He Gets It!!!

Often people will ask me questions like, "Is Matthew excited about _________"?  Fill in the blank with anything such as Halloween, Christmas, his birthday, etc.  And I'm never really sure how to answer, because it's hard to know how much he understands about abstract concepts like that.  If I were to ask him, he might nod "yes", but a "yes" answer is not always reliable.  When he shakes his head "no", he usually really does mean "no", but I think sometimes he nods "yes" because he knows you are asking a question and therefore should reply, but doesn't really understand the question.  (Abby and I have done a few experiments, where we ask him goofy questions where the answer would most likely be "no".  For example, "Do you like to eat bugs?" and he nods, "yes".

This year though, something exciting happened!  The pumpkin basket that he uses to collect his trick or treat load has been floating around our house since last Halloween. Honestly, I'm pretty sure I put it in the basement, but things in the basement tend to find their way back upstairs.  Singing Easter bunnies sometimes make appearances in the summer.  The snowman pillow finally had to be hidden. I think you get the idea. The week leading up to trick or treating, he pointed to the pumpkin basket and then signed "walk".  I think between trying on pieces of his Halloween costume, Abby practicing putting a pirate beard on him and working on signing Trick or Treat during therapy he was really starting to understand about Halloween.

Fast forward to Saturday (Trick or Treat night in our neighborhood) and the boy could barely eat dinner because he was so excited.  Abby left a little early to go to a friend's house because the "big" kids were trick or treating together this year.  All his actions were saying, "Come on...let's go!"  We drove down to the blocks where all the action was happening.  With prompting, every house that we went to he signed, "Trick or Treat" and "Thank you".  It was fun to see that several people asked how to sign "you're welcome".

I'm proud to say that we didn't have any running incidents.   He did a little pulling when he saw our neighbor's van (it is an obsession of his), but he was able to be re-directed.  Last year, I remember we would sometimes get stuck at a house because he had to tap/pound on each pumpkin.  It got a little dicey when he tried to take the top off a lighted Jack o' Lantern.  He didn't do that this year.  The only thing that held us up was that he would hold out his hand to take the candy because he wanted to put it in the basket himself. Then he would just hold the candy for what seemed like forever and I would have to prompt..."Put it in your basket".  I was surprised that at one house, when he could choose between candy and a mini container of Playdoh, that he chose the candy, because he loves Playdoh.  Considering what a sensory seeker he is, I was also surprised that the only sensory seeking that he did was to tap the bowls that people were using to hand out the treats.  His favorite was the house that was using a big aluminum pan.  He had to spend a little while scratching the ridges on the side.  I was worried we might overstay our welcome at that house.

Matthew lasted 1 hour and 20 minutes.  Actually, he would have kept going, but WE were done!  I thought he might have fun helping hand out candy the next day during city-wide trick or treating, but he just kept signing "walk".  He totally would have gone Trick or Treating again!

I can't wait for Christmas - it'll be fun to see what ways he shows us that he "gets it" this year!


                                                         

Just the Right Place

Last year (pre-blog stage) I wrote on my personal Facebook page about how I was a little worried about Abby going onto the middle school, because then they wouldn't be at the same school. Matthew would sometimes visit Abby if he needed a little calming down.  I shared how we were at Abby's orchestra concert and Matthew was enjoying the music, but starting to make a lot of noises.  Rob took him out into the hallway and a few minutes later came back into the concert without Matthew.  I looked at him in surprise and he said that Mr. Supa (the principal) was taking him for a walk.  At that time I commented that I was reassured that everything would be okay...Abby could move on and Matthew would be fine, because he was in the right place.  

Now that we are in the second month of the school year and have had his first parent-teacher conference, I thought I would share with you some of my current reasons for knowing that he is in "just the right place."   

1.  His classroom teacher said that sometimes she tells the rest of the class,  "Look at Matthew.  If you don't know what you are supposed to be doing, look at Matthew."  I have to admit my chin almost hit the floor on that one.  We have heard positive things about Matthew before, but I don't know that he's ever been referred to as a role model!  

