Little Acorn

A Happy Day, with Cupcakes

I don't know what you guys did, but some combination of wishing on stars, letters to Santa, good thoughts and crossing fingers has worked and we received our travel dates on Friday! Thank you! I thought our absolute best case scenario was to be in Vietnam in late December and January, but instead we are going IN JUST OVER TWO WEEKS. We have a flight booked to Hanoi November 18th and we will welcome sweet baby Lam into our family forever on November 23rd when she is just 15 weeks old. Our return to Canada is scheduled for December 15th, but there is the possibility that we could be finished in Vietnam a week earlier or we may need to stay a week later depending on how fast her immigration paperwork is processed. Either way though, we should be home for Christmas. Home for Christmas!!! There is a possibility that our departure date could be pushed back, so since all your positive thinking worked to get us this far, if you could all take a moment to fix November 23rd in your mind and send along a wish for us, we'd appreciate it. November 23rd is already an important anniversary to us and we celebrate it every year - our family was founded on November 23rd, 2000, when David and I first met and it would be extremely special to have Lam join our family on that day.

Needless to say, David and I are frantic, grinny, spinny messes. There are pages and pages of lists and honestly there are many things that will be left undone which as a perfectionist is really making me anxious. All that really matters is that our girl is coming home. After much discussion, we've decided that our travel blog will be separate from this blog, and it's where we will post a lot of photos and there we will share more personal details about the adoption and our experience in Vietnam. The travel blog will be password protected and I am happy to give any of my readers (even you lurkers) the password so that you can follow along. Just send me a quick email (link is in the sidebar below the picture of me drinking tea) and introduce yourself and ask for the password and it's yours. If you don't want to follow the travel blog, there will be some quick updates here at Little Acorn and of course I couldn't deny you a few photos of our beautiful little one and her happy family. Once we are home then it will be business as usual here at Little Acorn, but with a whole lot more baby girl cuteness and a little more sleep deprived/jet lagged/new parent craziness! 

These cream filled chocolate cupcakes with whipped ganache frosting* were made for a potluck lunch we attended today which was a happy, busy, noisy, gathering of families with children from Vietnam. We're so lucky to have connected with these great people and I love the thought of all the babies growing up together. We thought we'd be there to celebrate our friends who will be meeting their daughter in Vietnam on November 16th, but we never suspected that the celebration would be for us as well!

Okay, off to tackle some things on my list...

* Recipes are available at the Martha Stewart website  cupcakes, cream filling and frosting

A Sad Day, with Cupcakes

I know that sad days and cupcakes don't usually go together, but today they do. Today our baby girl turns 3 months old and she is 6,750 miles away from home and it's unlikely that anyone is marking her special day. I made cupcakes and we're going to go eat some Pho to mark her day, but it's hard to call it celebrating. I know I shouldn't be sad, but I am. Lam is just a wee baby, and while we are waiting and counting each minute until we can be together, she is just living her life and isn't pining for us at all. She's sleeping on her reed mat snuggled close with the other babies to stay warm as the weather cools in northern Vietnam, she's  drinking her bottles while being held by women who care for her greatly. She's hanging out in her bouncy seat and learning from everything around her. Sometimes she is crying, but I know there is someone there to comfort her. I know that the orphanage is taking good care of our girl, but I can't help but be sad at all that we are missing. They change so much in these early months that I feel a loss at every day that goes by that Lam isn't with us and today I am feeling it more acutely than most days. If they could just tell us WHEN we could go, it would help immensely. Right now it's still anyone's guess when it will be. If we had a date, then we could start counting down the days until we're united, but not knowing is just hard. I know I'm setting myself up for ending up in a black hole of disappointment, but all I'm asking Santa for this year is to have Lam in my arms by Christmas.

Happy 3 Monthaversary, sweet baby girl. We're coming as soon as we can.

