Memory Lane - Referral day

3 years ago, the first time I had seen her picture, 2005


2 years ago, 2006


1 year ago, 2007


This year, 2008

Very interesting Article

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=787542

Black Kids in White Houses
On Race, Silence, and the Changing American Family
by Jen Graves


KIM SCAFURO


After all this time, there are still things we don't talk about. It’s a century and a half after Emancipation and a year before the election of America’s first black president. This is October 2007.

The door is closed. There is a black woman at the front of the room, near the blackboard. She is facing a black man who is sitting down and talking fast. He keeps talking for a long time, as if he has been waiting a while to say this to someone. The police, but not only the police, treated him like he was a criminal. His parents, who are white, didn't believe him when he told them this, or if they wanted to believe him, they still just didn't know what to say. Why would they? They were adopting a black child, they thought—not a black teenager, not a black man.

When he finishes, there is quiet in the room, as if everyone is giving him his due. A young Korean woman goes next. She says she has tried to find her birth mother, but the Korean authorities have stopped her. She says she is working to end all adoption from Korea.

There is a young Korean man. He is gay. He is also transgender. He grew up in a white Christian family in a white Christian town. He had to escape. For a long time, he didn't talk about it. He knows he should be grateful, but here, among like-minded peers, he feels like he can really talk about it for the first time.

This workshop is called "Race and Transracial Adoption Workshop with Lisa Marie Rollins." Rollins is the black woman at the front of the room. She says that a social worker labeled her Mexican, Filipino, and Caucasian because people didn't want black kids. But she looked more and more black as she grew older. Her parents still said she wasn't black. She was. Finally, they admitted it too. Then once, as an adult, visiting home, she found a mammy doll in her mother's kitchen, in among the other knickknacks. That's the end of the anecdote. She's still basically speechless about it.

She says it is time to watch a video called "Struggle for Identity." In the video, people tell their stories, stories like the ones in the room. A black woman who was adopted by white parents boils it down: "Don't think you can make black friends after you adopt a black child. If you don't already have black friends, you shouldn't be adopting a black child." Then the lights go up. There are several white people in the room who have said they have already adopted black or Asian or Guatemalan children, or that they are right now waiting to leave for Ethiopia to pick up their adopted children. All of those people—the white people—are crying.

They are crying because they have heard things they did not want to hear. But there is more to it than that. They are also crying because they do not know how else to respond to the great, big cultural silence that has been broken here.

I t would be easier for white people if race did not exist. Or if everyone could agree that race did not matter, that is. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "transracial" first appeared publicly in a 1971 Time magazine article. The article introduced transracial adoption, or adoption across racial boundaries—most often white parents adopting children of color—and reported a strange phenomenon. According to a study in Britain, some white parents "tended to 'deny their child's color, or to say he was growing lighter, or that other people thought he was suntanned and did not recognize him as colored. Sometimes the reality was fully accepted [by the parents] only after the very light child had grown noticeably darker after being exposed to bright sunlight on holiday.'"

It's such an outrageous finding that it sounds like a joke. Stephen Colbert's dimwitted white-guy alter ego has a joke like this, when he says on The Colbert Report, always in the most ridiculous of situations: "As you know, I don't see color." The joke is funny because in so many ways it's true. Plenty of white people don't see color. We refuse to look at it, prefer not to see too much difference, because difference almost always makes us feel bad by comparison.

Transracial adoption is awkward to discuss at first, because although it is designed to chart a radically integrated future, on the surface its structure repeats the segregated past. Just look at the basic structure of a family and apply race to the equation. The most crude way to put it: Whites are in charge, children of color are subordinate, and adults of color are out of the picture. And that's not even talking about class.

And yet there are more of these families now than ever. The exact number of transracial adoptees in this country is unknown, but the practice, which began in earnest in the 1970s, has been on the rise for at least 10 years. Twenty-six percent of black children adopted from foster care in 2004—about 4,200 kids—were adopted transracially, almost all by white parents, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect at Cornell University and the Department of Health and Human Services. That figure is up from 14 percent in 1998 and, according to adoption experts, it has continued to climb. The 2000 census, the first to collect information on adoptions, counted just over 16,000 white households with adopted black children. In the last 15 years, Americans have adopted more than 200,000 children from overseas, but that trend is cooling off, partly because international adoptions are so expensive.

