It’s a different kettle of fish raising this set of little ones. Thirty years ago, back when my first were small, things were unlike today. There are plenty of differences, some deep and profound, others simply life happening: I’m older, the Hubble has come and gone, times have changed, Bill Gates grew up and did stuff, we’re living in another hemisphere, blah, blah, blah.

Just how separate and distinct the world today is from the world of the late 1960s hit me upside the head this week like a sack full of North Carolina Commemorative Quarters when I learned that Barney... more

Storm, author of the Hoping to Adopt blog, recently asked, “How do you know when it’s attachment disorder or just a good match?” What a great question! To understand more about the dynamics of attachment issues and how they present, it is necessary to understand the dynamics of intimacy.

One web dictionary defines intimacy as:

A feeling of being intimate and belonging together.

Another... more

Yesterday, as I sat in church looking at my son, I felt a pang of sadness. For whatever reason, I thought back to the days before we knew our son, and thought about what that must have been like for him. Just a little background: our son spent the first ten months of his life in an orphanage. We met our son at eight months, but could not take custody of him until he was nearly ten months old. At least the eighth and ninth months of his life were filled with daily doses of love via our visits to the orphanage. But lately I have been thinking a lot about what he must have endured before finding his family.

I know that in his orphanage, there were many babies and few caretakers.... more

I currently don't wear makeup because

I'm lazy It's expensive I think my face actually looks kind of ok the way it is

Confession: I did go through a phase in high school where I'd get up at the crack of dawn to paint on a face, Picasso-like, from a huge case of cosmetics that looked like a tackle box.

In any event, reading about all the toxins, chemicals, and xenobiotics has been kind of freaking me out. Occasionally, I have to do TV appearances, and the camera people always flip out when I show up bare-faced,... more

When we first decided to adopt from Kazakhstan, it was because we were requesting a caucasian child. I am actually embarassed to write that, because our viewpoint absolutely changed shortly into the process.

Why the original limitation on race? Because we live in a small town in Kansas, and our children will attend a small Catholic school with few minorities. We thought it would be easier on our children to avoid race issues in a school where there is little diversity.

When our son's picture came with a group... more

I didn't realize that Max Levchin who co-founded paypal.com in 1998 was born in Ukraine. Too cool...

Around the time he immigrated to Chicago from Ukraine as a teenager in 1991, Max Levchin became obsessed with cryptography. Living under the old Soviet regime convinced him of the need to carry out communications undetectable by authorities. As a computer science student at the University of Illinois, he immersed himself in the mathematics of creating and breaking codes, not only making it the focus of his studies but also, he says, turning his pursuit into a "huge hobby" that consumed countless days and nights at the supercomputer center on the Urbana-Champaign campus.... more

At some later time, I will "get into" my very twisted fertility journey, but for now, let me start with my friend's :).

My best childhood friend had these strange symptoms--sudden attacks of digestive problems, awful awful cramps for which she needed to stay in bed for extended periods. She had an interesting family situation, so I remember our little group hanging out with her, bringing her and waiting at endless doctor's appointments. And when she'd have another bad attack, we'd bring her to the Emergency Room, or urge her to see her doctor, and wait wait wait again. She never... more

When we first met our daughter, she was a couple day's shy of her first birthday and had never had solid food. She was ready -- more than ready.

The breakfast buffet at the Chongqing Hilton had eggs and yogurt and oatmeal and cereal for us Westerners. Our young lady dove head first into steamed eggs and yogurt, but another thing she really went for was the Chinese breakfast: congee.

This is a rice porridge, usually served with some kind of sharp, savory thing on the side: pickles, preserved mustard root, salt-cured eggs, that kind of thing. A little cube of super-savory and a spoonful of soupy and bland, and you've got a great little meal going.

Making congee at... more

Continued from the introduction post...

We left off with the One Thing (the universe, I suppose) giving rise to two things, yin and yang, which are the two fundamental elements of everything there is. They are opposites, but not opposing, necessarily. And their presence is absolutely relative -- a mountain can be yang and a lake can be yin when looking... more

My lack of a husband/partner played a big role in my decision for adoption.

I grew up with moderately conservative parents, who taught me to believe that two-parent families were the only right way to raise a child. Back then, I too thought that if a kid didn’t have a father in the house, he/she was pretty much doomed to a life of hooliganism. During my pregnancy, I remember staying up at nights, scared that since I couldn’t offer my son a father, he would turn out badly, no matter what I did.

In the end, so much of my adoption decision depended on the person who wasn’t very... more