Two Weeks Down

Chris and I were a little worried when we pulled up in front of the house on Marcel's first day.  The kids were playing in the front yard and Marcel was slumped in a lawn chair.

"Uh oh, he looks tired," Chris said.

And he was.  The first words out of his mouth when we asked how his day had gone was that he was really, really tired. 

I knew the first day was going to be tough.  And the next few weeks for that matter.  When Oliver was really little, I had the opportunity on two different occasions to care for a friend's child.  I was honored my friends would trust me with their children and excited about my new role, but I'll admit that during the first week, I wasn't sure I was going to make it.  It was overwhelming to learn the schedule of another child and figure out feedings and nap times and how to get out the door with two kids.  And I was doing all this in the comfort of my own home, and not in another country with different customs and language.  Marcel had barely recovered from jet lag when he was given instructions in another language, the keys to a gigantic car and a nine-hour day to fill with a three- and five-year-old.

Marcel very quickly figured out what I have always preached to anyone home with young children - you need to get out of the house.  He takes it to the extreme, as I think the only reason they come home is so Soren can nap.  Otherwise, they are out and living it up as only a bunch of preschoolers would see fit - children's museum, parks, the lake, more parks, the zoo and if there's a bit of time left in the day, yet another park.  

Lakeside "selfie"

Since staying at home with kids can be isolating, I'm thankful Marcel connected with another German au pair who lives nearby and takes care of four boys.  The two of them have gotten the kids together numerous times these first two weeks for playdates and outings.  They fearlessly took six kids to the zoo.  Marcel described the experience as "easy."  He shows me the evidence on his cell phone - pictures of the boys standing mesmerized by the seals or videos of them playing happily (and quietly) together in the playroom at the other kids' house. 

My favorite story from their adventures with all six kids was about Marcel and his friend's impromptu tennis game.  They brought them to a playground that had a tennis court and after the children had a chance to run around, they herded them over to the tennis court.  The two young men sat them down on the sidelines and then got them fired up about cheering for the two of them as they battled it out on the court.  The kids were wild with excitement and cheered for the au pairs.  Can you believe the kids sat there for entire half-hour game and stayed engaged?  My kids reportedly got caught up in the excitement and were rooting for the other au pair, but when Marcel won, he got lots of cheers and hugs from Oliver and Soren. 

A first pump for surviving the first week!

Happy Birthday Neale!

He put his parents through an agonizing wait, but nine days after his due date, Baby Neale finally decided to make his appearance in this world this morning.  My brother, Scott, called about an hour after the birth and relayed the events that led up to the arrival of his first-born.  The afternoon plans they scrapped when the contractions started.  The wonder if this was "it" after two false alarms.  Road construction detours on a midnight drive to the hospital.  Twenty-eight hours of no sleep.

We talked about how surreal birth is.  Here's a baby you couldn't see or touch for nine months, packed inside his mother's uterus and now here he is, a brand new human being.  My daredevil little brother, the kid who once wanted to be a stunt man when he grew up, admitted he's done a lot of crazy things in his life.  "But wow, that was crazy," he said.  "And I all I did was sit there."

I'm glad to hear that staying up all night assisting his laboring wife and witnessing his son come into the world ranks up there with skydiving and driving from London to Mongolia.  

Clearly my brother is an adventure-seeker.  I promised him parenthood will be an equally crazy ride. 

Holding Pattern

When we were matched with our children, our excitement was dampened by the reality that the Chinese government had no idea that we wanted to adopt these two beautiful children.  That's because we couldn't actually lock the children's files until our dossier had transferred from our old agency to our current agency and that process took six excruciating weeks.  Until then, we were in a holding pattern - matched, but making zero progress towards approval.

Three weeks after we were finally able to lock our children's files, our agency called to let us know of a new policy (or possibly, a previously-unenforced policy) which required that families adopting two children submit a dossier "copy" or "mini dossier" for the second child.  This was such frustrating news to receive.  We had locked both files on the same day, so obviously nothing in our dossier had expired and nothing about our family situation had changed.  No matter how much creating a dossier "copy" to submit for child #2 made zero sense, there was no way around it - China was requiring us to update certain parts of our dossier.

I really almost dropped my head on my desk and cried when I heard this news.  This will end up costing us over $2,000, plus time lost.  We were back in the holding pattern and remain there.Without the mini dossier, China will not approve us to adopt both children.

We are also in a race against time, but in a race where I don't know where the finish line was.  China will use our original dossier to make their decision on approving us to adopt one of our children, but they give us no information about when they'll make that decision.  Meanwhile, they'll reportedly be upset if they don't receive our mini dossier by the time they are reviewing our main dossier.  Do you now understand why I feel like this process is going to make me go mad?