In spite of all that, a person has to slog through layers of silence just to meet someone else at the surface for a conversation about the topic. When Mark Riding, a black father in Baltimore, burst out last November on an NPR blog with a long narrative he'd clearly been waiting to tell someone—about adopting a white daughter, getting glares on the street, and trying to censor his own family's talk about "white people" at home—he found himself in a debate with another commenter, who told him repeatedly to "rise above the race issue" and talked about "membership in the human race." There's a silencer in every conversation about race.

But anonymous commenters can be great sources of information, because they'll write what they'd never say. On The Stranger's blog, I wrote about the woman at the workshop who said you shouldn't adopt black children if you don't already have black friends. An adoptive parent named Teresa took serious offense. Biological parents don't even get screened, she wrote. "My husband and I are white, and we adopted a 9-year-old Hispanic boy four years ago. The amount of training and inspection that we went through was incredible.... You don't know the whole story. You can't possibly. You aren't part of those families."

"P.S.," she wrote at the end, "It isn't that hard to get a white person to cry."

Teresa's comment was long, and it built to a climax before the P.S. Her point: If you don't silence these disgruntled adopted adults, then adoption policy could become race-conscious, and if adoption policy becomes race-conscious but white people still mostly aren't, then white people could be denied the right to adopt, and if that happens, then children of color are going to go without good, permanent homes.

Don't talk is the idea—it can't lead to anything good. All it leads to is shouting, and suing, and then, finally, resilencing.

Barack Obama may as well have been a transracial adoptee.

He grew up with white grandparents, without black role models. His Kenyan father and his Kansas mother were not constant presences. As an upperclassman in high school, he realized what it meant to be black in a white world and became sick with the particular loneliness of a transracial adoptee. His grades dropped, he smoked pot, he snorted coke, he came close to trying heroin with an acquaintance in a meat locker: In short, he nearly destroyed himself. To his family, he simply fell silent. "I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant." So they didn't talk about it.

In the world of transracial adoption, you don't have to look very hard to figure out why no one talks about this stuff. Federal adoption laws mandate silence. Social workers aren't allowed to talk to families about whether they already have black friends. They aren't allowed to tell families they might want to get some. Any of that would be seen, according to federal law written in 1996, as a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The 1996 law prohibits the placement of an adoptee on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Race does not matter, the law says. The American domestic child-welfare system is officially colorblind—or, more to the point, colormute.

There's one exception: The law doesn't apply to Native American children. A separate 1978 law governs them and says the opposite: that in-race adoptions are preferred. Both laws were written by people who said they had the best interests of the children in mind. Yet today, as a report released this past May by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute shows, Native American and black kids—despite being governed by philosophically opposite laws—both on average stay in the child-welfare system longer than children of any other race. Why are these kids still stranded? If one way of helping minority foster children doesn't work, and the opposite way of helping minority foster children doesn't work either, why are we still pretending one is right and one is wrong?

A doption has never been simple for adoptees, and increasingly, adoptive parents are learning that making life easier for their children may make it more complicated for them. Today, many parents acknowledge absent birth parents—always present to the adoptee—as a presence in their families too. For a transracial adoptee, race is like another missing parent. In fact, transracial adoptees hunger for heritage at a younger age than their white counterparts, searching for their parents on average five years earlier (25.8 versus 31.2), and looking not just for parents but also for a racial identity.

We know this because of a study cited in the 2006 anthology Outsiders Within, which is the first book ever to be written entirely by transracial adoptees and to include academic research, scholarly papers, memoirs, and artworks. It's a landmark book representing a new voice, or an old voice finally speaking up. Why did it take so long? Gratefulness. Gratefulness is the most powerful silencer in the adoption world. Even if a transracial adoptee breaks the silence to make a criticism about his or her experience, the immediate response always is: Would it have been better if you'd never been adopted? It's a rhetorical cul-de-sac, a false runaround that continues to stifle conversations about more complicated subjects, like what's the difference between a family that's tolerant and one that's actively antiracist, or why are there so many children of color adopted in the first place?

That old stifling question is starting to die.

These are the voices that are coming out instead:

"I can't be alone in thinking that being transracially adopted, we have lost something: lost our languages, traditions, cultures, and most importantly the subtleties and nuances of those cultures. We have lost something we never had, which we may not have even valued had we had it, and yet we continue to mourn. Am I alone in this grief?"

