Snow Day

Christmas Break


Dinke takes a rest with her new doll. For Christmas, we gave the twins handmade Ethiopian boy and girl dolls. (Thanks, Autumn!) I even made them slings to carry the dolls around, just like we used to do with the Fabertids.

Real (Embarrassing) Conversations

Alana: I'm going to go hide in the bathroom and wrap your presents shortly.

Xander: What the hell are you giving me?!

Alana: Uh, bedroom. I meant bedroom.

Xander: I'm just going to go ahead and take all yule log jokes off the table right now.

Things That Make Xanders Happy: XKCD


(Caption: Not only is that terrible in general, but you just know Billy's going to open the root present first, and then everyone will have to wait while the heap is rebuilt.)

Did we mention Xander is a mathematician? That's right. Some people make a living out of being complete geeks.

Merry Christmas!

The Most Significant Time of the Year

Christmas is very significant for us this year. As it should be. Because Jesus is the reason for the season? Hell, no! (This is the Public House, people. If your holiday is lacking religious dogma, search elsewhere. Christian we may be, but dogmatic we ain't.) It's because Christmas marks six months home with the Fabertids.

Many experienced adoptive parents will tell you the same thing over and over again when it is time to bring home your child. "Don't evaluate your life for six months," they say. Six months. Six months. Six months. Why six months? Because right around six months is when you wake up one morning and realize your life feels completely and totally normal. It's when you no longer worry that you don't know who these people are that cling to your pants leg and demand food from you before they've even taken the time to say, "Hi, Mama." It's when the fears that you've made their lives worse, not better, begin to subside. I don't know why, but six really does seem to be the magic number.

It doesn't just take the parents six months to get from crazy to normal. (Well, still crazy, but more of a normal crazy rather than a crazy crazy.) It takes the kids some time, too. Remember that baby who used to scream every time I moved more than three feet away from him? Well, he pretty much woke up one morning and decided life was good. It was that simple. We didn't do anything special to help him. We were just there, every single day. And sure enough, after about four months of us feeding him and clothing him and loving him, he got the picture. We are not going anywhere. Except maybe to the kitchen for a beer.

And right around six months, one day when we weren't looking, that baby decided to stop being a baby and turned into a little boy.

A Thoughtful Christmas

I grew up in a family that liked to give each other stuff, especially around the holidays. Actually, I feel like the 80s and 90s were all about stuff. What stuff you had, what stuff your neighbor had, what stuff you did not have but wanted. At Christmastime, everyone would stress out about what stuff they were going to buy and what the gift recipients might think. Opting out of buying stuff and giving stuff was not an option. And almost no one worried about where that stuff came from or how it was made.

I remained pretty much caught up in all of that until Xander and I moved to a 375-square-foot apartment in Manhattan. Living in a small space on a graduate student income pretty much cured my stuff habit. There was no room for stuff and no money with which to buy it. Christmases quickly turned into handmade and second-hand affairs. We got our kicks out of finding the coolest used stuff, making things ourselves, and finding the most colorful newspaper ads to use as gift wrap. Believe it or not, being forced to go this route actually increased our enjoyment of the holiday immensely. We no longer felt forced to brave holiday crowds in search of the best deals. We could use the money we saved to do things together rather than spending it on stuff we didn't really need.

I think one of the gifts of a recession like the one that we are in is that it forces people to be more thoughtful about their purchases. If you have less to spend, you have no choice but to be really picky about how you spend it. If you're really thoughtful, you might even manage to spend some of that holiday cash in a way that not only accomplishes your goal of buying a gift for someone but also directly supports a person in your community. For example, I needed a cool holiday gift for our babysitter. I have a friend who makes these amazing hats. So I bought our babysitter a gift certificate that she can use to commission a custom-made hat. A few months ago when I needed a gift for my parents, I called up a local ceramic artist and asked her to make something for them. You'd assume these items would be insanely expensive, right? No. With a little work, you can find plenty of artisans out there making things you can actually afford. And many will be happy to help you select a gift that fits within your budget. Not sure where to start? Stop by the locally-owned shops in your hometown or, if it's too cold to go out, hop on over to Etsy from the comfort of your very own couch.

Places like Wal-Mart and Target and the like definitely serve their purposes. Don't get me wrong. I have shopped at both for things like shelves and trash cans and toy bins. But I also hate them for the way they affect Americans' expectations about prices and availability. They've trained us to expect to have everything we want right now for a fraction of what things are actually worth. We become so blinded by this illusion of choice and economy that we never have to think about what goes into the production or who is deciding what we can and cannot have access to. We never have to think about what it means when we buy an item from a box store versus one that is available from a in a locally-owned shop or from a real, live artisan. The same applies for food. What is the effect of buying an apple imported from Chile versus buying one grown in the next town? Or buying chicken from a small, local farm versus buying chicken from an enormous plant half way across the country? Where is your money going, and how do you feel about the things it supports?

All of this blather is really just a lead up to a link from my dear hat-making friend Molly. She wrote a very thoughtful post that just begins to explore her thoughts surrounding locally-made items versus imported factory-made ones. Click here to read it.

I think as we each explore these issues, the main thing to take away is not that we should never ever buy anything made in a factory. Rather, I think we all need to be a little more thoughtful about the things we purchase, where they come from, and what is hidden in costs low and high.

Hello, Stranger

Soooo...It's a bit of a weird feeling to suddenly be sort of Internet famous. When Katie and Xander and I created those faux maternity pics, we did it as a joke, purely for our own amusement. (If you haven't already, you can read Katie's thoughtful explanation of the project here.) We figured our friends and family would chuckle at them, and that would be about the extent of it. I mean, of course I know the Internet is public, but I kind of figured it was so enormous that there was very little chance that many people would ever end up stumbling onto my little plot of Internetland.

