Really pissed at the new Chinese adoption guidelines...
I just got this long e-mail from the director
of our adoption agency saying that, because the China Center of Adoption
Affairs wants to decrease the wait time for children, they are going to
make the requirements for parents more stringent (they're also going to
work some on improving orphanage conditions so that kids can be kept
alive long enough to be adopted - hey, THERE'S a concept...). The new
conditions will take effect for log-in dates after May 1, so *shouldn't*
(I hope - I just sent a message to the agency's list to double-check)
affect us - they include no single parents, body-mass index below 40, no
more than two divorces in the parents' history, and some other stuff,
all of which has me kind of pissed, but the one that has me totally
frosted (probably at least partly because it would include me! But I
think it would make me angry even if it didn't) is this one:
3. MEDICAL: CCAA will only approve parents who are healthy. They will
not accept any parent with any infectious disease, mental disease,
serious disease, or disability. If either parent is taking medication
for anxiety or depression, they are disqualified. If a parent has
experienced a serious health related problem in the past, he or she must
have been free of this problem for 10 years prior to submittal.
Of course, I've been on Lexapro for a couple of years now, so this would
cut us right out. The idea that this disqualifies me to adopt a child
just has me frothing! Like I said, hopefully this doesn't matter to us
(although I wonder how much the new policy reflects tendencies that CCAA
is already showing), but damn it, it shouldn't matter to ANYONE.
You know, the
more I've thought about it the angrier I've gotten...or
maybe it's just the more stories that have come out, the more I have
thought about all of the ramifications. The prospective mom who's
"only" 7 1/2 years cancer-free (has to be 10)...the single mom
who had hoped for her Chinese daughter to have a Chinese little sister
and feels like China is telling her she's been a bad parent that she
can't have another one...the couple who hasn't been married long enough
(that's one I forgot, that you have to be married for at least five
years) and by the time they are, he'll be too old...the list goes on and
on. Then someone posted to our agency's list that they had read a post
from a different agency that although most of the restrictions were
going into effect in May, the medical ones were going into effect
immediately. As you can imagine this sent me into panic fits (as Bob put
it last night, to find out now that we couldn't adopt a daughter from
China would be like miscarrying at Christmas all over again) so I went
to a larger e-mail list to see if I could find any confirmation of this.
I couldn't (and so far no one from our agency is confirming it either -
the same person said she had actually had a really reassuring
confirmation with agency staff that morning, but read this post and went
back into a panic), but I sure found a lot of people sniping at each
other! That made me angry too - yeah, the folks who say, "You're
not going to change Chinese policy" are probably right -
historically, nothing makes the Chinese government angrier than the
sense that the West is telling it how to run itself - but that doesn't
make the feelings of anger and fear and grief that people are having any
less legitimate. Thankfully, none of that is going on on our own
agency's list.
I think somewhere in the next few weeks there is supposed to be an
official announcement by the CCAA - so far this is all based on a
meeting that a bunch of the agency heads had with CCAA officials - and
then I guess we'll know for sure. I do feel kind of like I did last year
before we knew if the pregnancy was going to hold or not...I just have
to try to breathe and not panic. Although at least I don't have the
added stress of worrying about whether my stress is going to actually
cause a miscarriage! 
We're back from
Minnesota...actually, we've been back since late
Friday night, but yesterday I needed to recover and today we went out to
First Night Virginia for a few hours.
Overall, I'd say the holiday in Minnesota went OK, but it was TIRING.
Laurel got increasingly used to having her 3 nine-year-old boy cousins
around, but unfortunately the first real blast of cousin-ness was on
Christmas, so she ended up spending a lot of that unhappy in another
room (even in another room, it was pretty loud). We didn't get all of
her presents opened until the next day, but she seemed to like the
remote control ladybug, the "Stringin' It" (http://www.clubandrave.com/stringin_it_2.html)
and Hi-Ho Cherry-O, which is her first game - Aunt Marie gave her an
adapted spinner for her birthday (but it was backordered and backordered
and finally arrived just two days before we left) that she can run with
her switch, so I made up an overlay for that and also a felt cherry tree
with full-size artificial cherries with pieces of velcro glued to them,
so she can "pick" the cherries herself (no, I'm not this
clever, I found the idea on the Internet). Since the whole idea of a
board game is new to her, we've so far just worked on the idea that the
spinner affects what you do with the tree, but after a couple of runs I
totally think she gets it - to the point that she hollers in frustration
and/or tries to spin again when she gets too many bad spins in a row.
Once we get the box that we shipped our presents back in, I think she'll
be ready for the big time of playing against someone. 
Aside from presents, the highlight of the holiday for Miss Laurel was
definitely the Mall of America, where we went no less than three times.
The second time, we took her to "Underwater Adventure," which
is the overpriced-but-worth-it-to-see-Laurel-stare aquarium with the
tunnel that goes under the fish. Twice, we went. (They give you
wristbands that are good all day.)
Probably not such a highlight for Laurel, but a big deal to me, was that
we spent Christmas Eve with my cousin Shannon (who lives about an hour
and a half from Bob's folks), and her brother, Chad, was also up
visiting from California. Since my dad's family has always opened gifts
on Christmas Eve, and my family did too until I started spending
Christmas with Bob's family, it felt like old home week to be there with
my cousins for gift opening. Shannon and Chad even each got Laurel
something and
Shannon gave me a couple of nice framed pictures of my dad's family and
some pictures of my dad when he was little. 
Because we have for the most part celebrated Christmas with Bob's
family since we were engaged, mostly Christmas felt pretty normal, but I
had such a hard time drilling into my head that we were flying back to
Dulles, not Pittsburgh, and I wound up breaking down crying on the drive
home. Then like I said I felt totally wiped yesterday, like I just
wanted to curl up in a fetal position, and I did take a long nap. I've
been mostly OK today, although my fuse was feeling dangerously short
after we'd spent nearly two hours in my office trying to get Laurel to
chill out between First Night performances, and then her feeding tube
came out and there was formula all over her and me and it was looking
like we were going to have to go home right there. But we managed to get
things sopped up enough to go to the last performance that we'd planned
to go to. I think the favorite for all of us, though, was the first
performance we saw, which was (I am NOT making this up) the Rod Serling
School of Performing Arts Steel Drum Band. Anyway, so we came home about
7:30 or so, did a load of laundry and had dinner, and when I finish
typing here, I'm going to go throw in another load of laundry (do I know
how to have a good time, or WHAT? 
). And I think the rest of our New Year's Eve is probably going to
consist of Christmas specials, and after Laurel goes to bed we're going
to break out the sparkling wine and some cheese and crackers (goat
cheese for me - with my allergy to cow's milk, the goat cheese fad is
really working for me!) and probably break down and watch the ball drop
at midnight. And that's our New Year's Eve. So I think I'll go and get
to it! I just realized that I don't think I've posted a single thing
about Laurel all month, or much of anything other than grousing about
the new Chinese regulations (which BTW have now come out officially and
will NOT affect us - but the bad news is that rumor has it that it
likely be at least two years before we get the baby!), so I wanted to
post an update. I'm sure there'll be plenty to post next month after the
surgery 
but I wanted to post something from normal-land...
Happy New Year, everyone!!! May it PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE be better than
2006...