That's M. Anderson, writing in Outsiders Within. Here's Rita Simon, a researcher at American University who has been studying transracial adoption since 1968 (she's talking on NPR):

"What we find consistently is that the white families cannot raise a black child as if it was its own birth child. They have to make changes in their lives. In other words, love is not enough."

And this from the Donaldson report this past May:

"Two principles provide a solid framework for meeting the needs of black children and youth in foster care: that adoption is a service for children, and that acknowledgement of race-related realities—not 'colorblindness'—must help to shape the development of sound adoption practices." (Emphasis mine.)

The Donaldson report, commissioned by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, calls for a change to federal adoption law.

P am LaBorde, a Seattle pediatrician, is in her kitchen making black-bean burritos for dinner. "My white friends don't really get it when I say this, but I basically have these kids because of poverty," she says.

Her willingness to talk openly is surprising; I find myself wanting to silence her for her own protection.

Pam and her husband, Bill, both white, adopted two black children, Theo and Simone, whose mother, Amanda, lives in Texas. Amanda had to give them up because she's poor and has been dealing with illness in her immediate family. The semi-open adoptions cost almost $20,000 each. "Some of my white friends think there's something wrong with the birth mother for giving up her kids. Okay, she could have used contraception, but not everyone I know is perfect in that way either. There's nothing wrong with her. It's important that my kids know that. I've thought before, what if I'd just given that money to her?"

In international adoptions, the poverty of the parents is usually blamed on corrupt governments or bad political situations, Pam says. "But when it's domestic, we blame the parents."

The Transracially Adopted Children's Bill of Rights, by adoptee Liza Steinberg Triggs, includes this rule: "Every child is entitled to parents who know that if they are white they experience the benefits of racism because the country's system is organized that way."

Pam is the sort of person—maybe all self-critical parents (people?) are this way out of necessity—who can't help but believe in opposing ideas. She and her husband, who studied black history in graduate school, were interested in adopting black children "from a social-justice point of view." Both because more black children than white children need homes, and because the LaBordes believe in the civil-rights dream of an understanding and connection between different races of people.

A year ago, they moved from the lily-white Proctor neighborhood in Tacoma to the racial mix of Columbia City, and Theo, now in kindergarten, goes to school at John Muir Elementary, where the LaBordes are hoping to meet and befriend black families. (They want not only black peers but black role models for their kids.) Their adoption agency gave them a few tips about respecting black culture and sent them on their way. "It's not enough," she says. "Honestly, we could have gone and moved to a white gated community in northern Minnesota, and nobody would have done anything about it."

Some days, Pam does feel like moving to a white neighborhood, not that she would. Several months ago, on a bus in Columbia City, a young black man asked her whether her kids were adopted. She said yes. He chanted, "That's fucked up, that's fucked up." Then he told her that when her son got older, he'd get up in the middle of the night and kill her, so maybe the man would just kill her now, there on the bus. Another time, a black woman in a car yelled at Pam and the kids when they were walking on the street in Columbia City: "How does it feel to steal black babies, you white bitch?"

There are times when black parents or grandparents smile at her knowingly, or randomly hug her, or give her unsolicited help, but usually she feels nervous around black parents. "I feel that I need to do it right," she says. "I need to prove that I'm capable of parenting these children."

She gives herself only middling marks. Neither she nor Bill have close black friends yet. And they aren't Christians, so they can't join a black church. "It's complicated," she says. "It's only going to get harder as they get older. I think you have to be willing to talk about it constantly, and over and over."

I'm a moderate racist.

My personal data "suggest a moderate automatic preference for European Americans compared to African Americans." This data came from something called the Implicit Association Test, which is hosted on the website of Harvard University. The test, developed in 1998, is intended to gauge unconscious bias. It measures how long you take to answer questions (by keyboard) that ask you to associate faces of different races with good (e.g., "joy") versus bad (e.g., "failure") words.

This is the test that King County employees of the state's Children's Administration department are going to be taking, because Washington has a problem. It's the same problem pretty much everywhere around the country, and not a new problem either: Too many kids of color are coming into foster care and staying in too long. In King County, the Children's Administration is writing a plan with five parts, one of which is "staff development, which begins with self-examination," says director Joel Odimba. "We're going to train in knowing who we are." The five-point plan includes—in addition to soul searching—a review of policies, the formation of an advisory committee, and a possible Cultural Competency Center.

