Wrapping up the questions

God, do you all hate the question answering, or what?  The lack of comments is making me feel self-conscious.  Are the answers too personal?  Too stupid?  Are you all still annoyed I can’t discuss the Very Big Thing?

Let me see if I can wrap these bad boys up today:

Lisa asks:

I’ll ask one that you can answer quickly-or expand on if you choose What are your current top 5 CDs?

I haven’t purchased much music since my raver days when I was too cool for radio.  I probably buy 2-3 CDs a year.   So this is what I have been listening to this year, though it is probably horribly out of date and uncool:

1.) Madeleine Peyroux Careless Love.  This never ever gets old for me.  I see she has a new CD so I may have to invest in that one too.

2.) We have been listening to a Chinese kids’ CD a lot.  It is very catchy. I bought it at Walmart.  Apparently, it was very popular last year and it features a Tibetan (?) family singing.  The only non-characters on the cover say Xin Tong Yao Jing Dian Er Ge.   I tried googling & Baiduing it and had no luck.  I will ask our Chinese tutor to see if she can help me find a link for it.

3) Bruce Springsteen We Shall Overcome the girls like this one and it doesn’t make me want to claw my eyes out.

4) that is it.  I think I might buy the Feist CD soon.  You know, the one from the Ipod commercial.

Ann asks:

Can you post the link to the online group you mentioned earlier for families with bio and adopted kids?

I don’t really read it so I don’t know if there is anyone still posting there:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BioandChinese/

Alison asks:

Have you started talking about adoption with L (and/or M?) Will you use a lifebook or just do it off the cuff?

We mention adoption casually quite often, so M knows what we are talking about.  I have a little photo album for L with pictures of the family in it (a duplicate of one I sent to china in her care package), I have added photos of her nannies too.  When we look at it/read it (it has a very brief narrative on each page) we talk about the nannies and China. 

I do plan to do a lifebook.  I started writing one but since I am the queen of procrastination, I never finished it.  I think we will probably have several different ones for different ages, I was working on the 3-5 year old version. 

May asks:

I don’t know if you’ve answered this before, but did you get the video camera, camera or answer to the questions you sent in the care package?

We did recieve both disposable cameras back, but not the video camera.  I wonder if they ever recieved it, because I didn’t include it on the customs paperwork and maybe it got confiscated.  Another family who traveled to L’s orphanage a few months after us sent a video camera and recieved it with 20 minutes of video.  We were fortunate that they shared it with us so we can see the inside of the baby’s rooms (they look identical to the ones in L’s photos).  There is also a few moments of footage of L’s favorite (we think) nanny.  We also got to see how the caregivers were interacting with the babies and it was very reassuring.  I am so thankful to have it. 

We recieved the questions back from our guide when we got to china.  They were already translated into English, which was somewhat annoying to me because we never got the original.  Also, there were a number of questions that were skipped on the answer sheet, so I don’t know if the guide removed them or the orphanage never answered them.

Finally, Lisa asked a long questions that I am gong to summarize you can read the original here:

Why is the waiting list to adopt from China so long if there are still children left in the orphanges?  Do some kids spend their entire lives in orphanages?

No one really knows the answers to these questions.  There are definitely some kids who spend their entire childhoods in orphanages in China, disabled and not disabled.   

There are a number of theories about why the waiting list is so long and why the Chinese government changed the rules to further restrict the number of potential adoptive parents.  One of the more prominant theories is that China does not want to get the kind of bad press that South Korea got regarding it’s international adoption program when they hosted the olympics, so they are reducing the number of children in the program.   China also says there are fewer babies available now because it is developing economically.  Whether or not that is true, I can’t say.

 The vast majority of parents want to adopt non-special needs, very young babies.  There are too many parents for that queue, so China changed the rules to get the parents that they consider to be better qualified (health, money, married etc).  They have also changed rules during the longer wait to encourage parents to consider the special needs kids because the wait is (usually) shorter. 

We can’t really know what is going on inside China’s orphanages.  In L’s small orphanage, we believe almost all the children are adopted by age 2 (as we were told by the nannies).  Either that or they are moved to another facility because there do not appear to be older children there.  Some big orphanages have many older children.  There are also children who enter orphanages at older ages who are more difficult to place due to special needs or simply their ages.

It is a complicated question.