2.  The school asked me to write a little about his weekends in his communication notebook.  On Mondays they use that information to help him write a journal entry.  They write it in his journal and then he traces over the letters.  His aide will then type that sentence into his ipad. When it is journal sharing time, Matthew's journal is put under a projection device so the class can see his words/picture and hear his ipad saying the words.  They understand the importance of his ideas being heard.  

3.  Almost every week he gets to have cooking class.  Not only does he love to cook, but his speech and language teacher is in the room at the time.  She is able to facilitate communication in a real life situation.  He won't always eat what they make, but he has fun nonetheless.  

4.  If he requests a rest time or they feel that he is exhibiting behaviors that indicate that he is tired they offer quiet time in the special education room.  They understand that if he is too tired, it's counterproductive to force him to work through that.  Someone as active as Matthew needs to recharge every so often!  He goes through goofy sleeping phases at home too that can affect his energy level.  Sometimes he will go weeks and sleep through the night and sometimes (like this week) he is up at least once every night.  Sometimes he goes right back to sleep and sometimes it is a process...a process that involves one of us being awake too.  

5.  Thanks to both school and home therapy (and a program called Handwriting Without Tears) his handwriting is really taking off.  I can't tell you how delighted we were when he brought home a paper and he had written Matt independently from a model.  He now writes Matt on his papers.  He had another paper where he did such a good job on writing the words Mom and Dad.   

6.  He has a daily communication notebook.  This notebook is so important to a parent of a child who is nonverbal.  I can ask him if he had a good day at school and he will nod "yes", but that doesn't really tell me what was good about his day and it doesn't tell me if there were some not so good parts.  I confess when I pick him up from school, I read it in the car while he is getting buckled.  Sometimes at home, I will read parts of it to him or ask him a question about something that was written in there (i.e.  It says you had library today.  Did you get new books?")  We also try to talk about if there were bad choices made that day.  

7.  If you read Whatever It Takes you will know that Matthew has some interesting things that motivate him. The school utilizes some of these motivators to help him be productive.  One of his favorite things to work for is to spend time with the school custodian.  He likes to watch him vacuum of course, but also other cleaning and building projects are pretty exciting too.  

8.  They will sometimes take pictures on his ipad of things happening at school.  He was scribbling on his dry erase board and his teacher said, "Write your words."  They took a picture of the word Matt on his dry erase board.  In the past they have also taken pictures of him on field trips or special events at school.  

9.  When I drop him off at school, there is a girl who was in his class last year who likes to give him a big hug and hold his hand.  Another one of his friends will always say "Hi!" to him and one day announced, "I love Matthew."  The rest of his classmates love it when he talks with his ipad.  

10.  And this just might be my favorite...they are attempting to help us cut his pinky nails! He will not let us cut his pinky nails or his toenails.  I will not describe for you what kind of torture this is to even try.  Every night I try to sneak into his room when he is sleeping to cut them, but he always wakes up.  Today they made some progress as he let them file his right pinky nail.  

As some of you know, after teaching full time for 22 years, I am teaching part time in Special Education. Since I have been in a different teaching role for the last 14 years, I am taking note of all the positive things happening for Matthew at his school.  My goal is to have my students' and their parents feel that same way...that their kid is in "just the right place."  

                                                    

The Dreaded Block Party

Our block LOVES block parties.  So much so, that we have one in June and one in September.  What's not to love about them?  The kids ride their bikes, skateboards, and scooters.  We eat yummy food and drink yummy drinks.  We shoot the breeze while our kids run and laugh and play.  We end the night with a bonfire. And it all happens IN THE STREET.  Which let's face it, makes it all the more fun because you're doing something that is normally off limits.

But I have to be honest.  Ever since Matthew could walk/run, block parties have become a lot more complicated and while I still look forward to them, I also feel a sense of dread. First of all, anytime we are even remotely near a street or parking lot we hold Matthew's hand.  He doesn't have an instinct for danger. But you can't really hold hands during the whole block party.  Granted, there are no cars in the street because it's blocked off, but our experience from previous block parties is that he will run down driveways to get to neighbors' cars or garages. A year ago, I remember thinking, "Gee...this is fun" as Matthew and I went in the house for the first time-out of the evening and the block party had only started five minutes prior. He has to take automatic timeouts if he runs and doesn't stop when we yell, "Stop!"  In June, I realized it was progress that we made it half an hour before we needed to take a time-out.   Secondly, when you have a "runner" you work so hard to teach them about safety and not going in the street.  And lots of kids will understand that this is a special party and that we can only do it on this special day.  I don't believe that Matthew understands that distinction.  Will I have undone what I have been trying to teach him? Thirdly (and maybe selfishly), it is exhausting and not relaxing to watch someone that closely for hours. I won't be shooting the breeze while my kid runs back and forth between someone's backyard and the street.  (Parents of toddlers can relate, I'm sure!)  You really can't hold a decent conversation with someone when you know at any moment you are going to have to abruptly leave. And there's always that bonus danger factor of having a bunch of hot grills around.