Because of an unfortunate timing issue, five weeks later, we're still weeks away from sending our completed mini dossier to China.  We needed a home study update to approve us for two unrelated children, which is simple enough.  We had planned to do this update at the same time our au pair arrived so that we'd only have to pay for one update.  However, the need for the mini dossier forced us to go ahead with the home study update for the two children a month before our au pair arrived.  We'll have to pay for second update to include our au pair.  But to do a home study update, we needed to have background checks completed again.  This shouldn't have been a big deal because we didn't need to be re-fingerprinted and I had already sent in the requests for Chris and me weeks earlier in anticipation of doing the update after our au pair's August arrival.  When I checked in with our home study agency to verify the statuses of our background checks, I learned that while mine had come back clear, Chris's clearance was still stuck in a "pending" status.  After a week of the two of us calling hounding one of the state's most dysfunctional agencies, his clearance magically came off pending. With the home study update complete, we could finally request U.S. government approval (I-800a Supplement 3), which thankfully came back much quicker than the first time we submitted our I-800a.

I thought I was finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.  We needed to notarize everything and bring to the secretary of state's office for certification (where they "certify" that the notary is legitimate).  I actually woke up giddy the morning I had planned to visit the secretary of state's office.  I had a mailing envelope ready so I could drive from there straight to the post office to mail the packet of mini dossier documents to our adoption agency in Texas. When I got into work, I saw the e-mail from our agency asking about authentication.  My heart dropped.  I had completely forgotten about the need for all the documents to go to the Chinese consulate in Chicago for authentication, where they verify that the secretary of state's certification is indeed legitimate.

By that afternoon my fellow adoptive mom friends on Facebook had pointed me towards a courier in Illinois (also a fellow adoptive mom of two girls from China).  The Chinese consulate no longer allows you to mail documents directly to them.  You must either walk them in yourself or have a courier walk them in.  I was feeling less mad at myself when I learned that I could overnight all the documents to the courier, who could have the authenticated documents to our agency in a matter of days, all of which would put us behind just a week.

I wish the story ended there.  After I mailed the documents to the courier, she called me to say that she didn't think the Chinese consulate was going to accept one of our documents due to how the document was dated.  Sure enough, it was rejected on this technicality.  If I was mad at myself for forgetting about the authentication process, I was even more mad at myself for such a stupid mistake.  We had to redo the document, re-notarize, re-certify and re-mail the document.  Meanwhile, we're still in the holding pattern where my resolve is starting to falter. 

Trash-Talking Among Preschoolers

You know Oliver and Soren are brothers by the way they trash-talk each other. "You can't come to my birthday party," Oliver taunts Soren.  And Soren has learned to dish it back with a counter-taunt of, "You can't have cake at my birthday party." The only thing that makes these exchanges almost cute is that they're the worst insults they're capable of throwing at each other.  Except it's not cute because the childish trash-talk usually results in yelling, tears and another sibling fight I have to mediate. 

Mediate I try as I remind myself this is one of those "teachable moments."  We talk a lot about treating each other with kindness and respect, which is one of our house rules.  I ask them how they would feel if they weren't invited to a party. I remind them that we show our manners by offering everyone a piece of cake, even when we don't want to.  With the build-up to "birthday season" at our house, I'm curious how well my teachable moments played out. 

Our Au Pair is Here!

After a lot of nervous and excited anticipation, Marcel, our new au pair, is finally here in Minnesota.  We are so excited to have him here, share our culture our culture with him and have him as part of our family.

As I wrapped up a couple final things at worked, I checked the status of Marcel's flight one last time and saw his plane was arriving earlier than expected.  His flight was landing in 15 minutes and it was a 15-minute drive to the airport.  A co-worker had offered to come to the airport with me, so we dashed out the door hoping that we could make it to the security gate before Marcel exited.  Unfortunately, we just missed him! 

His first impression of me was probably of a crazy woman running towards him waving a "Welcome Marcel" sign.  But ours of him?  He's as friendly and easy-going as we as thought of him during the interview process.  He kept telling us he was nervous, but he genuinely seemed excited about this year-long adventure in a new country.

Oh, and he's a light-packer.  Marcel arrived with a messenger bag and one reasonable-size suitcase.  Seriously? That's all?  I packed almost that much for my five-day trip to Washington D.C. a few weeks ago.  Whenever I traveled abroad for extended stays, I maxed out the weight limit for my bag...and then carried everything else on board with me.  No wonder my husband is embarrassed to travel with me. I had noticed in his application that he liked shopping.  Obviously he intends to take advantage of the favorable euro-to-dollar exchange rate and our proximity to the Mall of America.

