Linda in Boston

I forgot to show that we saw Auntie Linda in Boston on our trip there last weekend! We got her a pearl necklace in honor (and gratitude) for her going along with us to China, and helping out so much in our first couple of weeks with Juliet.

First US doctor's visit

Today (Tuesday) we walked across town to the offices of Dr. Jane Aronson, who is known as "the orphan doctor" in the media. Her practice specializes in adopted children. We had gotten very good advice, instructions, and prescriptions from her colleague, Dr. Laura Feldman, before heading off to China (including the Tobradex which quickly cured my conjunctivitis).

The worst part of the visit was extracting blood samples from Juliet. Our darling is still a bit chubby, and since she's a baby, she has extremely tiny veins. Dr. Aronson started with the right side of Juliet's neck, moved to her left arm, then moved to her right arm, and was finally able to score a vein on the left side of Juliet's neck. Needless to say, Juliet did not enjoy these proceedings. Personally, I found some of the rooting around with needles to be unsettling, as many different angles were tried.

Here's Juliet after all the trauma, and after a couple of bottles of milk to settle her back down.


Other stats seem pretty normal--Juliet is around the 15th or 18th percentile for her age in both height and weight. She's at only the 3rd percentile for head circumference, which might be of concern, but we also observed that her head is somewhat flattened on the back (possibly from sleeping patterns), and also her skull hasn't sealed, so she has time to catch up. Dr. Aronson thinks that Juliet wouldn't need Head Start and wouldn't qualify given her current set of responses. So we'll just go back to making her life miserable with broccoli, baths, and walks through the park.


On the vaccination front, everything is as it should be; apparently the Chinese records were quite thorough, including instructions about the next round of vaccines that ought to be administered. Juliet had to get four vaccinations, about which she was not at all happy, but at least they were over with quickly.

Baby Containment Technology

Yesterday, at Joyce's request, I ventured to "Buy Buy Baby" (what a crass name for a store!) and returned with a Superyard XT, or, more colloquially, the baby fence. My colleague Mike likened it to a sheep pen, and he made fun of all the pictures of happy three-year-olds playing inside their pen. As if!

Juliet doesn't seem to realize yet that it's actually a baby cage. She seems to enjoy the technical challenge of using it to climb.


Uncle Bill and Aunt Evelyn very kindly gave us the high chair that they had used for my cousins Bob and Leslie when they were growing up. Which makes this a vintage baby chair, in case you can't tell from the metal frame and vinyl seats (you can't get this stuff anymore!). Auntie Evelyn warned us, however, to make sure to install a strap to prevent submarining. She also told us that my cousin Bob had climbed out of the chair, lost his balance, and fallen head-first into a nearby garbage can, apparently to much hilarity. After these stories, we've begun affectionately referring to the high chair as "The Death Trap".


Luckily for us, our friend David was willing to give us a few pieces of general-purpose webbing, which we have configured (a) to prevent submarining and secure the tray and (b) as a seat belt. Juliet seems to enjoy eating food off the tray, and flung broccoli all over the kitchen, the tray, and herself. She even got broccoli up the sleeves of her clothes; we're still finding little broccoli bits in improbable places in the apartment.

Quilt Show in Watertown

On Sunday, we headed to a quilt show in Watertown, at which we met up with more friends.

Trevor Blackwell came over on Sunday morning to meet Juliet, and then decided to come along to the quilt show. In typical nerd fashion, I think he and I talked as much about machinery and mechanical engineering (which is to say that Trevor, as usual, taught me about such things) as we discussed the quilts at the show.


I couldn't resist taking this shot of this quilt.


Trevor appears in this photo with Keith Smith, Joyce, and Juliet. Keith's wife Jackie is also a quilter; unfortunately, we didn't get any photos of Jackie or their daughter Maddie. Which is perhaps just as well, since Maddie will give anyone a run for their money in the "cuteness" department, and this is, after all, Juliet's blog.

Visiting the Sandstrom/Smalls

After the conference, we stayed at the home of Chris Small and Carol Sandstrom, friends of ours (originally my friends from grad school, but Joyce and I now feel that we share them) who live in Cambridge.