Last Friday was our fall block party.  It started around 4:00 pm and I felt a little bad that he had therapy until 5:45 pm, but a part of me thought, "Well, that's a little less time that we will have to be outside."  His therapist should have been paid double that night because she had to convince him that he still wanted to do therapy even though it was becoming more and more evident that he wanted to be outside.  That's where all the action was.  At the beginning of the block party Matthew and I did spend some time in a neighbor boy's backyard...just the two of us.  We spent some time visiting the garbage cans that were being used to hold the block party sign to block off the street.  And we did make a few attempts to lead adults by the hand to their garages.  BUT...besides that we rode our scooter in the street (okay...we were attempting to ride it on the curb, but go with me here.), went up to the table and ate taco dip (with some prompts not to double dip), and rode a neighbor girl's tricycle up and down the street.  We didn't run down driveways. We didn't get in cars.  We didn't go in garages.  We were staying at the block party! After dinner, when the sun started going down, he was content to do what he often does in our house...he walked around in big circles on his tiptoes, verbally stimming (repeated vocalizations) and flapping his face with the end of his toy microphone. And you might not believe this part, but I actually sat down!  (Now you need to know that Matthew signed for me to sit down and you might know from Mr. Bossypants that he likes to tell people what to do.)  I can't explain how I know this (mother's intuition?) but I believe that he wasn't just being bossy this time.  I think he was telling me two things:  1.  He was asserting his independence  2.  He was reassuring me that he wasn't going to run.

Another confession...usually on block party nights we take him in right at his bedtime or even before (even though most kids are staying up way past their bedtime), because as I mentioned it's exhausting.  But at this block party we let him stay up past his bedtime, because he was doing such a good job.  One of the funniest parts of the night came after Rob took him inside to put him to bed.  Someone points to one of our upper level windows.  "Hey, look it's Matthew."  The thing is if we can see him in the window, that means he is kneeling on his dresser.  Before we knew it, he had gotten up off his knees and was standing on his dresser. All you could see was a black silhouette perfectly framed in the window...a boy, wishing he was still at the block party.  I called Rob on his cellphone and said, "Did you know your son is on top of his dresser."  The whole block erupted in laughter as we could tell the moment that Rob opened Matthew's bedroom door...the silhouette jumped hastily and guiltily.

Now that you have read this I think you'll understand and hopefully not think I'm too crazy if I decide to suggest to our neighbors that we try something new... a winter block party! Just think, there could be snow forts, snowmen, snowball fights, a fire pit and hot chocolate.

Note:  Prior to this block party, we did build into his therapy sessions a social story about block parties.  A social story is a way to teach him about a social situation and expected behavior.  His therapists read it to him every session for about three weeks leading up to the party.  I don't know if that was what helped this block party be a success, but I have to believe that it definitely didn't hurt.


                                           

True Colors

But I see your true colors

Shining through

I see your true colors

And that's why I love you

So don't be afraid to let them show 

Your true colors

True colors are beautiful 

Like a rainbow

I smiled as I heard the familiar 80's tune playing from my phone.  Matthew had signed and asked to use my phone.  This was progress since he used to just take my phone. Progress that was helped by a locked screen, mind you.  The phone is not as much fun when you can't get into it!  One of his favorite things to do is to play music from my iTunes.  True Colors is one of his latest favorite songs to play.

While the rest of the song doesn't necessarily fit, I feel like the chorus could be Matthew's theme song.  The songwriters, Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly didn't know Matthew when they wrote it. He wasn't even born yet! But when I hear that part of the song I feel like it was written just for him.

