Will the real Jin-yeong please stand up?

Sheref occasionally makes fun of me for believing that the moon landing was filmed on a sound stage in L.A. Ok, I don't really believe this, of course. I merely admit to the possibility that the whole space thing is a ruse. And I only said one time, years ago, that I don't entirely rule out this possibility (I was kidding, for the most part:)...

The reason I bring this up is that I sort of have a similar theory, which I don't truly believe, about Holt-provided photographs. Holt is our adoption agency, a wonderful, very established, very respected agency. Which is why I don't really believe that the children in the above photographs are 2 separate little boys. I don't really believe this, of course, though when we received the second photograph, the thought may have crossed my mind...You see, for the first 2 months we knew about Charlie, we had 2 newborn pictures and 3 of the top picture (3 pictures, each from a different angle, but obviously taken that same day). I formed this image of him in my head, what he looks like, what his smile is like, the shape of his face, the gentle angle of his nose, the soft curve of his mouth. The second picture, while also super cute, just looked very different to me than the image I had in my head of what I thought Charlie is like based on the earlier photographs. I was so excited to get the second photograph, and of course I never had any negative thoughts about him looking different than I had imagined. It's just that when your child lives on the other side of the world and you have never met him, you are bonding with an image made by your imagination, based on a few photographs and a couple of pages of medical and social work reports.

Another mom-to-be, who is adopting from Holt, said jokingly that she occasionally wonders if the little girl whose photo hangs on their refrigerator (her new daughter, still in Korea) and whom they talk about on a daily basis, really exists. She was just kidding, but I know what she means.

I also have enough foresight to know that when we do meet Charlie, I'll be able to see both of the above pictures in his face. I'll look into his sweet face and his bright eyes and I'll be able to see both the soft, sweet little baby on the top and the smart, curious little guy on the bottom.

I have been uploading all our family photographs onto my new laptop, so I have been looking at all the hundreds of photographs I haven't seen in a while. Up until fairly recently, I could not tell Rose and Lucy apart in baby photographs. I have never had any difficulty telling them apart in real life, but until they were around 18-24 months, I could not reliably look at photographs of them and tell who was who. Now that I have known them for nearly 5 years, and know their voices, their faces, the ever so slightly different angle of their jawlines, the minute differences in their smiles, the way their teeth come together just a tiny bit differently, the very slightly different way their hair falls, so well that I don't even think about it, I find I can easily distinguish between the 2 in older photographs.

I know that when I meet Charlie and know him in 3 dimensions, in colorful reality, his face, his laugh, his mannerisms, I will look back and wonder how it is that I ever thought the 2 photographs above don't look the same. I can't wait!

Post-call musings of a tired Mama

So I have just finished a 24 hour on-call shift. I am very used to being on call, very used to working 24-36 hours straight with no sleep. I love my job, am immensely satisfied with my job, and have no desire to ever do anything else as my chosen profession. And if you call me at 2am because you are bleeding, or your baby is not moving or you are having severe pain, fevers, whatever, I will bend over backwards to make sure you get the most compassionate, most up-to-date, most excellent medical care I can provide. However, if you consider calling me at 2am for the any of the following reasons, please think twice about the best use of your time, and mine:

1) to ask if you are too far along to have an abortion (for any concerned readers, if there even are any readers, I don't do abortions...fyi)

2) to ask if you can ride roller coasters while you're pregnant

3) to tell me you think you have a yeast infection and could I please call something into your pharmacy for your life-threatening emergency yeast infection

4) to ask why my office called you 4 days ago and left a message that you didn't bother to return

5) to ask what causes headaches (yes, seriously, this has happened before -- the caller didn't have a headache; she was just wondering what causes them)

6) to ask if I can refill your birth control pills

7) to ask how you got chlamydia

There are so many more examples that make me laugh just thinking about, but I need to sleep.

Superheros and Girls' Night

Superhero day was a huge hit. Lucy loved wearing her Wonderwoman shirt, and Rose was equally as happy wearing a regular dress. Superhero day then morphed into "Girls' Night," which is what we call any evening where Sheref goes out and we girls stay home together and do "fun stuff." Sheref is at a Black Crowes' concert tonight with a friend. So for us girls, tonight "fun stuff" consisted of going shopping for a birthday present for Rose and Lucy's friend, who is having her 5th birthday party tomorrow, then boring shopping with mom for a purse ($18 on sale black leather Nine West hobo-type bag -- love it!), and finally to the cupcake store for a treat. Unfortunately, my children's eyes are bigger than their stomachs, so I ended up eating about half of each cupcake. I had to, right? Couldn't waste good cake and icing. Oh well.

Right now girls' night is culminating in dress up (I gave them each a old knit type top of mine to wear, so each girl has a "dress" just barely covering her bottom...Ella told me "Mom, we're teenagers, going on a date." Uh, say what??), combined with our family's (approximately) 98th viewing of Sleeping Beauty. Oh, and some Pinot Grigio for mama...

Tomorrow is Superhero Day at **A

**A is **Academy. Yes, my twins go to an academy. Well, ok, fine. It is glorified day care. With an organic garden, playground equipment special-ordered from Scandinavia, and Spanish class for all children over the age of 2. Which is wonderful, actually. We love the "academy," and our kids do too. The word "academy" just makes me feel like I'm trying too hard to be cool...