After leaving the airport, our next stop was...the county jail!  This was not the Minnesota welcome I normally give people, trust me.  However, due to state and federal adoption requirements, all members of a household over the age of 18 must have background checks, and a background check requires fingerprinting.  So even though Marcel had undergone a background check through the State Department before his visa was approved and had only stepped foot in Minnesota an hour prior, here I was taking him from the airport to the jail to have his fingerprints taken so that the Minnesota Department of Human Services can check to see if he's ever been convicted of child abuse, so that our social worker can update our home study and write that he's an upstanding guy, so that we can submit the updated home study to the USCIS, who will want to finger-print him again, so that they can re-issue their initial approval to bring an adopted child into this country.  This is one of the more ridiculous things we've done in this adoption process.

Marcel proved to be the flexible guy we had taken him for when we interviewed him and didn't let on that he thought the experience was anything but the normal thing you do with your new au pair.  After our visit to the county jail, we walked over to the post office to mail the fingerprint cards and accompanying paperwork to our home study agency.  With our adoption-related tasks behind us, it was finally time for Marcel to meet Oliver and Soren.

We drove to kids' daycare to pick them up on their last day.  Oliver had been talking all day about Marcel's arrival, so he was super excited, but as I had predicted, Soren was shy.  However, by the time we left the daycare center, he decided it was okay to give Marcel a high-five.  Marcel asked him if he liked playing t-ball and when we got home, the first thing Soren did was drag his tee and bat off the porch so he could show Marcel his swing.  And with that, Marcel had officially broken the ice with the kids.

The rest of the weekend is being devoted to getting to know our kids better, teaching him to change his first ever diaper, letting him practice driving our "big American cars," learning the kids' routine and of course having a little fun.  Prior to Marcel's arrival, we put him in contact with another German au pair who arrived last March, so they're out tonight doing whatever 22-two-year-olds like to do.  Then on Monday morning, at 7:30 a.m., he starts his gig as full-time nanny.  

Renovation Week #4

Our renovation received another blow this week.  I thought we had passed all our inspections, but then learned that our bedroom windows are two inches too narrow to be a legal egress.  Never mind that the windows in our new master bedroom are big six inches wider than the single window in our current "master" bedroom. In a wise move, our contractor chose to break the news to Chris, (who's better at handling stress) who then called me, where I showed that my way of handling stress is to yell into the phone about wanting to send pictures of our ourselves to the city inspector to prove how not big we are.  

It's ironic we ended up with windows too small. When we were designing the new space, I kept pushing for  bigger windows because I wanted as much natural light as possible.  We're on a narrow city lot and with the houses so close together and a three-season porch on the front of the house, so we rely a lot on artificial light.  It looks like I'm going to get more even more natural light than I had hoped for - at least two inches worth. 

As for how to solve the problem of fitting bigger windows into a smaller cut-out in the framing, Chris and the contractor figured out a plan and even declared it an "easy" fix.  Then we're going to "recycle" the windows by replacing our dining room windows.  Ironically, the windows meant for our master bedroom are wider than the ones in our dining room.  But Chris and our contractor say they have a plan for that too.  I don't even want to know the details.  Once they told me they had it all figured out, I could feel my stress levels dropping.  First a waterfall in our house and now some swapping out a couple of windows - so far, still not so bad. 

Renovation Week #3: Officially Behind Schedule

We've only finished week three of a months' long renovation and I'm facing reality - we're behind schedule.  Sigh. Our au pair arrives in less than two weeks and his room, which was ripped apart during the construction of the second-floor addition, won't be put back together in time. The delay isn't totally unexpected since you can assume two things during a renovation - you will go over budget and the project won't finish on time.  However, just like adoption, where I thought we'd be the exception to what is a long wait for everyone else, I was relying on our renovation to not fall a day behind schedule.  I feel really guilty about welcoming someone into our family for a year and offering him an air mattress to sleep on for his first two weeks. 

Thankfully, our new au pair insists the temporary set-up is not a big deal. But then again, Germans generally are too polite to say otherwise.  Just as thankful I am for my brother-in-law and sister-in-law who have offered to put our au pair up in their home and provide him with such luxuries as a bedroom with a finished ceiling, a door and even a bed. 

As stressed as I am about this particular delay, really, in the grand scheme of things, our renovation is on track.  We've passed all our inspections, which means that after a lull in construction, the contractors are gearing up for the next round of work.  They'll finish insulation by the end of this week and sheet rocking by the end of next week.