Matthew's True Colors:

Red

Red is for his charismatic personality.  He has a way of winning people over.  There's something endearing about the way he can get people to do just what he wants without speaking a word.  He takes a person's hand in his and somehow has a way of making that person feel special...that he chose them to hold his hand. Once that person feels special, they are like putty in his hand.  A friend of ours was watching him for us one day after school last year.  She sent me a picture of him in the baby swing at the park. I laughed and asked her, "How did you get him in there?  He's too big!"  She said, "Well, he really wanted to go in that swing." He can get the grandmas and grandpas to do all kinds of things from scratching his head and his back to swinging him from his ankles, just by being charming.

 Orange

Orange is for his love of vacuums.  If you read, Whatever it Takes, you already know that he loves vacuums. I don't think he has met a vacuum that he didn't like.  There's a lot to love about vacuums; the rumbly sound, the slightly dusty smell, the feel of the air on your hands or face, the plastic to tap and the bumpy hoses to feel, etc.  At Meet Your Teacher night, his new second grade teacher showed Matthew the vacuum she had bought just for him.  The vacuum that he would be allowed to use on the classroom rug at the end of the day. (I would say his teacher knows something about winning people over too.) At school, he works to be able to watch the custodian use the vacuum or the floor cleaner (that's an extra special treat).  There's a neighborhood Chinese restaurant that we used to go to and we would have to hold his hand extra tight when coming and going because he knew right where they kept their vacuum cleaner.  One day, we were at a local department store and there was a worker vacuuming.  Matthew had to sit down (criss cross applesauce) right there and watch him.  This month we bought a new vacuum cleaner and almost every day he asks me to vacuum when we get home from school. My floors have never been so clean!

Yellow

Yellow is for his love of music.  Both on his ipad and my phone he will sit and pick music on my iTunes.  He creates his own slideshows by picking a song and then going into the photos and looking through them. That is one of the reasons why I have so many pictures on my phone!  Right now he is sitting next to me on the porch playing a video clip of Lady Antebellum in concert.  He is playing it over and over and I think he likes the extra hooting and hollering of the fans.  He will also select apps because he likes the music playing in the background.  He will hold my phone up to his ear and listen very intently.  He is obviously not too picky about his music though, because he will still ask me to sing to him.  Abby and Rob can vouch that I can't sing, but Matthew doesn't seem to care.

Green

Green is for his love of jumping.  Ever since he could walk he has loved to jump!  He also jumps when he is super excited about something.  (After the store worker moved to another section of the store, but still within earshot, Matthew looked like a jumping bean. If jumping beans squealed and flapped, that is.) During therapy he is still able to get his therapists to "jump him".  He faces his back to them and they pick him up at the waist and jump him into the air.  It is definitely an upper body work-out for them, but there's going to come a day when they just can't physically lift him anymore.  The week before school started we tried out Helium, which is a trampoline park.  The place was something out of his dreams, I'm sure.  There's no doubt that we will have to go back.  A couple weeks ago we went on a bike ride, with me pedaling and Matthew in the ride along carrier.  I swear I didn't pick this route to torture him, but we went past a festival and they had about 3 different bouncy areas and then we passed four different block parties, and they all had bouncy houses.  I thought he was going to burst out of his skin!  He signed "jump" at me the rest of the day.

Blue

Blue is for his sensory seeking ways.  Touching:  tapping garbage cans, wastebaskets, walls, orange cones, the inside of the freezer, boxes, coffee cups, etc., scratching box lids, bottoms of slippers, lids to coffee cups, the sides of the car, etc., pounding walls, doors, wastebaskets, garbage cans, etc., stimming by flapping his face with a kleenex, paper towel, receipts, his microphone with a plastic piece that hangs down, etc., Hearing: most of the touching from above creates sounds, music, the vibration of the car when the window is rolled down, shaking things to make noise, etc.  Smelling:  things before he eats them, Daddy's coffee, Mama's tea, bottoms of shoes and slippers, flowers, things made of plastic, rubber, wood, cardboard, etc.