Those are pretty quiet, bureaucracy-as-usual ideas compared to the idea that made Seattle famous on this issue. In 1999, Washington's Department of Social and Health Services launched a pilot project that four years later became the full-blown Office of African-American Children's Services (OAACS, pronounced "oasis"). It was staffed with people trained to handle the particular issues of black foster kids, and most of the county's black kids were routed through it—blatantly defying the colorblind mandates of federal adoption law. Quickly, it was the talk of the nation, a test of dealing with race head-on in public policy, as if it matters. And it was invented out of a sense of desperation not uncommon around the country: In 2004, while black children made up 7 percent of the population of King County's kids, they accounted for 30 percent of the kids in King County foster care.

It was a stab, an effort, a start. But it got complaints. Its management turned over often, and it was criticized by the rest of the department. Last spring, just as OACCS's approach was about to be validated by new research—two months later, the Donaldson report would call for an emphasis on race in the child-welfare system—OACCS was killed. The federal Office of Civil Rights declared it in violation, and the state decided to let it go. The state's foster-care administration would no longer deal with race in a direct way. Meanwhile, the OAACS building would be renamed the Martin Luther King Jr. office—an apt linguistic elision. Now it operates like all the others, taking cases on the basis of where the kids live. You'd never know that a major experiment on the role of race in families went on there, and whatever it might have been on its way to learning appears to have been lost.

T here are not that many movies about domestic transracial adoption. In one, the 1995 movie Losing Isaiah, Halle Berry stars as a crackhead named Khaila who leaves her baby, Isaiah, in a trash can while she goes to find some crack. He's discovered, taken to a hospital, and adopted by Jessica Lange's character, Margaret. When Khaila cleans up and discovers her son is still alive, she wants him back, and a judge orders his return. But it is too late—the toddler is attached to Margaret, and he doesn't respond to Khaila. Khaila is forced to admit that Margaret has become her son's mother. The last scene shows Margaret and Isaiah reunited over some toys, and Khaila playing alongside them. A title card flashes: "And a little child shall lead them, Isaiah 11:6."

A little child shall lead them.

That phrase hits me hard. One of the reasons I was at that October 2007 workshop (at Seattle University), and that I'd been looking into transracial adoption, was to teach racist family members of mine a lesson. I had other reasons too—I've been debating whether to become a parent for a while—but this one was the most embarrassing. In my fantasy, I hadn't considered how exactly I would protect my child. The child was a means to an end, a healing agent: Want to rid your parents of their overt racism? Give them black grandchildren and defy them not to love them! Need to atone for your own covert racism? Adopt a black child and let him teach you!

Part of the genuine appeal of transracial adoption, it's true, is its potential to transform our culture. "I often think about transracial adoption as a grand social experiment," writes John Raible, one of the first mixed-race children adopted to a white family in the 1960s and something of a spokesperson on the topic.

Even so, children shouldn't be the day laborers on the job, says Chad Goller-Sojourner. Would you want your children to be the test cases in a grand social experiment?

"What I'd ask parents is, are you willing to be the uncomfortable one?" Goller-Sojourner says. This is how he'd question a prospective parent if he were a social worker. "Because somebody's gonna be uncomfortable, and it seems the burden is on you. You have to be the uncomfortable one."

He means that if white parents of black children, for instance, don't live in black neighborhoods, join black churches, have black friends, and send their children to significantly mixed-race schools, then at least they should cross the thresholds into black barbershops even though it's awkward, or drive out of their way to shop at grocery stores in black neighborhoods. Parents should be careful to raise their children to live in this world, not the one they wish existed.

"If you're buying a house and you have a dog, don't you spend more time looking for a big old yard for your dog?" he says. "Love is but one of many components of parenting. You're raising children to live in a world that may not be your world. If you go to the pound, they won't just give you a dog. There are rules. They'll say, 'That dog's not good for your house, we'll get you another dog.' But when you ask that question about kids, people freak out."

