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Published: October 2nd 2010
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Greetings Friends!
We are all about the business of settling in with Baby!
The jet lag day-night inversion continues but is slowly beginning to give way to re-entrainment into Mountain Standard Time. Baby Julia is having a great time... in the middle of the night!
If little 11 month old Julia could post a blog entry to cover the past 24 hours, she would title it:
“3AM. PARTY AT MY CRIB!”
Yes indeed. After getting a restful nap from about 11pm to 1am, she decided it was time to get this house rockin! By 3:30 am, she was belly laughing and giggling in the face of my best attempts at “sleepy baby” techniques and by that point the kids were downstairs having breakfast with Shannon.
Baby decided around dawn it was time for sleeping. Suffice it to say that by high noon, our day had finally begun in earnest. Gotta love that jet lag.
Every day will get better though.
We got out and about in the afternoon though with Sweet Emma’s honest excitement to visit her teacher Mrs. McQueen and classmates. Joshua quickly got on board with this and decided that paying a visit to
his teacher Mrs. Walker and classmates was a grand idea too! Consequently, we were honored to have just a few brief minutes in each class at the end of the day for Joshua and Emma to touch base with their teachers and momentarily show off Baby Julia to their wonderfully receptive classmates. What great kids and teachers!
We returned and got some fun playtime in the backyard just letting Julia take in the new sensory experience of Colorado. As we played in the shaded back yard this afternoon, I realized that Julia has never ever in her whole sweet life seen the bright sunlight until now. What a shame!
After 3 weeks of travel across thousands of miles of China from its North to its South, not once did we experience a bright clear sunny day. As I’ve described to you in prior posts (see The Big Day from 9/15 for photographic examples), the air pollution in China is extraordinary. Our worst days of nasty smog in Denver don’t compare to the daily baseline across China. The closest to a bright sunny day was our first day in Zhengzhou which allowed some great pictures of a city tower
as we drove away from the airport there but even that day was hazy.
In any case, in talking to another Denver family in our travel group tonight, they confirmed that their little girl seemed sensitive to the bright high altitude Colorado sunlight too.
It strikes me like a story line from a dreary futuristic science fiction novel that we live in an age where significant portions of the human race have never seen the sun in all its bright glory.
Aside from that cheery reflection, Baby Julia
loved taking the backyard baby swing for a sentinel ride. A good time was had by all as Joshua’s best friend Jack came over and they reveled in getting to finally play baseball together after a painful 3 week hiatus.
We ended the day by having our first real normal family dinner with just the 5 of us. After our wonderful extended family feast with Shannon’s family last night, tonight was a small but cozy affair, reminding us of the value of family and simple moments.
Baby Julia seems quite taken with her new high chair and happily makes progress with eating more independently every day.
She is a
sweet little baby and now that we are back home in the nest, it strikes me even stronger that
we are falling more and more deeply in love with this little girl with each and every passing day! Many of you have kindly related that Baby Julia seems like a natural, almost predestined, fit for our family. We couldn’t agree more.
It seems counter to the laws of biology and genetics but adoption is, at its heart, a most magical thing to behold. Having witnessed several adoption success stories among close friends and patients by outside observation, I must say that seeing it now at least initially from the inside, there is a transformative change within the heart that feels just a bit beyond description.
I think this change in essence occurs in how we see each other; With our shallow eyes, our stereotypes, our expectations and fears, versus the rare experience where we find ourselves seeing with the pure heart which grew within each of us before all the roughness of life inevitably dinged and dirtied it up. Adoption has turned out to be for us one of those rare experiences, unexpectedly reassuring
about the connectedness which underlies all humanity.
And life is rough indeed. There is misery and suffering aplenty wherever we look in our world, with more types of poverty and abuse happening to countless millions right now than we can humanly wrap our minds around. To deny this is to take part in its propagation. But there are times when we’re afforded a glimpse of just
maybe how
God sees
us, instead of how
we see
us. Times when we see those around us with the unblemished heart and not the worldly mind.
The God who plainly and clearly told us to
Love One Another (not fight, subjugate, colonize, trample, abuse, misuse, stereotype, break or fear one another) is the same curious God who gave us the critical riddle that to deny the least among us is to deny the One who created us. We are all connected in some magical way which cannot be explained. When I look into Julia’s beautiful little baby face, I no longer see Asian eyes or olive skin, but I see
my daughter through and through.
There is much in this world which defies easy explanation in both good ways and
bad. Adoption stories are not always happy rosy yarns but they do mostly turn out to be strong examples of the good over the bad.
How can it possibly be that a malnourished orphan girl born with a heart defect and the wrong gender in a polluted industrial city on literally the other side of the world and found lying all alone in a train station could feel so right in our home and, more importantly, in our hearts? Born in a place so foreign and far away that I still struggle to even correctly pronounce her given name there and yet I claim we’ve always known her? Is it wishful thinking? As a father, as a son, a husband, a pediatric physician, a published biological researcher, even as a former NASA rocket scientist trained in the logical discipline of aerospace engineering, I have to say NO. It is not wishful thinking. It is
real. And it really doesn’t matter that it cannot be explained or defended it in the court of logic.
I can only speak from my own experience, and admittedly, I cannot provide a satisfying natural explanation, but this little girl has in some eternal
way always been a part of our
family. As we got closer to her actual adoption day, I could sense a certain personality, a particular feel of what this little person was like. With only a few JPEG images and sterile biometric descriptors, such an impression was unfounded and speculative at best. But to meet this little person and get to know her more each day, I have to admit she is a match to what I knew she would be. It should surprise me but for some reason it doesn’t.
Even as I offer all this, I can have no expectation of agreement among those who hear it, as I must acknowledge the unprovable and illogical nature of claiming a Providential aspect to adoption. And yet I have to stand by the impression by simple observation from seeing what I’m seeing from where I sit.
This little girl is now home and we couldn’t be luckier or happier. What once was unknowingly lost in our 5 hearts is now found.
JC
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shannon
non-member comment
beautiful!
Beautiful, beautiful post! So happy for all of you! Welcome home Campbells! Mallory was so excited to see Julia and Emma at school yesterday. Can't wait to see all of you and meet Julia soon!