Purple

Purple is for his ability to problem solve.  An overturned wastebasket makes a tall stool. We find these right under closet doors with latches.  Luckily for us, he has not figured out how to undue that particular latch...yet. In the laundry room he will overturn laundry baskets to get cleaning wipes on the shelves above the sink.  Just today he wanted to get into the basement (which was latched).  He stood on a giant package of toilet paper and this was the kind of latch he can undue.  Fortunately, he was caught red-handed by Daddy.  One night at dinner, Abby went into the kitchen to get something and when she returned she exclaimed, "Why do I have more green beans now?"  We looked at Matthew's plate and he didn't have ANY on his plate.  Pretty clever.  If she would have been a green bean lover, she probably wouldn't have even noticed.  As I mentioned in another post, he will make up signs for words if he doesn't know the sign. Then he consistently uses that sign to stand for that word.  That takes some huge problem solving skills.

I know that he is at an age where his classmates and peers still accept him, because that's how they have always known him.  As Abby often says, "That's just Matthew."  But I'm sure there will come a time when someone will say something to him or make fun of him for the behaviors and loves mentioned above.  I won't always be there to stop it or defend him, but maybe if I can keep reminding him of these words...

But I see your true colors

Shining through

I see your true colors

And that's why I love you

So don't be afraid to let them show 

Your true colors

True colors are beautiful 

Like a rainbow

Knock on Wood

As a kid I think my beliefs in superstitions were pretty typical.  My friends and I would be huffing and puffing by the time the car passed the end of the cemetery and we could finally let out our breath.  It makes me laugh to see Abby and her friends do the same thing now.  I remember sitting in our backyard searching and searching for that one magical four leaf clover.  And of course I jumped from sidewalk square to sidewalk square...wouldn't want to break my mother's back!  It seems disgusting now, but I remember having a keychain with a green rabbit foot .  I'm sure I won it at a school fun night. 

With maturity and age my superstitious beliefs lessened as I became a teenager/young adult.  I would find that I still needed to throw a penny and make a wish in a "wishing well" (aka any pool of water where there was already coins).  Pennies found had to be picked up, because "Find a penny, pick it up, all day you'll have good luck."  At my wedding I made sure to include something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.  Although I might have cheated a little on that one, because my mom's garter covered three of the categories.  

That brings us to today.  I might be caught using expressions like "knock on wood" or "I'll cross my fingers for you".  A few months ago, Abby and I did save a wishbone to see who would get the biggest piece.  But other than that I can't be considered too superstitious...I mean I have two black cats for goodness sake!

However, I realized I have created my own little superstitions when it comes to Matthew.

They don't last long, especially when the pattern gets broken.  Just this week a new superstition was formed.  Matthew has a communication notebook with a behavior scale (1= I can do better  2 = OK  3 = Great)  for the morning and the afternoon.  Daddy tells him in the morning, "I want 3's.  Give me 3's" and Matthew will hold up three fingers.  On Monday morning he had a big bowl of hot cereal.  It's super healthy except for maybe the spoonful of brown sugar.  I'm sure the reason he loves it is because of the brown sugar, but to his credit he eats the whole bowl.  That day when he got home from school he had a 3 for the morning and a 3 for the afternoon with an extra comment of Great Day!  

The next morning he requested the hot cereal.  Normally, I'm a little picky and won't let him have the same thing two mornings in a row, because I don't want him to get stuck on only eating certain foods.  But I thought about how he had such a great day and thought "why not?", maybe it's the big, nutritious breakfast he had.  Guess what?  3's on Tuesday.  Hot cereal on Wednesday morning.  3's on Wednesday.  Hot cereal on Thursday morning.  3's on Thursday.  Hot cereal this morning.  A 3 and a 2.  The pattern is broken...guess we'll be eating something else for breakfast tomorrow!

Probably the thing that causes my brain to want to make up superstitions is Matthew's erratic sleeping patterns.  Not sleeping through the night is a fairly common problem in the autism world.  When he sleeps through the night, I think to myself, "What did we do right before bed?  What was different about this night then say the night he wanted to party at 3 am?"  For awhile I was convinced that it had to do with who put him to bed.  I thought that if Rob put him to bed, the reason he would wake up was because I hadn't sang to him or played music for him, etc.  But then Rob had a couple of successful nights in a row and that threw my theory out the window.  Matthew likes to go to sleep with the overhead light on.  I started to think that maybe leaving it on all night versus turning it off when we went to bed was the ticket. But truly there doesn't seem to be rhyme or reason to his sleepless nights.  One of these days I will probably learn to live with the fact that some things just don't have an answer.

