In China
All Days  |  Next Day

Saturday, March 9, 2013 I am writing this at 4am in a Changsha hotel room… so thanks to all of you who prayed for safe travels. (A few more of you could have prayed for “smooth” travels, but I trust that you were saving those for the flight home with all four of us… :)) There have been some tears already, but turbulence was not the cause. The cause of our tears is the reality of leaving four kids in Ohio while we head to China to bring two more home. We are incredibly thankful to my mom who is staying with them during the trip and a great community of friends and family who will be loving on them in our absence, but it doesn’t make the goodbye hugs any easier. While they are not in China right now, we are comforted to know that Abby, Adam, Mia, and Will are on this journey with us. On the day we left, Anne overheard Willie in the shower singing a song he wrote called, “Hi Sammy and Ellie. I’m your big brother.” While we hope to be good parents to Sammy and Ellie, the greatest gift we may be giving them is the four finest siblings on the planet. As I sit at the desk in our hotel room while Anne pretends to sleep in the other room, it is an interesting time to reflect on our journey to date. If all goes well, we will be meeting our children in ~8 hours. The journey to this moment has been an interesting mix of the incredible and the pedestrian. That second description may be surprising, but it shouldn’t be. I suspect that almost every great endeavor is peppered with a lot of ordinary days. Noah spent 100 years building the ark which translates to decades of sawing wood planks before there was even a drop of rain. We remember the championship games, but few of us appreciate the miles of running and time in the weight room that underpinned that championship. With this in mind… and likely on the advent of one of the most important days in my entire life… I wanted to showcase two examples from the last 24 hours that highlight the fascinating tension that exists in this process between the ordinary and the extraordinary.

Chinese people love to give the peace sign in photos. Sam needs some fine-tuning.

The Ordinary: Paperwork As almost everyone reading this knows, I have an amazing wife. (I know that you know this, because I do not have any friends of my own… just people willing to hang out with me to be closer to Anne.) What you may not appreciate is her herculean efforts to enable this adoption. While there are countless ways that she has helped to make this happen, one of the most important ones is in the area of paperwork. Paperwork is the “weight room” of adoption, and Anne has been bulking up for months. (If there was a steroid equivalent for paperwork, Anne would be under investigation.) At 2pm yesterday (which felt like 1am from three days earlier), Anne was sitting down with our very nice regional guide from the adoption agency to walk through the mountain of paperwork we would need over the next two weeks. The guide was impressed at how well organized it was… especially considering there was twice as much paperwork as she normally sees (see earlier note on “Twins”.) It would be difficult to grasp how much paperwork is involved in adoption. (Anne might argue that I would have trouble grasping it because I did almost none of it…) To put it into perspective for my work friends, I would say that the amount of paperwork parallels the paperwork required to launch a new Hair Care brand globally. I would try to translate this into terms that make sense for others, but I don’t think I could. Let’s just say it involves the following acronyms which each have their own related systems: SIMPL, RAMP, SR, PE, PC, LPA, TSCR, EPADEX, SQI, and PS&RA. (Those of you who do not work in Hair Care product development should now give an extra thanks to your local Hair Care R&D professional for the hard work that delivered that bottle of world-class conditioning to your local store shelves…) To be clear, that is the amount of paperwork required to adopt a single child from China. Now double it. (I have a feeling that the idea of “now double it” will become a theme for the next 2 weeks…) While adoption does not have the traditional labor of a bio-baby, there has been no shortage of labor for Anne to deliver these children. (And for those of you wondering, Anne decided to go “natural” with this childbirth… although there were times when she seriously considered taking drugs…) But interspersed with normal processes like paperwork are some moments that do not have a parallel in the “normal” world. Anne is also at the center of this example: The Extraordinary: Deadly Chinese Bed Bugs At one point last night, Anne asked me to look at something on her upper thigh. Under other circumstances, this might have been how we ended up with seven children… but there was nothing romantic about this request. She wanted to know if she was going to die. She then pointed to what appeared like a small bug bite on her left leg. Under “normal” circumstances, this would not have merited a second thought. But when you have not slept for 48 hours and are trying to acclimate to a strange city and new time zone, the possibility of deadly bed bugs seems incredibly real. I am happy to report that Anne’s leg continues to be attached … so we may have averted this entomological disaster. So there you have it. The last 24 hours have been marked by a strange confluence of the normal and the extraordinary. With the prospect of meeting Sam and Ellie just a few hours away, I suspect that the continuum is about to make a major shift before this day is done. If all goes well, the next post will come with pictures from our “gotcha” moment with Sam and Ellie. Since no one is interested in pictures of Anne’s bug bite, we have attached a couple of additional Sam and Ellie photos that we received earlier this week from a friend at ELIM. Thanks again for all of the prayers and guest book posts of encouragement. You cannot appreciate how valuable they are.

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