We're Adopting Again!!!

Yay for siblings! If you are new to this site, these are our three kids, aged 5, 4, and 6, respectively.
We are excited to add a fourth! (Picture by Rachael Kulick.)

WHO: A boy or girl who is younger than our youngest (at the moment 4 and a half), born in China with the same special need as our daughter, Congenital Melanocytic Nevus. We feel very comfortable with this special need and have a good relationship with a wonderful pediatric dermatologist at Emory. And it's not just about comfort level and familiarity: objectively speaking, we will be considered a good match for a child with this special need, because of our experience, which (we hope) will lead to a fast(er) match.

WHAT: Um, this seems obvious. Unless you missed the title. ADOPTION! Yay!

WHEN: Not soon enough. The process will probably take at least a year from now until we are bringing our child home, maybe longer. There are two different paths with a Chinese adoption:

1) after a family has finished their paperwork they wait to be matched with a newly listed child whose file matches their openness. (This is not a mandatory match: the parents can pray over the file and consult with doctors if desired before making a decision.)

2) at any time during the paperwork process the family can ask to be matched with a child who is on the Waiting Child List. Children on the waiting list are kids who were not matched with families when they were first listed with the adoption agency, either because they have special needs that no families were specifically open to, or because they are older (four years old is considered "old!"), or because they are a boy and the families at that time specifically requested a girl. (Side note: There are SO MANY boys in China who need families!)

It is my personal hope that we would be able to race through our paperwork (ha, ha ...) and as soon as we are done, the child that we are meant to adopt would be newly listed with our agency and we would be matched to them. This hopeful scenario would mean the shortest wait time for everyone. When we were adopting Mei-Mei, we saw her picture on the Waiting Child List, asked to be matched with her, and then we had a year's worth of paperwork and waiting before we could go get her. This time around, if we get all our paperwork done first, then our child has the shortest possible wait after they are listed, although the timing is about the same or a little longer for us. (Clear as mud? All of this is pretty confusing.)

WHERE: China. Our first experience with Bethany Christian Services' China team was stellar, and the Chinese language, culture and food are wound into our hearts and our family life.

WHY: Because children need families. Let me repeat that. Children. Need. Families. This is not about my husband and I wanting more kids. (Although, to be clear, we do!) This is not about a fun cultural experience. (Although we have been enriched by the addition of Chinese culture to our family!) This is about kids, growing up in foster care or an orphanage, never having anyone who is committed to them for forever. Sometimes never having anyone who will tell them: "You have value. You are loved."

That is why we are doing this big, crazy, time-consuming, expensive thing.

HOW MUCH: $31,000. *Gulp* Let me break this down a bit.

Agency fees (Home study, Adoption fees, Post-Placement Reports) $13,950

Foreign Country Program Expenses $2,810

Translation and Document Expenses $3,685

Program Development $1500

Immigration fees $985

Travel and Accommodation in China* $8,575

Total: $31,505

*This number is the most flexible, as it will be affected by the tourist season, strength of the US dollar, and the specific province in China that we are traveling to.

We will also be giving our child's orphanage a gift of either money or supplies, both as a culturally significant gesture of gratitude, and also to improve the lives of other children in the orphanage. In previous years this was a required part of the adoption fees, adding approximately $6000 to the cost of Chinese adoption. Praise God that the adoption officials in China have made it this much easier for children to be adopted!

HOW CAN YOU HELP: 

If you would like to know about our continued prayer needs and financial progress, sign up for our (probably monthly) newsletter by emailing me at derkihee@gmail.com with "Add Me" or something else self-explanatory in the subject line.

If you would like to contribute directly to Bethany, send a check made out to Bethany Christian Services with "Fenn Family Adoption" in the memo line to this address:

Bethany Christian Services
930 McCallie Avenue
Chattanooga TN 37403

If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation, send a check made out to Highlands with "Fenn Family Adoption" in the memo line to this address:

Highlands Presbyterian Church
1211 North Main Street
LaFayette GA 30728

If now is not a great time for you to contribute, but you'd like to at some point, keep an eye out for future updates! We will be doing a T-shirt fundraiser in a few months.

Thank you for walking with us on this journey! We're very excited to be on this path and excited that you want to travel with us on it!

(Picture by Rachael Kulick.)

Chinglish

A common question from friends, family and random strangers is, “Does she know English yet?” And the answer is, “Yes! Um, no. Well, sorta.” Also complicating the matter is the fact that Mei-Mei is almost entirely silent in public, a striking difference from the wild and screeching hellion that we know and love at home. It can be hard to explain the amount of English, Chinglish and Chinese that we have going on at home without a lengthy dissertation. So, here’s that (semi) lengthy dissertation.