I will tell you this though; if there was something I could do that would guarantee to stop him from being a runner,  I would do it in a heartbeat.  Matthew going missing or getting hit by a car are my biggest fears, ones I live with everyday. (Yes, this will be a blog post someday.)  I would wear my pajamas inside out, jump over holes, make sure all pennies were right side up, kiss an onion when I woke up, etc.  Anything. 

But until I figure out what that magic trick is I will just have to post this, because do you know what I realized?  Right now I have 13 blog posts and you know what they say about the number 13...

                                       

Did You Know?

From time to time I will get the question of whether we knew Matthew had autism when we adopted him.  In fact someone just asked me that this week.  If you read Mama Bear...GRRR...  or knew us at the time of his adoption, you might already know the answer, but I still think you will find his adoption story interesting.

After we had been back from China with Abby for about three years, we decided we wanted to go back to China to get her a sibling.  We assumed that it would be a girl because from our experience the majority of adoptees from China were girls. *  We started the process the same way we did with Abby, in what is called the standard process.  Every month our adoption agency would send an email that would have updates on wait times from when dossiers (crazy amount of paperwork) were sent to when matches were being made. When we were waiting for Abby those emails were so exciting to get, because each month we knew we were getting closer to receiving a match.  However, we had the opposite experience during our second adoption in that we began to dread those emails.  Every time we would read them, the wait time to match would increase.  At a certain point we realized that if the wait time kept increasing (and there was no indication that it was going to decrease) we were looking at a four year waiting period.  That was not our plan.  We didn't want our kids to be that far apart in age.

We got information on adopting children with special needs and decided to switch over to that process. (I made that decision sound easier than it was.)  You might wonder why we didn't just switch to adopting from a different country.  For one, it really wasn't that simple. Payments that we had already made were not necessarily refundable and every country has its own set of rules about what needs to be in their required dossier.   Therefore it felt like it would almost be like starting over. We had already invested too much time and money into the process.  Secondly, we really wanted our two children to be from the same country.  We had a great support system with a group called Milwaukee Area Families with Children From China and Cricket Academy (where Abby took Language and Culture classes). We wanted our children to have the same cultural background as each other. We thought they might be able to have that bond with each other as they got older and had questions about their cultural identity.

One of the things that we had to do when we switched over to the special needs process is fill out a checklist.  The checklist had a list of different types of special needs and you had to check Yes, No, or Maybe on whether you were able to handle that type of special need.  Believe me, this was not an easy process.  It was not lost on us that if were able to have children naturally, we wouldn't have a choice on what we could handle.  We would have to live with the cards we were dealt.  But this was the process that was set up.  A good example that I can think of is that some medical issues require a financial obligation such as surgeries that some families might not be able to afford.  Rob and I spent a lot of time filling out this checklist. We had to look up lots of different conditions because there were so many that we had never even heard of before.  As we all know, many conditions have a range from mild to severe, so even that could be a factor when choosing between a Yes and a No or a Maybe.  I want to repeat that this was not an easy process.

After completing the checklist and other forms that we needed for the specials needs program we were surprised at how fast we got a referral.  With both the standard program and special needs program you have the opportunity to accept or reject the referral.  I have never heard of anyone rejecting a standard referral, but it is more common in the special needs process for some of the reasons I mentioned above.  We had one referral that we were considering that somehow by mistake had been referred to another family at the same time.  That was difficult because we had decided to accept the referral and then found out the other family had already accepted it.  I know it might be hard to understand, but as soon as you think that child is going to be yours, you already have a connection to him/her.  But then we got a referral for a little boy named Zhang Li (approximately 18 months old).  So, did his paperwork have the label of autism?  Did we know when we got his referral that he had autism? His paperwork had a label of growth delay.  He was extremely small in both height and weight...under the 3rd percentile for both.  His paperwork also indicated some developmental delays (not walking or even crawling and not talking) without a specific cause.  There was no mention of autism and I suspect that the orphanage and others involved in his care did not know that he had autism at that time.