When I started this blog ages ago, it was because we lived so far away from family. A friend suggested we start a blog because it's such an easy way to share photos. At first, that's mostly what we used it for. Then we started the adoption, and it kind of morphed into an online journal of that process. Even though a lot of people think adoption is "popular" these days, there still aren't that many of us. Even people who live in largish cities may not know anyone nearby who is part of the adoption community. So those of us out there rely heavily on our Internet pals for help and support, and it is largely for this reason that I keep this blog open. It gets tricky as the children get older, because there are always concerns about privacy. On the other hand, there is the thought that the more we can educate people about adoption, the more we are open about it (within reason), the more comfortable everyone else will be around us and around adoptees. I am still trying to find balance between wanting to share and wanting to keep things private, which is why it feels strange to know that so many people I have never even met now know what I look like in yoga pants. (I just want to say that those photos were taken before I started trapeze. I'm much hotter now.)

On the flip side, though, I find it completely amazing the way people who live nowhere near each other can come together here in Internetland and hang out for a bit. This appeals greatly to my passion for things like equality and creativity. So hello, stranger! Let's be friends.

More Pregnancy Photos

For some reason, I never get tired of looking at bad maternity photography. It's that car accident effect, I guess. The fact that this has become an entire industry is, I admit, highly amusing to me, which is part of what motivated us to do our own series of maternity photos. Don't get me wrong. I do think it is crazy wicked cool the way new people come to the world. But I guess I am just not sentimental enough to understand why, as one friend put it, some women who give birth speak and act as though they are the first creatures on the planet to discover uteri. I think more along the lines of, "People have been doing this for ages." It's why I also find the way most women are forced to give birth in this country mega creepy. It's like society has convinced them they are incapable of bearing children without the obnoxious interference of a whole army of doctors, nurses, and robots. Women are powerless in this system, it seems. But this is another topic for another day.

Back to tacky maternity photographs. Look what I found! A blog post dedicated entirely to awkward pregnancy pics. I love it!

UPDATE: But wait! There's more! Look what Katie did!

On the Various Campaigns Spawned on That Social Network Site

Anyone else get tired of those ridiculous and useless pseudo-activist campaigns on That Social Networking Site? I wonder if people who participate in them really pat themselves on the back afterward. Like, "Well, I did it. I changed my Facebook status. I've done all I can for breast cancer this week. Well done to me!" I find pseudo-activism to be extremely irritating. But the most recent "campaign" was somehow extra obnoxious.

Hey! Next week let's all dress up in black, brown, and white to show our support for multiracial families! In addition to feeling good about promoting diversity, we can also be cheered to know that neutral colors are super hot this season!

Talking

Everyone keeps asking us if the twins are talking, even people we see on a regular basis. This is because as soon as a stranger shows up, they shut up. They seem like silent, shy little beans. But they totally aren't. They blab constantly when it's just the four of us, and their vocabularies are expanding. When one learns a new word, it's only a day or two before they've taught the other one, so their vocabularies are almost identical with just a few exceptions. Just one of the ways that twins are not really twice the work! Anyway, their pronunciation is pretty crap at this point, but here are some words they say pretty reliably even if they are hard to understand:

Mama
Daddy (No idea where they got the "y," because we always say "Dada.")
NAAAAAH! - What Dinke calls herself. Must be said loudly.
Dink - What Dinka calls himself, often whispered
cat (pronounced "dat.")
yeah
hi
bye
teeth
ear
dog
bird
tree
door
car (pronounced "dar.")
light
yay! (Must be said with both arms in the air.)
wow!
TV
bottle
water
bath
bathroom
kitchen
potty (pronounced "pah.")
two
three
four
five
nine (Yeah, I know. Not sure why they skip to nine.)
up (Pronounced "pah.")
jar
shoes
button
that
this
brother
blanket (called "bah," because why would you bother with all those other letters?)
bread

They don't really care about sign language, but they do sign "more," "all done," and "potty" a lot. Whatever. We were worried that the fact that they lived in another country for the first year of their lives combined with the fact that they are twins and subject to twinspeak would mean that they would be language delayed. So the fact that they are talking so much and picking up so many words is super exciting for us. I have no idea what's normal for kids their age, but we're thrilled with their progress and grateful that they are thriving regardless of what the books might say. I find their language acquisition to be one of the most fun and interesting parts of their development, and I cannot wait to hear what they'll say next.

So really, they do talk. I promise. They also have collected a bizarre array of creature sounds:

cow - mmmmmmm
snake - ssssssss
sheep - baa
owl - oooo oooo oooo
wolf - awooo
rooster - also awooo
pteradactyl - squaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwweeeee
zombie - grrrrrrr phlegm grrrrrr

What? Every child knows what a zombie says, right? No? Hmmm.

A Trip to See the Cousins

A couple of weeks ago, we took a road trip to visit my cousin Anna. (If you don't know the story, click here. It's a good one.) It was the first time all of the cousin kids got to meet each other, and it was just wonderful. We attempted a group photo, which yielded some amusing results.





Seeing them all together just makes me unbelievably happy. I just love them.

Enjoying A Bit of Fall

The Other New Sweater

More Dinkee Couture! I finished Dinka's sweater awhile back. And now, finally, I've finished Dinke's. These took me forever to make, but I have to say it was worth it. They're probably my favorite crochet projects so far. Both sweaters fit over fleece liners to make toasty and awesome winter coats.