Here are the words that Mei-Mei says by herself in English:

Mama*

Danny

Maisie

Pippin

Sophie

Mine

Hello

Bye-bye**

Please

Thank you

Sorry

No

Potty

All done

Water

Hungry

Gentle

Stop it 

Go

Shoes

Car***

Choo-choo***

Thomas [the Tank Engine]

Train [anyone picking up on a theme here?]

Carrier

Pew-pew

*Mama is the same in Chinese and English.

**Bye-bye is essentially the same in Chinese and English.

***Car means vehicle. Choo-choo means a toy car or a toy train.

A lot of adoptive families use Baby Sign in their first months at home, so that they can communicate effectively from the beginning. Since we learned some Chinese, we didn’t do Baby Sign, but there have been a couple of gestures that we’ve made up and are part of our family pidgin.

Moving the hand, palm side down, over a plate of food – all done

Pointing at an empty spot on the plate – I want more of what I just ate

A buckling motion at the waist – the Tula carrier

Using both hands to push inwards along Mama’s shoulders – I want to stay in the carrier

Maintaining eye contact and opening the mouth wide (optional sticking out of the tongue) - Snapchat

Before going to China, I did lessons 1-15 with the Pimsleur Mandarin course. I highly recommend Pimsleur for people who don’t have a lot of study time per se because it is all CDs. I borrowed them from the library and kept them in the car and learned Chinese while driving around town. We have also made COPIOUS use of Google Translate, which has been a lifesaver. (If you’re heading to China, though, remember that Google doesn’t work in China unless you have a VPN.) These are the words that ‘Stache and I  know in  Chinese and use regularly:

Baba – Daddy

Gege – Brother

Mei-mei – Sister

Wo (men) – I (we)

Ni (men) – You (y’all)

Ni hao – Hello

Bu – No/not

Shi – Is/am

Haishi – Or

Keshi - But 

Ma – word that ends a yes or no question

Yao – Want

Chu – Go

Guolai – Come here

Zheli* – Here  

Nali* – There

Zai nali* – Where is

Fenxiang – Share

Xiang – Would like

Shanghai – Hurt

Peng – Touch

Hui huilai – Will come back  

Mingbai – Understand

Chi – Eat

Hue – Drink

Shuijiao – Sleep

Chin chin – Kiss

Baozhe – Hold

Ai – Love

Xianzai – Now

Guo yihuier - After a while

Niao niao – Pee

Shema – What  

Yi dian* – Little

Hao – Good

Hen – Very  

 Piaoliang – Pretty

Yi, er, san, sz, wo – One, two, three, four, five   

Shui – Water

Cha – Tea

Kafei – Coffee

Tian – Sweet

Jige – This/that
Maozi – Hat 

Wawa – Doll 

*The Pimsleur course uses speakers with Beijing  accents so I learned to pronounce these  “djar,” “nar,” “tzai nar” and “eediar.” Also, any words that end in "shi" I pronounce more like "shir."

The ideal would probably be to say a sentence in Chinese and then repeat it in English: “Ni yao shuijiao ma? Do you want to go to sleep?” (Three guesses what the answer is and the first two don’t count.) In practice, we rarely do this. It’s oddly difficult to switch gears between languages. What isn’t hard at all (for reasons I don’t know) is to mix the two languages. “Ni yao yogurt haishi ni yao orange juice?” “Xianzai ni brush your teeth, then shuijiao.” (Any linguists out there who have insights into this phenomenon, feel free to chime in!)

It’s very clear that Mei-Mei is understanding more English than she speaks (or is just brilliant at deducing from tone and context, which is also possible). We’ll say things like “We only eat in the kitchen; come back in here” or “Do you want to be in the pack ‘n’ play or go play with your geges” and she’ll respond appropriately.

The plan (the hope) is for Mei-Mei to learn English, probably taking about a year to become fluent, and for me to hang on to my Chinese, learn more, and teach the boys once they start kindergarten. Whether Mei-Mei will lose her Chinese and then relearn it again in kindergarten or whether she’ll retain it, we don’t know. Generally three-year-olds don’t hang onto their Chinese by themselves, so either way it will take a bit of effort, but we think it’s worth it.   

I'm exhausted just thinkin' about it.

Edited to add: At the time of this post, Mei-Mei was 3 and a half years old and had been home exactly two months.