Here's Chris with Juliet:


And Carol, during a moment I missed, sledding with Juliet:


Their delightful daughter Harriet (who was one of Joyce's and my flowergirls at our wedding), dispensing big sister advice:


And lastly, Juliet considers her career options:


Interestingly, I find that I keep on typing "Harriet" instead of "Juliet". It probably helps that both of their names end in "et", but I suspect that there might be a tiny bit of Freudian slippage in my brain. Joyce and I had long thought that it would be wonderful to be parents of a child such as Harriet, who was preternaturally articulate as a child and remains thoughtful, wonderfully sharp, and painfully direct. I'm sure that Juliet will surprise us in her own ways. Actually, she already has.

Boston USENIX 06

On Thursday we drove up to Boston, so I could give an invited talk at the USENIX technical conference. After the talk, a bunch of old friends went to lunch with us at the Legal Seafoods in Copley Place. Here's a couple shots: Dave Presotto, who I know from Bell Labs, is on the left; Catherine Zhang, who I went to grad school with, is on the right.



Juliet, of course, continues her mission to taste absolutely everything.

Webcam suggestions?

I'd been meaning to get a webcam for about a month now, but hadn't yet gotten around to it. Do any of you have recommendations or suggestions? I know my coauthor Paolo would say to buy the cheapest $20 device I can find. But do the higher-resolution cameras add any value?

Also, our default webcam service would be Yahoo! Messenger, which my family and Joyce's family both use. If you'd like to see a Juliet webcast, it's probably good to either get an ID or convince Cliff to sign up for your service of choice.

In any case, please either add comments or send Cliff mail.

Thanks.

Memorial Day Weekend

For those of you complaining about the lack of posts this weekend, here's how Juliet and I spent most of it:

I suspect that I picked up some strange new bug on the plane--I had a fever of 101.3 on Sunday morning, which was gone by Sunday noon. I had one of those "brain loose inside my head" headaches that only aspirin can cure for most of that day. Also, all food tasted wierd--like the parameters in the Matrix had been tweaked just a little bit, so chicken didn't taste like chicken anymore. Anyway, the combination of whatever I was fighting and jet lag made me not the most sociable person this weekend--I'm afraid Ralph and Audrey didn't see me at my best.

On Saturday, we spent some time unpacking, some time marvelling at the job Ralph and Audrey had done repainting our kitchen, and some time visiting the new apartment with Ralph, Audrey, and our friend Jocelyn, who came over to meet Juliet. Sorry, no pictures--I was too spaced out to remember to take any. We did, however, put Juliet into the stroller that Beth and Steve loaned us for the trip. Juliet seemed to really like the stroller experience--despite being closer to the ground, I think she enjoyed the ease of being carted around. The Baby Bjorn is probably more work for her, as she's got to be able to feel the muscle motions of whoever is carrying her.

On Sunday, Joyce and Audrey went shopping for baby supplies at the Manhattan Babies 'r' Us. In addition to bringing back the usual sets of things (diapers, bottle liners, etc.), they also came back with a bouncy swing, which Juliet loves.

I think it's improving her coordination. Also, Juliet seems to be crawling for real these days, and its much easier and neater to feed her baby food than it was only a few days ago.

Sunday evening, our friends Beth, Steve, and Annabel; Richard, Susan, Elaina, and Amy all came by to meet Juliet before going out for dinner. Amy unfortunately had an ear infection, so her parents took turns hanging out with her downstairs while the other parent came up to socialize. Annabel brought a whole set of gifts for Juliet, including a hippo that vibrates and sings "Fur Elise", a tetrahedral plastic molecule, some cool cloth cubes that make different noises when you squish them, and a mobile-like device that looks to me like a surrealist nightmare but I am assured is delightful to babies. Again, I'm sorry I didn't get any pictures due to being spaced out.

Nanny and Grampy left to return to Oregon on Monday morning, so we only got to see them for a weekend, which was far too brief. We're hoping to see them again in Maine this summer, with a more relaxed schedule to enjoy each others company.

Our last big triumph of Monday was making congee! My dad (Lowell) provided the very simple recipe: one cup rice, two cups chicken stock or water, meaty bits to taste, and simmer for two hours, adding water to maintain the same consistency as the simmer boils liquid off. We used bits of Citarella rotisserie chicken (our favorite among Upper West Side rotisserie chickens, having tried them all). Juliet appears to approve.

