Most recently things have been pretty relaxed. Peggy has tried to keep busy with work. She’s also writing many draft pages of her master’s thesis which she must complete by mid-May when we return. She will have a one-quarter leave from her job to finish her program at the University of Chicago, which will include taking two classes. I’m never as busy and productive as Peggy. Thinking we would travel in January, I took the semester on leave from my teaching job at Saint Ignatius—although I am still coaching our track team now in the afternoons and will continue to do so when we return. That’s been my busy work. There have been some things to do for the adoption, but I’ve also been using the time to do various things that I’ve put off or thought about doing—including digging into the backs of some closets.
I still have more of that to do, and less time to do it in now, as we’re about to hit another stage. The lunar new year Tet holidays are over in northern Vietnam, and we are told that the government officials in Lang Son province go back to work tomorrow—or maybe even today. As early as the next few days, we hope to get a date for our Giving and Receiving Ceremony. That is the official event in which the babies are given over to their adoptive parents, attended by government officials and, in some cases, by the birth parents. We will leave that ceremony with the babies in our care. All the other paperwork follows, and all the following appointments with the U.S. embassy get scheduled around the “G&R” date.
Once we get our G&R date, we also book our flights and hotels, and the ball really starts rolling. It can happen very fast, apparently, and the last days can be a rush. It is a strange thing to hope for, right now, that we could in fact be traveling to Vietnam in just over a week—without having made any travel arrangements whatsoever. It could happen that fast, and we want that to happen. Yes, all you planners who book ahead for lower fares must be asking, this makes the travel costs an issue. But we have made contact with a travel agent. His name is Todd Gallinek and I think he works out of Boulder, Colorado, where he specializes in adoption travel. He can get us something reasonable in terms of fares, with an all-important open-ended with no penalty return ticket, since we will travel to Hanoi without a firm date for our return. We found him through internet contacts and email groups about adoption from Vietnam. That’s been one of my preoccupations—reading emails and blogs from people who have already made the trip. If you are interested, here’s the address of another blog: http://www.avalinh.blogspot.com/.
The waiting has given us time to get comfortable with these kinds of details—including starting this blog. We’ve collected some packing lists from our internet friends, along with lots of helpful information about what to expect in Hanoi when we get there. We know what we can buy there (diapers, formula, umbrella strollers), and what we cannot buy there (bottle liners, clothes). We’ve had phone calls and emails full of advice from people who have already made the trip, like the Connors-Kos family who gave us the pictures of Lang Son on our blog. A parent of one of my students, a former flight attendant on international routes, even, gave us detailed suggestions for taking care of the babies during the flight in case of distress. It is about a two-day travel trip door to door, with most of that, of course, on a jet full of people. Our sense is that as difficult as this will be, the euphoria of completing the adoption carries people along pretty well as an extra resource. Either that or it is so terrible people don’t talk about it.
We received a fourth set of pictures of Luc and Maisie last week, the best ones yet. When Sherrell Goolsby from World Child International, our adoption agency (http://www.worldchild.org/home.htm ), sent the pictures, she gushed about how cute and healthy they appear to be. Out of thoughtfulness for us, she noted that one picture seems to show that Luc’s head is slightly flattened, but added that this is not an uncommon thing and easily treatable when we get Luc home. I wrote her back that we’ve been through international adoption classes at the Family Resource Center in Chicago (http://www.f-r-c.org/) as part of our home study process, so we are familiar with developmental and health issues for babies in orphanages. As we understand the set up in Luc and Maisie’s orphanage in Lang Son, the babies sleep on floor mats. The pictures seem to show Luc and Maisie on their mats.
In fact, World Child has a foundation project (http://www.worldchild.org/holiday.htm) to raise money in order to provide stainless steel cribs for that orphanage. And here is one of the best stories about our wait: Peggy’s students in the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools’ 7th grade organized several fund raising events, including a buy roses for your special friend event for Valentine’s Day, to collect money to buy the cribs. Peggy just sent a check off toWorld Child for $500, which will provide two cribs, and one family contributed a crib on their own.
So our waiting has been productive in many ways. But we expect it to be over soon, replaced by hectic—even insane—activity. We have visa applications ready. We’re making plans about what books to bring for the flight—and we’ve backed up the music from Peggy’s Ipod on the computer so that we still have it if we lose the Ipod. We’re reading our “Rough Guide to Vietnam Travel,” and other books about Vietnam. I just found this morning a very recent article about Hanoi in the New York Times Travel Guide, http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/travel/18hanoi.html. We will have some time to do things in Hanoi as we wait for paperwork to process. We’ve looked at maps of Hanoi and learned that we can probably go for a jog around Ho Hoan Kiem, or the Lake of the Returned Sword, which is near our likely hotel site in Hanoi’s Old Quarter. We discovered that the lake used to be called “Luc Thuy,” or green waters, and so we connect the lake to Luc’s name.
The waiting time has also allowed us some time to look back and reflect. We have talked about the loss of our infant son, Declan, now two and a half years ago, the event that really brought us to this adoption process. Our photos of Declan now share a wall with photos of Maisie and Luc. Soon Maisie and Luc will be here sleeping in the room that was going to be Declan’s room.
Right now, where it is night time in Lang Son, they are probably asleep on their mats.
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