Best seat in the house!

Ok, maybe the car...

Jazzy, new, ahem, European (Dutch) car seat that a fellow adoption friend turned me onto:

The Maxi Cosi Priori Convertible Car seat!



Best parts:

• Fits weights from 5-40 lbs first facing backwards then facing frontwards. With A we needed 2 or 3 different seats to cover that range!
• Reclines so baby girl can relax on long trips.
• Side Impact Protection with energy absorbing foam.
• Matches the interior in the Big Tuna, also now known as the Flexus.
• Purchased for far less on Ebay, NEW, with free shipping.
• Too small for Ranger.

Ebay: The last legal high.

Lauren

We are number one!

We are first in line for a referral and should get a referral within a month!

I confess, I have been going a leeeetle nuts buying clothes for baby girl. I just could not hold back any more. Gotta buy some tiny hangers, this stuff is piling up!

We are Fingerprinted

Turns out they don't use ink any more, just water, a glass plate, an imager and a computer. Pretty cool. We are in the system now so we better stay on the right side of the law! Hopefully we will now get our I71H within a month.

Celebrated by buying this Maclaren Stroller:
And this crib set:




I also bought a whole bunch of Chinese paper lanterns. I came up with a lighting installation design idea where I cluster them like grapes. Should be cool I think and visually interesting. I bought all of the colors in the crib set: in brights--fuschia, mango, golden yellow, and also chartreuse, turquoise.

Recall that my design inspiration is a bold graphic fabric I purchased in high school. I actually purchased it because one of my friend's mom had a color combo like the one above in paint and fabric in her kitchen. I really liked it, it was "mod", and when I saw the fabric that was similar I grabbed it and used it in my dorm room (my dorm room was totally happening!). And you know what? I still love that fabric and the combo. So I figure if I still like it, I won't stop liking it any time soon, and hopefully baby girl will like it too!

I've been stripping the wall paper in baby girl's bathroom, not fun but not hard. I hope to finish this weekend. Then John will repair the walls a bit and I will paint. This nesting is so much easier to do without a baby on board!

Lauren

20 years...

Married today.

And most of them were good!

A terrific son, a baby on the way, our health, a place to hang our hats, and a lot of laughs. Who can complain?

Tomorrow we get fingerprinted for the immigration paperwork--

Lauren

What is race?

I'll tell you one thing right up front, race is one hot potato of a topic.
But what is race, really? How is it defined biologically? In society?
I am a genomicist/geneticist and would like to note that it has actually been established that with the exception of genes for skin color or eye shape, etc, "race" is a social construct. As a society WE have attached other significances to these differences than the ones derived from their evolutionary advantages.
EVOLUTION DISCUSSION ALERT: These differences in most cases are based on evolutionary advantages conferred in the presence of a particular selective pressure–like too much sunlight. There have been studies that show that as prehistoric man migrated from Africa to Europe, skin color became lighter and this is believed to be related to the need for vitamin D which is derived from sunlight. The farther north you go the less sunlight per year and so the skin needs to have less melanin in order to absorb as much sun as possible. The converse is obviously true as well. Indeed as we take home our African babies we will find that they really need Vit D supplements to stay healthy in climates too different from the one they came from.
Back to social constructs: Unfortunately, they are as real as the genes in our DNA but in a different, more pervasive and thorny way. But they are definitely changing. When I was 6 in the 60s, there were really no biracial marriages or families to speak of. This has come a long, long way in my 40+ years. 40 yrs before that? You had segregation in every facet of daily life. Blacks and whites did not mix in any way.
I like to think we soon-to-be biracial families are helping that rate function. Every meaningful journey is made of individual steps. Societal change is slow but inevitable. Just like genetic evolution. But I do think the slope of that line is changing for the better. I think our kids will look back in 40 yrs and be astounded by how far, and how quickly, the change has taken place. I think they will be proud to have been at the forefront of that change. Will it be hard on us, and more importantly them? Yes. But it will also be very important and lead the way for these social constructs ending up in the evolutionary waste bin.
Lauren

Things are moving...

