  I took those all to be bad signs, did a little search on the House Rabbit Society’s website, and found that she probably has an ear infection (inner ear) or a neurological problem.  Dr. Teddy, our awesome vet, agreed with the information I found and we started Pepper on antibiotics in the hopes that it’s an ear infection and not her brain.  Please don’t let it be her brain.
Interestingly, the scanning of the eyes is caused by the bunny’s vertigo, which makes them unable to focus so their eyes twitch as they try to find a focal point. 
On the way home, with one dose of antibiotic already in her, Pepper stopped scanning and sat up in her box to wash her face and stare at me as I drove.  The vertigo must have eased a bit; she seems fine now, except for the left ear which is still slightly drooped lower than the right ear. 
We also found out that Pepper is, in fact, a girl.  She’s a very sweet girl and I am really hoping that this is just a minor blip on the radar of her life, and not a sign of many complications in our future.

And Bunny Makes Seven

Behold the cuteness:

This is Pepper, small enough to perch in my cupped hand, but just big enough to warm our winter weary hearts and add an element of new energy to our home. 

I think she is a girl, but she is still too small for a novice like me to really be able to tell. 

I would like to tell you that I felt badly for our kids, who have been sick nearly every week since September, and so I brought them a bunny to cheer them up.


And while they are visibly cheered by Pepper’s presence, the truth is that I was the one who needed cheering.  After a year of losing people and pets that I loved, I wanted to start 2009 out on happier footing. 

And Brendan likes her, too.