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Ni hao...wo shi ni de Baba
Contributed by: Jared Keller on 5/22/2008

The Wife and I have been fortunate enough to begin taking some Mandarin lessons (thanks, Xiao Ling!), so as to ease The Boy's transition to life in our crazy house. Our tongues may never recover.

As it turns out, we'll need to accelerate our retention. We're working as hard as we can, but it's tough. In particular, I've been practicing the phrase that forms the title of this column, since I'll need to speak it more quickly than we might have assumed.

It means "Hello...I am your daddy".

We're leaving in six weeks.

Monday morning, I received a call from CCAI (Chinese Children Adoption International - our agency), indicating that our final Letter of Acceptance (LOA) had arrived at their offices for our signature. This letter signifies (again) that we truly want to adopt Shan An Fei (our Will) as our son. Needless to say, we got there as quickly as we could, signed the thing, and were thrilled to find out that our travel invitation would be arriving within about 10 days from the date when we submitted our LOA. Early July. In southern China. With our boy. It's possible that our Independence Day may well be his "Gotcha Day".

We're flushed with so many emotions right now. Overwhelming joy mixes with the stress of having to get a new mountain of paperwork finished up, having to figure out how the new Chinese visa application works, having to find airline tickets, and figuring our how on earth to get all the stuff we'll need for a nearly three-week trip crammed into less than 8,000 pounds' worth of luggage.

The overall effect is somewhat akin to being kicked in the stomach by a mule - and being happy about the whole affair. The wait - already interminable - becomes excruciating at this point. We're so close now...it's almost like we can begin to feel his weight in our arms; like we can smell the top of his head, and feel his breath on our faces.

The Girl has begun to make final preparations for the demands of big-sisterhood. Her mom has neatly segregated her toys, and The Girl has made generous allowances for their potential use by this new kid. If he asks nicely. And doesn't play with too many of her My Little Ponies. His closet is ready. His bed is ready. His walls? Not so much. That's my gig - the painting - and I'm way behind. I've got a whole surfing motif to whip up, and very little time in which to do it. Gotta get cracking.

So, generally speaking, the house is ready for him, his sister is ready for him, the cat can't even begin to comprehend how completely unready for this kid he is, and Will's mommy and daddy were ready yesterday. Our impatience runs rampant for now, but we can see the end of our longing ahead, and the destination looks indescribably sweet.


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CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Jared Keller

Littleton

Jared Keller has posted 465 stories and 64 comments since joining on 12/1/2005. Jared Keller 's average story rating is 4.86.
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