Tet Trung Thu

Happy Mid Autumn Moon Festival to all! Tet Trung Thu as it is known in Vietnam, is being celebrated with mooncakes, lanterns and moon gazing at our house. Autumn Festival is a time for children, when traditionally parents turn their attention back to the family after the hard work of bringing in the harvest is done for the year. It's also a time to think of those who are missing and not there to celebrate with you, as no matter where they are in the world they are looking up at exactly the same moon. Today of course we are thinking about Lam who is watching the full moon rise far, far away from us and our thoughts also turn to Lam's birth family who will be celebrating Tet Trung Thu without her for the first time. I will likely never speak to the woman who gave birth to our daughter, or meet the man who fathered her, or the many other men, women and children who are a part of her first family, but I wish them all peace, and I promise that I will love your girl with the fiercest, kindest love and she will be given every opportunity to grow and become the amazing person she was born to be. She is too little to have any memories of you, but you will always be with her, and we will always honour you.

Getting Ready

Thank you so much for all your well wishes and for sharing our joy and excitement that our small person is on her way home! Unfortunately the timelines between receiving the child's information and when you can travel have slowed down a bit, so it will be December or January (or maybe even February, but don't even say it because that is just too horrible to contemplate) before we can hold sweet Lam in our arms. It is HARD to wait, but we know that the steps that are being taken now are important to make sure that this adoption is legal and ethical, and we certainly wouldn't want anything else but that. What is happening now is that Lam's information is being transferred from the orphanage to the central adoption authority who then undertake a thorough investigation with the cooperation of the provincial authorities where she is from to make sure that she is legally available for adoption and that we are suitable to adopt her and that all the correct procedures have been followed. This can take anywhere from 2 to 5 months, with 3 to 4 months being the average. We take comfort that she is being cared for by a group of very loving women who take great pride in keeping the babies happy and healthy, but she needs her Mama and Daddy and we can't wait to go. Here at home we still have many things to do to get ready for our daughter's arrival. Since we found out that it was a girl, there have been shopping sprees a'plenty, especially for clothes.While we were waiting we would look at all the lovely tiny girly clothes, but we didn't buy anything because we knew that it could be either a girl or a boy, but now we're filling her closet! We may not need to shop again until she's 3. It's a joyous explosion of red, yellow, orange, blue, brown and of course PINK in there. It's really hard to buy things for little girls that aren't pink, isn't it? I'm certainly not anti pink, but you can certainly get overloaded with it pretty quickly. I'm still on the lookout for black onesies or baby t-shirts. A black t-shirt and a pair of jeans is sort of our family uniform, so she needs to have them too! Speaking of closets... what I was doing on September 22nd at 5:07 when the email that changed our life arrived, was working in Photoshop on a picture of her closet so that I could do a post on how her room is coming along.
The room is blue/aqua...sort of a Tiffany's box blue, I think, although I didn't think of that until after it was painted, and we plan to add lots of white and little touches of red and pink. The painting is all finished and the closet system is put together (there's a rod for hanging clothes around the corner - it's a big, weird shaped closet). In the room we have a rug which those bad cats are working on wrecking already and my Nanny's rocking chair  and the crib is waiting to be put together. David is painting a dresser and refinishing the doors and has a list of projects after that as long as his arm. I need to get busy as I've got lots of things I want to make for our girl, including quilts and blankets for her bed. Her room needs artwork and a mobile, of course. Then I need to make her softies, knit her sweaters and hats and try my hand at sewing some clothes. I'll also be shopping on etsy as there are just so many amazing things there for babies. I think keeping busy is the only way I'm going to cope with being separated from my daughter for the next few months...

I have seen the future...

...and the future is cute!

