Noelle Dreams & Beyond

My new favorite CD is the Dixie Chicks' latest, "Taking the Long Way" - I got it in my stocking this Christmas from my dear husband, and I've been playing it nonstop ever since! It's so honest and soulful, and for me, tear-inducing at times. I particularly love "Easy Silence" (track 2), so beautiful in its melancholy and one of the best love songs I've heard in a long time, and "I Hope" (track 14), a bluesy, straight-forward, yet gentle call to action for creating more love in this world, reminiscent of Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On"... And their "Lullaby" (track 6) is just so sweet and soothing. I imagine singing it to Noelle, though Natalie, Martie and Emily's sound is so lovely that I should probably just plan to play the CD for her. :) If I was tech-savvy, I'd figure out how to play this song here on the blog. For now that will have to remain in the idea realm. I've been thinking about lullabies ...

So I seem to have missed the opportunity to participate in most of the June 2006 LID web community activities, e.g. "cybershowers" (not surprising as I tend to be late to most everything in my life, as many of you know;) . Of course we have been busy with our move and new jobs, and we really didn't need to add anything else to our plates. But there's one I truly regret missing, and that's the "swap" for the 100 Good Wishes Quilt. This is a wonderful Chinese tradition that Noelle certainly should not miss out on. If any of our friends or family members would like to get this started for her, I would be so grateful! I might actually prefer something like this to a baby shower since we've already accumulated so many things for her over the last year, and since I have no idea when it would make sense to have a shower (AND not knowing how old or how big she'll be)...hmm...still TBD. Anyway, if you're interested and would like information and ideas...

The following was emailed to my Mommy Forum on 12/31/2006... On the eve of a much-anticipated new year (at least on our end!), I thought I'd do another "lesson" for you:) This time I decided I'd write about the ever-growing wait time to try to answer any questions you may have. This will not be exhaustive by any means -- there are so many issues that affect the wait, many of which no one outside China even understands, so all we can really do is speculate and just hope that the wait will stabilize soon. As you know, we have a log-in date (LID) at the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) of June 23, 2006. We started the process last January, but as far as China is concerned, our LID is the only date that matters. So while we've been waiting almost a year, we're "officially" just over the 6 months mark in terms of the referral timeframe (meaning the time from our LID until we get matched by the CCAA with our child, i.e. referral.). This is helpful ...

The following was emailed to my "Mommy Forum" on 9/23/2006... The following article was written by Xinran, a Chinese author and journalist born in Beijing in 1958. Her parents were imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution when she was 7 years old, and she spent the rest of her childhood in an orphanage. She moved to London about ten years ago and began writing a regular column for the newspaper The Guardian. She has written two books, The Good Women of China and Sky Burial (next on my reading list), and two years ago she formed a charity called The Mothers' Bridge of Love (MBL) to help Chinese children living in poverty. You can learn more about this charity at http://www.motherbridge.org/ . By sharing this article with you, I am hoping to provide some understanding of the mothers that abandon their baby girls in China. ________________________________________ "It's different for girls: 'Do the foreigners who adopt our girls know how to feed and love them in...

The following was emailed to our female family members and girlfriends 9/14/06... Hi, dear women friends and family! This is the first in a series of emails I'll be sending over the next year to my "moms" (literally and figuratively). Most of the emails will be educational while others will be fun, informative emails about China's culture, history, etc. I'll include the men in the family on some of them, but I'll probably let you disseminate the majority of the lessons to them and let this primarily be my mothering forum. Why am I doing this? First, there's a lot to learn, and this will help me be diligent about staying on top of my education. You may be thinking that the parenting journey upon which Chris and I are embarking is really no different than bringing a child into the world biologically -- based on all the reading I've done, that just isn't so. While our child will be like any other child in so many ways, there are special considerations...