Goller-Sojourner is a performer. This summer, he put on a one-man show at the Rainier Valley Cultural Center called Sitting in Circles with Rich White Girls: Memoirs of a Bulimic Black Boy. As a big, gay, dark-skinned black adoptee of white parents living in white University Place outside Tacoma, he has had to explain himself many times, from many different perspectives, to many different kinds of people. He's developed multiple metaphors: the dog-adoption analogy, one involving a seven-foot child with five-foot parents ("It's not that one's better, it's just an acknowledgement of likeness or nonlikeness"), and one about lions and a gazelle.

"Let's say I was a gazelle adopted by lions," he says. "I pranced around happy until I got to first grade and all these lions tried to attack me; it's like they didn't get the memo. The other gazelles, they smelled the lion on me and didn't trust me, so I stood open."

He can also tell it literally: "The difference between when I got called nigger and when other black kids got called nigger is that they went home and got love, and I went home and got love from people who looked just like the people who called me nigger. As a child, you don't have the ability to bifurcate."

P hebe Jewell is gay. She and her partner, Dawn, adopted a boy named Isaac. He has the same mother as Bill and Pam LaBorde's two children, the poor woman from Texas, Amanda, who for the most part finds it too painful to be in contact with the children she's let go. Isaac, Theo, and Simone all live in the same neighborhood, and Theo and Isaac go to the same school (Simone is too young). When friends from school come over, they are often confused about why Isaac, Theo, and Simone don't live together. But then somebody explains it, and that's that.

Isaac is 6 1/2, the oldest of the three, and he is not a quiet kid. You can hear him across the aisles at a store. Phebe worries that some people will see him as "dangerous, a thug," but she knows that if he were quiet, he'd probably get teased as an Oreo. At his school, many of the kids are black. He comes home talking black, calling her "girl." It makes her proud, that he's getting black culture, black cadence. Even though she's white, she knows it herself, having grown up partly in the South. She jokingly calls him "boy" in return, but she knows she'll eventually have to stop herself, because of that word's old association with power and slavery, something Isaac couldn't know about now.

Isaac does know about slavery. He learned about it a year ago. Eventually, he used it against his mother when she tried to tell him what to do. "White people don't own black people anymore, so you can't own me," he told her.

Ingenious, she thought. That's my son.

O ver at Theo and Simone's house, they have just finished eating their black-bean burritos, and it's time to put on swimsuits and get in the car to go for lessons. Lessons are at Medgar Evers Pool, a place named for a man who was intimidated from voting just 62 years ago, who was on his college debate team, who married a woman named Myrlie, who had a Molotov cocktail thrown into the carport at their home, who was nearly run down by a car, who was shot dead in his own driveway—in the back—by a Ku Klux Klan fertilizer salesman who was not convicted of murder until 30 years later. Everything good that happened to Medgar Evers was because of Medgar Evers. Everything bad that happened to him was because he was black and refused to apologize for it.

Theo and Simone are sitting in the backseat of the car. Pam is explaining how she dresses the children carefully. If they were white children, she might dress them as "little Goodwill hippies," but she doesn't want black or white people thinking of them as poor maltreated urchins, so she dresses them up. Theo is wearing a white button-up polo shirt and glasses. We are driving past Garfield High School, where on Halloween night, a black teenager was killed in what police think was a gang shooting. Since then, black teenagers have been walking around the Central District and riding city buses along Martin Luther King Jr. Way in sweatshirts that say "RIP Lil Q" for the kid who died.

Theo doesn't know any of this. He doesn't know that he's going to a pool named for Medgar Evers. He doesn't know that there was a shooting here at this same place, another shooting of a black man. He doesn't know that this is my neighborhood, where I live, where I'm learning about the meaning of race, the moderate racist in the front seat.

He does know about Obama, though. What does he know about Obama? I ask him. He puts his fingers to his chest and says, "Black." Then he says, "White House." That's all he says.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TUKI !!!!!!

I can't help but watch and marvel as to what an amazing little girl she is!!! She leaves me speechless when I think how truly lucky and blessed I am to be her Mama.

Tuki turns 3.... tomorrow & FFF

EDITED TO ADD:
Email received this morning!!!
Good morning,

The visa of Ve is ready to be picked up.

Any working day.