Arrival at Newark

Customs at Newark airport was relatively smooth--we went to a normal "US citizens" line, handed our packet from the US Consulate in Guangzhou to the customs officer (Mr. Ferrari, who was very nice to us), then were escorted downstairs to a secondary area, where, after waiting about three minutes, another customs officer looked us and Juliet over, then handed us back her US passport. She's apparently provisionally a US citizen, although she still has a Chinese passport. There's still one form (N400 or some such) that we get to fill out to complete the process.

When we got out of the customs area, Audrey and Ralph Farnsworth (that is, Nanny and Grampy) were there to meet us!






We spent a little bit of time blundering around Newark Terminal C before realizing that it has no restaurants outside the secured area. So we took the monorail to Terminal B and found ourselves five seats at Chili's. Staring at an American fast-food menu. Joyce and I split a mushroom-swiss burger, which turned out to be just about right. I was very happy that we got to spend time with Linda, Ralph, and Audrey before Linda caught her flight home to Boston.

Have we mentioned that it was wonderful to have Linda along on the trip with us? Of our many wonderful, talented, and delightful friends (and Linda is all three), Linda gets my vote for "most calm". She's also an experienced baby caregiver by virtue of having twin nephews and a niece. All of which added up to a third pair of hands, a lot of sage advice, and a calming presence in panicked moments throughout the trip. Joyce and I thought that the combination of one experienced and two inexperienced caregivers worked out nicely--we could learn on the job and still have backup for the hard situations.

The Flight Home

It was kind of strange telling Juliet that we were taking her "home", since home is halfway around the world and a place she's never visited before. Nonetheless, she held up very bravely on our connection from Guangzhou to Beijing, and from Beijing back to Newark, New Jersey.

Here are some fun shots from the Beijing airport. First, Windows apparently still crashes in Chinese.


Second, the connecting corridor between Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 had these wonderful bamboo trees growing along its windows, providing shade. Linda called them a "bamboo curtain", for which we chastisted her, since the Cold War is long over.


These shots are also from the walk from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2. Joyce was carrying Juliet in the Baby Bjorn, and with Linda in front, Juliet decided that eating Linda's backpack was the right thing to do.





Linda mentioned in her blog that we hit some impressive turbulence about an hour out of Beijing. I was jolted awake, and one of the overhead compartments sprung open, spraying Joyce and Juliet with orange juice (my guess is that the flight staff were storing the OJ there). It was pretty rough for a few minutes; as rough as I've felt in a commercial aircraft. One thing I don't understand is that the turbulence coincided with the Mongolia-China border, and that as soon as we hit it, we started a long banking turn to starboard that was visible on the trip computers. Did we really hit turbulence, or was it a glitch in the automatic flight control system, making a sudden change to the controls when we switched from one vector to another?

Safely back in New York

And severely jet-lagged. More whenever I wake back up.

The US Consulate

For security reasons, we couldn't take cameras into the US Consulate. My one photo is of the crowd outside the consulate, after everything was done and we were waiting for the buses to take us back to the hotel.

It turns out that the Consulate is no longer next door to the White Swan Hotel. A year ago it moved out into a new development area, to the sixth floor of an anonymous office building. It took us half an hour to drive there by bus. It's not at all clear to me whether the move is due to increased adoption flow, concerns about security (the old consulate was very visible, with obvious American flags; the new one you'd have to know where it was to find it), or both.

Most of the process was waiting, although overall, things were impressively efficient, especially as it appeared to me that at least 50 families were processed today. We waited for the usual security check, which was pretty much like an airport check. Then we sat in a waiting area, showed our kid with a copy of her passport to a clerk to verify that she was in fact present, waited some more, and heard a very gracious and brief speech by one of the consular officials. He noted that Guangzhou is the largest adoption center in the world, that they processed 8,000 adoptions last year and are on their way to far more this year. He also noted that almost all of the adoptees are girls, and that China's demographic trends will make them especially precious in the years to come. And finally, he asked us to "swear or affirm" that all of the written and oral testimony we had given the Consulate was correct. Then that was it--Juliet's Chinese baby passport was returned to us, with a new US immigration visa on one of its pages, along with a sealed envelope to deliver to customs in US.

