Filling the time

So our initial blogmania subsided, and it has been a week since we have posted here.

Maybe we’ve just been busy doing various things.

One milestone, almost a formal adoption event, was a travel preparation phone call with Jenny from World Child International. She seems to be the liaison between the U.S. staff and the Vietnamese guides. When we were doing our dossier preparation and paperchasing, we had to send our materials to the Vietnamese consulate in San Francisco for authentication. In the package to them we included a Fedex envelope which sent the material on to Jenny for translation and transmittal to Hanoi. The first time Peggy addressed a package, she just wrote “Jenny” and the address. “Don’t we need a last name?” I asked. Apparently not, Peggy said, “They told me to just write ‘Jenny.’ The consulate people must know her.” Now we know her last name, however. She emailed us a 30-page travel preparation book and reviewed it with us by phone. The good news is that there weren’t many surprises for us. We’d already been pretty well prepared from our own research and emails and phone conversations with the helpful families who did the travel already. We’re still mulling the travel insurance issue. We’ve settled on the Hong Ngoc Hotel in Hanoi, cheaper than the other alternative offered by World Child, the Melia. They want us to use hotels that they choose, partly for security and safety, and partly because it is easier for them if the group of families traveling is in one place.

Have we talked about those families? We’ve made internet contact—another way to spend some time. There seem to be four families total traveling on this trip. Three of us will share the same Korean Air flight from Chicago! We used the same travel agent, Todd Gallinek, and so all that work that finally led us to Korean Air turned out to be worthwhile for all of us.

On the weekend we made a big shopping trip to Target, buying the baby things and personal items for our travel and for our return. You’ve been to Target. You don’t need the details. Suffice it to say we left after spending more time and money there than we expected to spend. And we bought diapers and wipes.

On Sunday night we were hosts for a dinner party of ten friends, and we cooked Vietnamese—or at least our version of it, from our cookbook: Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured foodways, modern flavors by Andrea Nguyen. Peggy made the Fresh Asparagus and Crab Soup (Sup Mang Tay Cua). I did the big entrees: Panfried Rice Noodles with Beef and Vegetables (Pho Xao Don) and Chicken Sir-fried with Lemongrass and Chile (Ga Xao Xa Ot). We’ve been cooking various recipes from the cookbook and from the internet for a while during the wait. But this is the first time we cooked Vietnamese for anyone else. Actually, we don’t often entertain—and seldom anyone other than big family gatherings. So this adoption thing has already been good for us as we try new things to do. To some degree we invited friends over to tell them that we won’t be seeing them for a while as we switch to baby mode. We owe a special thanks to Kelly and Jeff, who brought their last growler of Hopslam, a scarce beer from our favorite brewery Bell’s, located in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Peggy has continued to work, of course. Last night her 40 seventh-graders and the other 80 taught by her colleagues Charlotte and Anne (who ate our Vietnamese dinner) gathered with parents at the second annual “Interview Project” reception. All the seventh-graders at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools have to pick someone to interview—someone very different from themselves—and they transcribe and present their interview stories in presentations and posters. Then they invite the interviewees and the parents of the interviewers to an evening gathering. I probably should let Peggy tell the story, but the group of interviewees included Peggy’s former student, Mollie Stone, a music director at the Chicago Children’s Choir. At the reception, a group of seventh-grade choir members asked if Mollie could direct them right then and there, and they performed some South African songs for the group. For the second year in a row the crowd included LeAlan Jones, author and voice of the radio program "Ghetto Life 101" and a book, Our America, about growing up as an African-American boy on the South Side of Chicago. He signed many copies of his book for the students, which they read for the class and which is full of interviews that the students use as models for their own interviews.

The event was also kind of a send-off for Peggy, perhaps, who will turn her class over to Sam, who has been working with her as a student teacher since January, when we leave next week. By the way, Sam came to our dinner, too! And he will house sit for us while we’re gone. Did I mention that Sam’s father was Peggy’s English teacher years ago at Saint Ignatius—or that when Sam’s father retired, I took his job at Ignatius? Strange how things come together.

On my side, the days are pretty much occupied with coaching the Ignatius track team. It is one of those laws that the amount of time you spend doing something expands to the amount of time you have available. So I am basically a full-time track coach. It is at least a six-day-a-week commitment, with practices from 3-6 each weekday and a meet on weekends. This coming weekend we actually have track meets on Saturday and Sunday. And tonight I will be the starter for the University High meet at the University of Chicago. We ran there last week with our Ignatius team, and they asked me to help again, tonight.

There are still lots of other small odds and ends to do for our trip preparation. I did the emails and phone calls to the University of Chicago’s pediatric adoption clinic, and we have an appointment when we return. They were also helpful as we prepare for some possible health issues when we get Luc and Maisie, including the dreaded scabies, which is a common problem.

Last night while Peggy was at her reception I picked up several more bags of clothes and toys from friends Diane and Kevin, who have two boys; so we got more boys clothes, which we needed for Luc. I sorted through them, picked out the suitable sized-clothes for Luc’s age, and washed them in Dreft. Yes, I have my own sorting hat.

I wasted some time on one project. We have an old laptop computer that we will take to Vietnam. It will be fine. But I tried to set up the internet telephone service Skype on the computer. It is running Windows 98, an old program, and Skype wants something newer. At least that’s why I think it doesn’t work well. We already have a cell phone, email, and our blog, so we probably will be fine without internet telephone service.

See what I mean about tasks expanding to fill the space available?

When I started writing this, I looked at the date of the last post and at the date of this post. Now it also occurs to me that looking ahead, we will be heading to ORD in a week for a flight about this time next Friday!

One last note: I forgot to tell you that our passports came back to us from the San Francisco consulate with Vietnam visas pasted into them. And our tickets came via Fedex. So we are good to go, with tickets and visas in hand.

--Written by Ed (obviously)