Congratulations Ms. Aves

Sincerely,
Adoption Unit
American Embassy, Haiti

WAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



Actually tomorrow is Tuks official birthday...., but like I said in the previous post we celebrated birthdays and Thanksgiving yesterday with the family and her cousin N. She had a great time, ate much, stayed up late, played hard. We are both dragging a little today, but we need to get off our butts and finish cleaning the house since we will have guests from out of town staying over night tonight


Tackling the gifts


baby, she like to care for the babies


tractor, just like uncle W's


opening up the four wheeler with cousin M


Tuki and cousin N shared a cake with party hats, it was very cute and they loved it!!!



having a great time


eating her ice cream cake

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Tuks bed under the windows

Very busy morning thus far. My laundry is going, We put together both twin beds, cut the boards for mid-bed support (I won't be buying the box springs until this summer), made up the beds and Tuks picked the bed that is hers and the one that will be Ve's. She is most excited to have a roommate and sister. I have also cooked up the pumpkin for Tuks' birthday chocolate chip pumpkin muffins I am making for Angie's school on Monday.


Ve's bed to the left and Tuks on the right

I did receive an email from Marie yesterday stating to start arranging the time with GR, the person whom will escort Ve home. The visa just has to picked up.
So according to the travel plans of GR, whom I will call tomorrow to firm up the details, GR will leave Haiti for her nearby state on the 12th of December, so that is when I am planning that Ve will be home. Hard to believe, and EXTREMELY grateful. Ve's process has actually gone remarkably smooth and fast compared to other children's process in Haiti. I know, long compared to other countries, but short and smooth compared to other children in Haiti. I'm not sure why it has gone so well, but I am thankful for it.


All excited before we left to pick up some milk

Later today, Tuks and I will be getting together at my sisters to celebrate Thanksgiving with the family, and also celebrate Tuks and cousin N's birthday. Cousin N's turned 4, seven days ago, and Tuks will turn 3 on the 29th, so we felt this year it would be easier to have both celebrations at once.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving !!!!

Being grateful/lucky

I tell Tuks nearly everyday that I am a lucky/grateful Mama because I am "HER" Mama, and she is "MY" daughter.

So the other night Tuks says: I am lucky because of my kitty cats, puppy dogs and my Mama........ohhh so sweeeet to hear!!!

I believe in raising my kids to have a grateful heart for what they have instead of an ungrateful heart for what they do not have. It is a tricky thing, so easy to focus on the negative instead of the positive.

Yes, me too, right now I am STILL waiting to hear of Ve's visa, I have a cold so bad that my daily sustenance for the last 3 days has essentially been cough drops otherwise I'd be coughing out a lung all over my students. I'm not sleeping well, and I have been seeing a chiropractor for a bad back for over a month now.

But I also have a great daughter at home, my nearly never ending energy, even though low right now, fabulous family and wonderful friends. I also have employment, a roof over my head, heat in the house, food on the table, and warm furry/feathery lovable pets to bring smiles to my face, and Tuks 3rd birthday is quickly approaching.

Life is good, and I couldn't have special ordered a better life for us.

Here's to finding that thing that makes you grateful and feel all warm and cozy in the tummy!!!

Nothin' yet - hopefully today

Hoping to find out something more specific today, some sort of misunderstanding yesterday......it just is never easy, especially this end process.

I will try not to refresh my emails about 3 million times today in anticipation of the outcome.

Just for the record; Adoption is NOT the easier way to grow a family. I have had too many people share that they think I took the easier route when deciding not to go the biological traditional route. They just have no clue, and frankly I think they are the very people that would break down in the midst of this whole process. Let's just say, I believe adoptive parents have to have a toughness, and resilience that begins from way down deep within our souls, or otherwise we'd never survive it all.

We are getting more excited in this house everyday. Tuks brings it up daily as to what we will be doing once sister Ve arrives. I think we will be for the most part OK in the transition, because Tuks really wants a sister!!

11.24.08 7:00A VISA Time

The first night I met Ve, June 2007

Ve's visa appointment is tomorrow morning at 7:00 am. We needed to re-do the D-230 (not sure what I did wrong the first time), send in two more photo ids of me (I'm think because of my hair length and hair color changing so often, plus through in the mix of glasses and no glasses), and photos of my stamps in my passport as evidence that I visited Ve before January 2008 (when Ve exited IBESR). I'm extremely nervous since the results of these appointments have been a little shaky lately for some families. Wish us luck and please pray ......Thanks

TukiLogic on her sister

Me: so are you excited that your sister Ve will soon be home.