Tomorrow we fly, first to Beijing, and then to Newark. My understanding is that Juliet becomes a citizen when we touch down on US soil.

Next post in country, insh'allah.

Charlie's Angles they're not

Since it's the last day, we gathered with the other families in our group for the classic "red sofa" photos with our kids.

Here we are setting up.


Tara arrived next.


Given how many takes I had to discard to get this one shot, I can't imagine how kid photographers stay in business.


Juliet makes a shameless grab for attention.


Yay! All three look in the same direction.


Here's all the moms and all the dads with their kids.

Still more capabilities

Today is our last full day in Guangzhou, the day of our visit to the US Consulate.

Juliet began the day by demonstrating a new pose. She's still not quite crawling, but this looks like a pretty good precursor to me.


And here's her reaction to Gerber's apple and chicken.

Dinner for Lin Qing and Minhua

Linda gave me and Joyce the best present we've received this trip: the afternoon off. She took care of Juliet, and we scurried off to shop and rediscover each other. I found it quite a relief--the woman I married, once again paying full attention to me! For a large chunk of the last week and a half, she's been mommy more than my Joyce. It was nice to have her back.

When we returned from shopping, Linda told us that the other two families were taking Lin Qing and Minhua out to dinner at the Silk Road, the French restaurant in the hotel. So we scurried down and met up with them just in time. Here's a couple of photos of the sorbet palate-cleanser between appetizers and entrees, whose presentation was a knockout (see for yourself).



Sorry that the photos are so dark; Joyce disabled the flash to avoid spooking babies. In the first photo, Paul is on the left; Christine is the blur left of the candle, Minhua is the very dark outline right of the candle, and Heidi is on the right (Steve is behind Heidi, and Maeve and Tara are in strollers below the table, so you can't see them). In the second photo, I'm on the left with Juliet, talking (in my fubared Chinese) with Lin Qing.

Over dinner, Lin and I talked a bit; it was nice to get to know her better. She has a nine-year old daughter and lives with her husband in Wuzhao, which is about a five-hour bus ride upriver from Guangzhou. She also hosts an orphan girl with what sounds like a scholarship from Alliance for Children to attend a local college. I fumbled terribly, and eventually failed to explain to Lin that my Aunt Jean is a terrific cook in part because she trained as a chemist. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to explain "chemist" to Lin--the closest I could come was "a person who makes medicines for their job, but not someone who sells them." Which is an indication of how bad my Chinese is, I'm afraid.

More wierd food!

You didn't really think I'd gotten the wierd food pictures out of my system that easily, did you?

First up, we have a fruit store, with a pile of what I think are durian in front. Throughout the last couple of days, I'd been getting whiffs of a noxious rot-like smell, not unlike New York's own unique rotting summer garbage smell. I'd presumed that it came from Guangzhou's sewers, but I was wrong--it actually came from these fruit.

I showed this picture to our facilitator Lin Qing, and she says that this isn't the really evil-smelling fruit. So perhaps I haven't actually found the durian.

Everything is better onna stick:


And lastly, a KFC menu from China!


Joyce and I returned to the Chen Clan Ancestral Hall and bought a tea set that Joyce had admired, then walked back to the eyeglasses market place on Renmin Zhong Lu, where I ended up buying three (3!) pairs of glasses, the most expensive of which was about $55. No pictures of this part of the trip, though, although we passed all of the food while walking.

Juliet, by request

Here's Juliet demonstrating two new skills.


The first is sitting up without support. The day before yesterday, she was tripoding; today she seems to be truly sitting. I find this to be amazingly quick.





The second is not accounting on the abacus, although that would be pretty cool. I'd call this "standing with support". She can do this one-handed, which frees the other hand for assaulting parents.

I don't have photo documentation for the third skill, but Linda reports that Juliet drank a formula bottle by herself. I'm rather proud of this, because only yesterday I was pushing her hands onto the bottle in an attempt to get her to grasp it (instead of flailing around during bottle-feeding).