No one has ever been brave enough to ask the follow-up question:  If you did know that he had autism would you have accepted the referral?  (Admit it, you were wondering it...) I am not trying to cop out with this answer, but I don't know.  I don't know if we marked Yes or Maybe for that condition on the checklist. I don't know if we would have let stereotypes, perceptions, and even my personal experiences as a special education teacher affect our decision.  Very possibly.   But I will tell you this:  I am glad that we didn't know. What if knowing would have caused us to say "No"?  We would have missed out on having this amazing, funny, happy kid in our lives.   That is something I can't imagine.


* Without going in depth into the politics involved surrounding the One Child Policy, I do want to say that we did extensive reading  before we adopted Abby.  The book Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son: Abandonment, Adoption and Orphanage Care in China by Kay Ann Johnson helped us to understand why there are more girls put up for adoption and clear up some of our misunderstandings of the situation.   The Book Summary (click here if interested) on Amazon gives a good description of the book.

Good Kind of Heat

You sometimes hear people talk about the “good kind of heat” versus the “bad kind of heat”.  The “good kind of heat” is a dry heat...it feels good on your skin. It’s the kind of heat that makes you want to lay on the beach.  The “bad kind of heat” is high humidity and makes you sweat buckets when you set foot in it.  

Eleven years ago we landed in Guangzhou, China.  We were there to adopt our first child, Abby.  The particular flight that we were able to get had us land in Guangzhou and then take a connecting flight to Beijing.  We got off the plane and found out that we would need to take a shuttle over to the terminal where we would be catching our second flight.  About fourteen hours earlier we had left O’Hare airport in Chicago and the weather was typical early fall weather with mild temperatures. So when we exited the airport to take the shuttle we were unprepared for the air that hit us. It was only 5 in the morning and it was still dark out, but the air was so humid.  Immediately we started to drip and we couldn’t move without feeling like hot, wet towels were being wrapped around us.  It was even hard to breath.  If you were thinking the shuttle would be air-conditioned, think again.  For all intensive purposes it would be put in the “bad kind of heat” category.  

But...whenever I feel that icky, muggy type of weather, which most summers we have many days of (this summer is abnormal)...I am taken back to that day.  That day when we first landed in China and were just days away from being parents!  A dream that we had had for several years by that point. We had made it through our home study, getting fingerprinted (more than once), getting our passports, answering completely hard questions for non- parents to answer on the Parenting Questionnaire (i.e. What will you do if your teenage daughter tells you she is pregnant?), answering embarrassing questions on the Marriage Questionnaire (i.e. What do you fight about?), writing about our growing up years, etc. We had put together our whole dossier (fancy word for a ton of paperwork) and gotten things notarized and then certified.  We also had survived the delay during the SARS outbreak in China that happened right about when we were expecting to get our match.  It turned out the delay was only about a month, but at the time we didn’t know how long the delay would be: days??? weeks??? months??? years???... it was the uncertainty that was so hard.  

We had survived all of that and we were HERE!  We made it to Beijing, where it was not as hot and humid as it had been in Guangzhou.  As part of the adoption process they had us spend several days in Beijing to learn more about the country and have an appreciation for the culture.  Finally on September 2nd we flew to Changsha.  We got to our hotel and were told that we would be meeting our child later that afternoon.  Our stomachs were tied in knots!  Several hours later they had us come to a meeting room in the hotel.  Due to the SARS delay, they were trying to catch up on adoption cases so our adoption group was HUGE...17 families! Representatives from our adoption agency were trying to have us fill out paperwork.  All of us were so distracted by the fact that the babies might be in the hotel that we were not very good listeners and had to have them repeat the directions a lot.   Imagine our surprise when our names were called first to get Abby.  I nervously went up to the orphanage workers and gave them a gift for caring for her these past 9 months.  The gift was really more of a token, because how do you truly thank someone for caring for your child during those critical first months?  I remember holding her and she was snuggled into me and it was the best feeling in the world.  And I will never forget (nor will Rob) when Abby put her hands out to him, asking for him to take her.  In that single moment, she had won him over!

So, I think you’ll understand now why even though the weather that day was brutal and sticky...I will always think of it as the “good kind of heat”.