Anyways, tomorrow is Superhero Day. All the Stingrays (Rose and Lucy's class) have made capes over the past week, and tomorrow they are going to wear the capes. They can also come to school dressed as superheros, a theme that is straight up Lulu's alley. A few months ago, she whispered in my ear, "Mama, I think I'm just like Spiderman, don't you?" So this past weekend we went out and bought Lucy a Wonderwoman shirt for tomorrow. We offered Spiderman, but apparently her tastes have evolved.

Rose on the other hand, adamantly does NOT want to dress up. She has made this point abundantly clear. In fact, I suspect she has made this point abundantly clear to her teachers as well, because our weekly email "Stingray Scoop" included the specific statement that certain children have expressed that they do not want to dress up, and we as parents should know that is perfectly acceptable. Whew.

So tomorrow we have a Wonderwoman, and a regular every day Wondertwin. Wondertwin powers, activate!

Pictures to follow...

Final newborn picture of Jin-yeong, and some obstetric philosophizing

This is the second and last newborn picture we have of Jin-yeong. I love it that I know exactly what we were doing when this photo was taken. We were at Shannon (my sister's) house for Christmas. We were at that time making our decision to actively pursue adoption, though we had not yet settled on South Korea. How fitting that Charlie entered the world at exactly this same time.

The other thing this picture makes me think about is his delivery. As an obstetrician, I am particularly interested in the details of his delivery. From his records, we know that the delivery was vaginal and was at 41 weeks gestation. We also know that he weighed 3280 grams (7.2lbs). So he was the only one of my children who was term and a normal birth weight!! Was she induced? American obstetricians often recommend inducing labor at 41 weeks because the risk of stillbirth rises quite a bit between 41 and 42 weeks. From what I am gathering about Korean doctors, they seem even more interventional than American MDs, so my guess is that they do routinely induce at 41 weeks, although I have no proof or concrete knowledge of that. Did she have an epidural? The marks on Charlie's face in the picture (see them on either side of his cheekbones?) suggest to me that he was delivered via forceps, though this is not noted in his records. There is a space for "vacuum/forceps" in his records, and that space is left blank. If the delivery was via forceps, why? Did his heart rate dip at the end? Maybe she pushed for a long time with no success. As an obstetrician, it makes me happy for her that she had a vaginal delivery and not a Cesarean. I think this for 2 reasons. One (and primarily) is that it bodes well for the rest of her obstetric health. The first delivery going "well" (meaning a normal vaginal delivery -- even with forceps) paves the way for normal, even faster and "easier" vaginal deliveries in the future, thus avoiding the risks with Cesarean. Second, she has no physical scars from her experience. I can imagine that perhaps having a physical scar is a welcome reminder that she really did carry and give birth to a baby boy, sort of a physical validation of her emotional scar. But something tells me that not having that physical scar is better...

My fascination with his delivery is, of course, not just professional obstetric interest. His delivery was close to (or perhaps it actually was) his birth mom's last encounter with Jin-yeong. She had carried him for 9 months, made the decision to have him be adopted during her pregnancy (we know this from Charlie's records), and of course delivered him. As wonderful as we think adoption can be, I don't at all underestimate the connection that comes from having carried a child, and I don't just mean that from her perspective. There is no way that a baby doesn't bond with his mother during that time. There is just no way that he doesn't somehow, subconsciously, know that she is gone, even when he goes to a foster family at just 3 days old. She is a huge part of him, and therefore, of our lives. We thank her and wish her a bright and fulfilling life. We may even meet her someday.

Red Casserole

When I was around 5 years old, my mother, normally a wonderful cook, made something that would forever be remembered as "red casserole." In my five-year-old memory, it was a mushy casserole in a clear glass dish, with hues of red, purple, brown and green. My adult self thinks it must have been eggplant, along with other unmentionable ingredients. I recall it being the most horrible, awful, inedible thing I had ever been told to eat. I can remember gagging trying to eat it. Now, can it really have been that awful? Seriously? Probably not, although both my siblings felt the same as I did. I recall my Dad didn't care for it either. My mom swears we only had it that one time, but I'm fairly sure red casserole will forever remain in my memory as the most disgusting dish ever.

Which brings us forward thirty...um, twenty-some...uh, whatever...a few years to tonight. Tonight was my girls' "red casserole" moment. Sheref made a stew that to adult tastes was actually really good. Not so to the ten-and-under set. Rose said it made her head hurt and it tasted like dog poop. Ella cried 3 times. Both Rose and Ella spent an entire hour at the dinner table, most of it whining and writhing in agony about the horrible, disgusting, awful mass of food in front of them. Only Lucy, though still not enjoying her dinner and asking about 10 times if she could be done, finished her dinner with a minimum of pain inflicted on me.

So yes, tonight was a monumental event in Unal history. In years to come, Lucy, Rose and Ella will tell Charlie how lucky he is that he never had to experience "the stew."

New Picture!!

So we actually got this updated picture about 2 weeks ago, but it has taken me that long to figure out how to convert it to a jpeg to upload, and also how to blur his foster mom's face. Well, okay, I didn't figure it out. Let me rephrase: it took me that long to find someone else to do it for me! Thanks Rachel:)

The stuff in front of him is the care package we sent. Looks like he already likes the froggie lovey.

Charlie has changed so much! He looks so different to me than the referral pictures we have of him. In those pictures, he looks like a sweet little baby, soft and sweet. In this picture he also looks sweet, but he looks so grown up! He looks like a happy and fun kid. We are so excited to meet him...