Tuks: She not push me (while shaking her head from side to side)

Me: No, she won't, but what if she does, what will happen?

Tuks: She go in the time out corner!!

Me: who will put her there?

Tuks: me! (while patting her chest)

HAPPY 4TH BIRTHDAY NIECE N !!!!!!!!!!

Whirlwind

Early last week I received photos of both by girls. They looked well, but Ve seemed to be less happy than I remember from this summer. Upon closer inspection I realized that Ve was located at the O site in Port au Prince and Mim was located at the O site in Les Cayes.

I wondered why...

Then on Saturday during my workout at the Y, it occurred to me that since the girls were at locations 5 hours apart, it wouldn't matter if Ve came home earlier than Mim, because Mim would never know that I had been to Haiti and back to pick up Ve. So, I became obsessed in attempting to contact M, the O director and let her know that I changed my mind about Ve coming home before Mim. I got ahold of her on Sunday afternoon, and to my surprise, at that moment Ve's paperwork was waiting to be granted a visa.

A VISA????!!!!???!!!,

the last step in Ve's process!!!! could this really be true????

True it was, but the problem was, since I didn't know we were this far along in the process, my paperwork for this end part wasn't in Haiti.

So I called Marie again Monday night, and then overnighted my paperwork on Tuesday scheduled to arrive in Haiti tomorrow, Thursday. Needless to say, my mind has been feeling like it is in a whirlwind. LOL

So remember my feeling on this post, I guess God was prompting me to GET READY!!!!

So when will Ve be coming home, well, I hope and prayer it is before Christmas.

Last night, I received an email from M, she wrote "hope to see you soon"

I say: Me too, Me too!!!

It would be sweet for the obvious reason of, yeah it's Christmas, but in addition, Christmas day happens to also be Ve's birth date. So wouldn't that be sweet!!!
I'll keep everyone posted.

Now this is bittersweet time for me, because my good friend, Casa de King, needs our prayers. Her process to bring her kids home has been anything but easy,
and she and her husband need to be lifted up for strength, peace and the mountains to be asked to move from here to there through the grace and power of our Almighty Lord.
Please help them out tonight in your prayer time to bring Lil Miss and Monsieur home. Thanks

Yet even more TukiLogic

This week is insanely busy at work and home. So I quickly wanted to blog a post with snip-its of more TukiLogic. She is swiftly exiting the terrible twos, and entering the terrible or sweet threes, I'm not sure which from any given day, but I can sure reason with her lately and that is fantastic.

For the last two days Tuki has been potty trained, yes even the poopies, so last night when she managed two poopies in the toilet at one sitting, she insisted I do the poopy dance twice, nice and loud...

Two nights ago we went to the flu clinic so that Tuks would receive her annual shot. As were walking in the clinic, we could hear a child of unknown gender screaming and crying behind a curtain.

I kept telling Tuks to just forget about the crying of the other child and reminded her that she was brave. It must have worked because she walked right in like a stoic little trooper. Held out her arm for the nurse, let it be prepped, and finally take the shot in the upper left arm. She watched the whole procedure and wouldn't turn away. She received her ball and crackers, then walked out of there with her arm sort of held high stating now and then "owie,....owie"

On the way home, just out of the blue, after a period of quietness, she said "They put a hole in my arm" I just smiled in the dark, and told her "yes they did, and you were so brave" Once home, she couldn't get her shirt off fast enough to examine the "hole in her arm".


This morning Tuks states "I a baby when adopted"

I say: "Yes, you are right, you were, do you know what adopted means"

She immediately starts singing the song I made for her; "firstname, secondname, thirdname, fourthname was adooopted from Guatemalllla, HOLA


So, she knows she was adopted, but not really sure what it all means yet.

TukiLogic

Tuks has been holding her poopies until either her nap diaper or her nighttime diaper. Otherwise she is in under ware all day on weekends. Never messes in them either. She still wears pull-ups at daycare, but has quit pooping there altogether and waits until the times I mentioned above.

Today's conversation:

Me: why are you pooping in your diaper when you know you are to be pooping in the toilet.

Tuki: It doesn't matter, I change it myself.

Me: yes it does, you need to poop in the toilet because soon there will be no more diapers, then what are you planning to do.