You may have wondered why it got so quiet around here all of a sudden, and some of you might have guessed the reason. Last Tuesday, at 5:07 we received the email that changed our life, telling us there was a baby waiting for us in Vietnam. We have been waiting until a Doctor specializing in internationally adopted children could look at the medical reports and give us an all-clear before we shared our news with the world. Our plan was that as soon as I saw that it was "the email" I would turn off the computer without reading it and call David immediately so that he could rush home and we would open it together and see our child's face for the first time and find out if it was a boy or girl together. My heart was beating so loudly I could hear it and after not being able to figure out how a telephone works for a few minutes I finally managed to call David at work where he was just finishing up for the day. He rushed home, but that still takes 20 minutes, so I did some manic tidying up while my thoughts raced. Is it a boy? A girl? How old? When David got home we set up the video camera so we could capture our reactions as we opened the email... A shout went up from David almost immediately - "It's a GIRL!". There was instant crying (me), ear to ear grinning (David) and an attempt to distract us by walking in front of the computer screen (Musette). We found out her name and that she was born July 27th. Then there was a minor panic as we realized that there was no picture or medical file attached. Finally we noticed that a large file was downloading and all of a sudden there she was... So so beautiful. Some wispy black baby hair. Sleepy eyes. A button nose. A perfect rosebud of a mouth. A sweet double chin. OUR BABY...a very small person. We have just one tiny, blurry, low resolution picture, but as soon as we saw her we started to fall in love immediately. She just looked right and it felt like we recognized her. We continued to videotape ourselves for about half an hour as we laughed, cried, hugged, exclaimed "She's so beautiful!" and "It's a girl" over and over. Her Vietnamese name is Lam, which means Forest, and she is just sweet baby Lam to us for now. We are working on her Canadian name but we still have a long way to go before we have it decided. We hope by the time we arrive in Vietnam to have it at least narrowed down to a one page list. The Vietnamese government discourages the public sharing of photos before the adoption is complete, so as much as I want you all to see how lovely she is, I just can't take the chance of making anyone mad, so here is just a wee peek at our sweet daughter.

What's your story little baby? Where did you come from? What have you seen in your little life?  We feel so honoured to have been given the important job of being your parents. We're going to love you SO MUCH.

Our Weekend

This is our weekend. This swirl of cardboardy chaos used to be our lovely basement guest suite. Now it's where David pulls out all the boxes from the storage area and goes through them one by one. It's his version of nesting, and I've never seen him more motivated to de-clutter and reclaim the room in the basement that his boxes were occupying. I'm way less of a packrat. Let's just say that I have a different relationship with my stuff and am less sentimental than David, so it's 90% stuff from his life before me that David is slowly sifting through. There's a few piles - keep, the thrift store, garbage, recycling and sell. Very little is staying in the "keep" pile. It's a slow process, but for me it mostly entails laying on the bed and encouraging him to not read the old free newspapers before they get tossed into the recycling bag. Occasionally I'll say "What would the small person think?" which helps him make his decisions. This picture is kind of like an "I Spy" book. Can you find... Zephyr? A vintage fisher price toy? 20 of the 600 cd's that David owns? 1 of 3 non-functional dvd players that we still have for some reason? A grocery bag full of Polly Pockets? David's red suitcase? A set of jalapeno party lights? My grandma's rocking chair? As with most of my pictures, you can click on it to see a bigger version.

Good News!

On Friday morning we got some awesome adoption related news. No, it's not THAT news, but it's good news. Great news, even. The group before us received their proposals, including a beautiful, healthy one month old baby boy from Lang Son province for a really great couple who live here in our city. This little guy will be the third baby from Vietnam to join their forever family here in our hometown this year, and we're really enjoying getting to know the other families. Saturday we all got together at a birthday party for the first of the little ones to turn one, and there was a lot of joy and excitement as we all celebrated the birthday, met the newest arrival from Vietnam (she has the chubbiest most smooshable cheeks EVER), and oohed and ahhed at the picture of the next little guy who will join his family and come to Canada in October.  We think it's amazing and wonderful that these children who have so much in common and such a shared history will grow up as friends. The group before us getting proposals made it very REAL for David and I. Very real in a "did the earth just shift a couple of feet and leave me standing in a whole new place?" kind of way. Really real. On Friday night we were all giddy and grinny and a wee bit nauseous. "NEXT" we kept repeating, "NEXT". Not maybe, not someday, not if, not we hope, but NEXT. And SOON. I didn't fall asleep until nearly three. My busy brain just wouldn't shut off and I made a million lists, asked myself a million "what if" questions, and had a million fantasies about all the things we're going to do as a family of three.