Our dossier is in ET and being translated.

We got our fingerprinting appointment--10/23. With luck we will get our I71H a couple months after that.

Also, we are officially third on the list for a little girl!! Courts in ET have reopened, so things should start moving again. They close for the month of September.

And, oh, J got his motorcycle. I just couldn't take his sad face any more looking every night on the internet for the bike of his dreams. In the end, he bought new and made a great deal (Yay J!!) A Triumph Scrambler. I'll post on this later.

Lauren

Paper Pregnant

I found this expression to describe the situation we are in, paper pregnant, and that really does describe it.

Our Dossier is now official, and in ET waiting for the referral of a child.

We are...expecting!

Yup.

We really hustled to get to this point so quickly--2.5 months from intake mtg to ET ain't bad. It may not be long from this point on, it could be as short as four months or as long as a year.

The hard part of being paper pregnant, as opposed to physically pregnant, is that you do not know how long it will take, what age your child will be, what size your child will be, or what season she will come home. You can't really do all of the fun stuff yet, like buying outfits and such. Crib or bed? Baby swing or tot-jumper? Turtlenecks or T-shirts? Bottles or sippy cups?

Now on the other hand--my bladder is not the size of a squashed ball, I don't have sciatica, and thank goodness espresso is still on the menu.

What we can do and need to do is get her room painted and ready!

L

It's gotta be the hair

Taking care of African hair is certainly different — it is very dry, the scalp does not make enough oil, and it breaks easily. The hair is washed with shampoo only infrequently, once a week or two. It is conditioned daily with oil and product. And products!! There are many types and brands and I will need to experiment, fortunately I enjoy that!
But that's not all. Black hair style is a complicated and emotional issue that is intertwined with racial identity.
Chris Rock has a new documentary called Good Hair which looks at black hair care ("good hair" is read as "caucasian hair.") It is viewed as denying your heritage. I can see why this is disturbing. But is it really denying heritage? Yeah, to some degree.
What is interesting to me is that having "good hair" is not a strictly black thing. Every race seems to have a hair tendency — and there aren't many women out there that love the hair they got. I got perms when I was young, got up an extra hour early on school mornings to painstakingly blow it out, I even got MY hair corn-rowed once. I started coloring my hair looong before the greys started showing up because my color was drab. Even now to really look my best I need to spend a half hour blowing it out. It seldom gets done —I scrunch it up and let it airdry. I like to keep it easy, and natural.
Adoptive white parents of Ethiopian kids often get taken to task by black women about their kids’ hair — it should be braided, put into puffs and ponytails, etc. It should look the way black mothers would style it. So again with the hair rules. Is this really what people mean by embracing black heritage??? Because braids certainly aren't natural.
The good news is that this whole black hair issue is changing — it’s now more acceptable to go natural. You don't have to braid it, relax it or weave it. You don't have to conform to anyone. That's how it should be. Who or what race likes to conform to what others think they should be? This needs to stop being such a charged issue.
And frankly, I'll be honest here — the braids to me look painful to the scalp and painful and time-consuming to put in. As a two year old I would not want to have to sit in a chair for one to two hours while my mom braids my hair, or some hairdresser does it. As cute as they are, I think I 'll let my daughter decide if she wants them and wants to sit through it. There was a Youtube video awhile back that caused an uproar — it showed a black mother combing out her young daughter's hair prior to some sort of draconian styling — the mother was being rather harsh and the child was SCREAMING bloody murder. Many people thought of it as child abuse. I'd rather not be associated with hair hell in my daughter's mind. I used to HATE the rollers my mother put in my hair before bed when I was a kid.
So for now I will stock up on headbands and let my daughter's Afro puff freely behind them. Well, maybe I will do these really cute twists if she'll let me —

Let's just let hair be hair and personal preference. Except when it is on your chin, now that's when you need to worry!
L