Tuks: poop in the toilet!!!

You see, what she does is quietly (in her bedroom upstairs) changes the poopy diaper, throws it away, cleans herself, puts on a new one and then acts likes she didn't poop in her diaper...Yes, I have a girl much too smart for her own good.

You know you are a mother when your conversation and writing material centers around poop and you have no real problem with it either. LOL

Saw-whet Owl banding & FFF

We, Kiki, Tuks and I went Saw-whet owl banding tonight. My friend W & R home school their 2 children, and they belong to a homeschooling group. It seems that W is the event and/or extended curriculum coordinator, and she planned this owl banding night. Fortunately for Tuks and I we were also invited. Three owls had been caught tonight. They set up a mist nest in a circle (sort of) around speakers that are broadcasting the mating call of the saw-whets. Since Saw-whets are migratory, many are caught, banded, data collected and then released back into he wild. They also do programs for the general public during the 2 months of banding to educate and also to raise some funds to continue the study. Tuks was pretty good considering it was late, she was the youngest there and sometimes she felt scaredy (her term) of the owls, even though we tell her she is brave, she does not always believe us.LOL


G showing the group the mist net. Very difficult to see.


You can see what Tuks thinks of the owl calls..could her eyes get any bigger?


adult saw-whet, the smallest owl native to our state and eastern USA


G showing us the ear size and location..nearly their whole side of the head is made up of the ear opening...the better to hear with


Up close and personal


Kiki, Tuks and an owl


Me, Tuks and an owl


the owl's release back into the wild

And who did I vote for this time around?? Well I am one of those voters that can go either way with each election. My two strongest issues are pro-life (tend to be Rep minded), but I am also pro-environment (tend to be Demo minded). This election,
after hearing Obama's energy plan, I just couldn't vote any other way..Obama all the way baby!!!!!!! So YEAH for change, and yeah for a step forward in making history.

Doctor Who??

Tuks talks about owwwies and shots on a regular basis. So much so she states she wants to be a doctor when she grows up. OK, I think good profession, well respected etc.,

But then I think to ask her do you want to be an animal doctor and help animals or a people doctor and help people.

She proceeds to tell me every time, no matter how I present it, that she wants to be an animal doctor.

At this point I am cringing since I know as a teacher, I make more money than a beginning veterinarian makes....thank goodness this is only a nearly 3 year old talking and her dream profession will change many, many times before it becomes a reality. Of course, if she sticks with this dream until adulthood, I will support her dreams all the way. LOL

Random Updates

1. Tuks had been pooping on the potty so consistently that I am letting her wear underwear on weekends.

2. On a daily basis, and often times during the day, Tuki makes the distinction between family and friends. When someone is part of her family, she says they are famoowlee. Her kitties are part of her famoowlee, so I have posted some updated photos of her feline famoowlee.

3. I have purchased the bedspreads for Ve and Tuks bedroom. It is cool because Target has various colors of sheets that matches the colors in the bedspread, so I can change it up a little as the girls request.

4. I still haven't found what I want for Mim's bed.

5. For some unexplainable reason, I am hopeful for the girl's homecoming. I try to remain distant from the whole process until almost pick-up time, but I am feeling like I need to be ready sooner than I logically think of when they will be coming home..Call me CRAZY!!

6. They were actually playing Christmas music in Walmart today. Now I love Christmas, and I love the music, but already today...now that is a little early even for me.

7. I had lost the fight against the land development adjacent to the woods on my west side. The trees are already down, 10 acres of trees, and bulldozers have been in there tearing it up for weeks now. I do have about a 200-250' buffer of woods between me and the bulldozers raping of the land and creating homeless wildlife before winter, but I am still casually looking at other homes with more space.

8. A question, why is it when someone is found to possibly do a bad or wrong thing, people immediately think the person is all bad, or if they do a good thing, people automatically think they are all good. People are imperfect, we are bad and good,
and the beauty of love and acceptance is to accept a person because of their good and despite their bad. We all make massive mistakes, we ALL do, yet some people can be so unforgiving and down right nasty if they notice a flaw in another. I don't understand this. Do you?



Ve and Tuks new bedspread


sMurph and Beatrice (she is almost as big as sMurph yet she is only 5 months old)


Hubble


sMurph


Beatrice