Next.

Soon.

I can't wait.

A post so monumental that I can't even think of a title...

You may have noticed that things have been a wee bit quiet around the Little Acorn corner of the web. You might have thought that I'd run out of things to talk about, but it's far from the truth. In fact, BIG THINGS have been going on at our house. BIG BIG THINGS that will change our life forever but that I didn't feel ready to talk about. Mostly because these BIG THINGS are also GOOD THINGS and we were afraid that it wouldn't work out. Nothing is ever totally guaranteed,  but things are looking pretty certain now, so we thought it was time to let the world in on our news. David and I are giddy with joy to tell you that soon a baby will be joining our family through adoption from Vietnam. This will be our first child and we have all the excitement/fear/happiness/apprehension/brain fog/glee/worry/joy that all expectant parents have. We've been in the process for quite awhile now. Anyone who knows anything about adoption knows that there is much red tape to be navigated, many forms to be filled out, doctors to visit, social workers to impress, government departments to be wrangled with, home inspections to pass and many flaming hoops to be jumped through in order to prove that we are suitable to be parents. We have been judged worthy, and now we wait to be matched with the little one who will become our child.

Do you know who the baby is?
Nope. Not yet.  We do know that the baby will be a boy or a girl, and he or she will likely be about 4 to 6 months old when we bring him or her home from Northern Vietnam.  We hope to have the adoption completed by the end of this year, but it's unpredictable and it could end up being a little or a lot longer than that. The baby that will be our son or daughter is likely growing in their first mother right now, soaking in the sounds of their family and Vietnam, growing strong and getting ready to be born. With all the joy that we are experiencing in preparing for a baby, we never forget the birth family and the hard choices and losses that will lead to the formation of our family.

When will you know?
In the autumn we should get the news that our application to Vietnam has been approved and that we have been matched with a baby. 2 to 3 months after that we will travel to Vietnam for 3 or 4 weeks to complete the adoption and have the baby's immigration paperwork processed so that he or she can come home to Canada. During our time there, we also hope to be able to explore the city of Hanoi and the surrounding area, while at the same time transforming into a family of three.

Why does it take a few months to be able to travel to get the baby?
Once our daughter or son is identified for us the final parts of their adoption is processed in Vietnam. There is just as much paperwork on the other end as there was for us. Just as we had to prove to our government that we are suitable parents, the baby must be proved to be truly in need of a family by the adoption authorities in Vietnam.  There are also medical checks to be done and paperwork to go back and forth between Canada and Vietnam before we are ready to board that plane. That wait to travel will undoubtedly be the hardest part of the process - although we're also not looking forward to 30+ hours of travel time home with a possibly screaming baby.

So is this going to be an adoption blog now?
No. There will be the occasional update on the adoption process as we wait and of course you'll share in all our good news as it comes, but the focus of the blog will still be crafting, homekeeping, gardening and cooking. It is definitely going to be a "crafting for baby" and a "decorating for baby" and a "getting the house ready for baby" blog for awhile. I've been busily sewing and knitting and crocheting, and the room we were painting on Canada Day wasn't just the small bedroom, it was the small bedroom that our wee one will sleep in.  Before now I couldn't show you anything, as you are all smart enough to figure out that something was up, and it might have made us break our news before we were ready. Now that it's out there I can start sharing all the projects I've been working on. Right now I am making things for both girls and boys as trying to just be neutral is too difficult, especially when just about everything in my fabric stash has blossoms on it. Anything that isn't gender or age appropriate once we find out who our baby is will likely be sold on Etsy.

So there. It's out there. ME - soon to be Mama.
Eek.