We look at pictures from the orphanage

I woke up early and Maia followed me out at about 5:30am.

"Do you want to see photos of Kazakhstan and of when you were in the orphanage?" I asked her. I had been looking at photos.

"Yes," she said.

So I brought some up on the computer. They were from our second visit to see her--April 30, 2004.




"Do you remember this place?" I asked her. "This is the orphanage. This is where you used to live."

She tried to say the word, orphanage.

"Orphanage," I said.

"Look," she said, pointing to a shoe that she had been wearing.

"They're cute, aren't they?"

"I was a baby, yeah?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "Do you remember this? You were really good at it."

Between the first and second times we saw Maia, Kristina bought an educational game from a store in Shymkent. It's a sorting toy--you have to stack concentric rings on a cone. You have to do it in order of size for the rings to fit.




At the orphanage, Kristina took the game out, showed it to Maia, and then took off the rings.

Maia focused in on the toy immediately, trying out different rings on the cone, and staying with it until she got it solved. Her concentration was remarkable. I videotaped her working with the toy, and the videotape shows that she stayed at it for more than 14 minutes straight, repeating the stacking process several times. Maia stopped only because Kristina brought out some raisins for her.



Kristina had been thrilled with Maia's effort and her success in stacking the rings properly.

We still have the ring game.

"Yes," she said.



"Is that Cheetos?" she wanted to know. Maia is a big fan of Cheetos.

"No, that's a bag of raisins," I said. "Do you remember them? You didn't like it at all when Mommy gave some to that girl."

If you speed up the videotape of the scene, you see Maia's hand darting in and out of the bag of raisins and then up to her mouth. The staff made us stop giving raisins to her because they said the raisins were too hard for her to digest.

She used to carry things around in her mouth--books, by a corner, a little stuffed dog that we got for her, by its ear. She used her mouth as a kind of stash and as a third hand in order to avoid having to put things down. I think putting things down was probably a risky thing to do at the orphanage.

A photo came up of Kristina and me with another couple that had adopted.

"Auntie Sandy," she said.

"Well, it kind of looks like Auntie Sandy but that isn't her."

"That's Anna," Maia said, indicating the child of the third couple in our group.

Anna is a friend of Maia's from hula. "No, that isn't Anna. I forget her name, but that isn't Anna."

"I wanna watch Batman," she said. She had gotten tired of the photos.

And so we stopped.

She looked so little and serious when she said goodbye to us that day.



We adopted her a week later--May 7, 2004. We had many ups and downs in between.

John, March 31, 2006

A face in the dark

One day, I picked Maia up after preschool. She was then a little over three. I had stayed home because I was a little sick and also because I wanted to do some more work on a home improvement project. Mainly I just didn't want to go to work.

I like taking Maia out to do things because it's fun to show her how things work.

That day I decided to take her to the car wash after school. Kristina's car was dirty, and I figured that riding in the car through the car wash tunnel would be fun for Maia.

There was a line of cars waiting to go through the tunnel. Maia was in her car seat in the back and was being very quiet. In the rear view mirror, I could see that she was playing with the little nub of her left ear lobe.

"What's wrong, Maia?" I asked.

"I lost my ear," she said.

Maia is missing almost all of her left outer ear. There is no ear canal, just a smooth spot on the side of her face where the ear canal should be.

Birth defects are a legacy of the Soviet occupation of Kazakhstan--the Soviets used it as an industrial dump and nuclear testing ground.

"Does that make you feel sad?" I asked her.

"Yes," she said.

"It makes me feel sad, too," I said.

Kristina and I had used the internet to look for medical resources for addressing the problem and had discovered a clinic in California that specializes in the repair of problems like Maia's. But a child has to be 5 before the work can be started. Any younger and the prosthetic ear is too large or would be outgrown.

"We will try to do something about it, sweetness, but we will have to wait for a year or two till you get older."

She was still staring off into space.

"Is there anything you want to ask me about it?"

"No," she said.

I know that the ear weighs on her and that we need to talk with her about it.

The ear is all wrapped up in the adoption so that makes it harder. Parents in Kazakhstan must give written explanations to the State of why they have abandoned children. Maia's ear was the reason that was cited by her natural parents. They never took her home. She spent her first two months in a hospital. After that, she was in the "Baby House" in Shymkent until we took her home. She didn't leave it except for two visits to the hospital for a respiratory infection.

We've talked to Maia about Kazakhstan, used the word, "adoption," and shown her pictures of the orphanage. But I don't think any of it has sunk in yet. A birth defect, being abandoned and the linkage between the two is a lot to ask a little girl to absorb.

The next night it fell to me to get Maia to bed.

We read some books, and then she was ready to sleep.

"Eye down with me, Daddy," she asked. She can't say els yet, so that's the way "lie down" comes out.

I turned out the light and lay down next to her.

"I can't see your face," she said.

"Your eyes will grow used to the dark, sweetness. Then you'll see it."

I felt her fingers on my face.

Kristina turned on a light in a room down the hall, and some of the light filtered in.

Maia looked at me and smiled.

***

This picture was taken on May 1, 2004. This was the third time we saw Maia. I took this picture as part of a series that I emailed to a doctor in Seattle, Washington for his opinion of the ear. The series is the worst set of pictures I've ever taken of her. Maia was then a little less than 21 months old.

John, March 28, 2006

Maia teaches me role play

About a week ago, I got a new pair of running shoes, and Maia has been pestering me about getting a pair for her like mine. Yesterday, I wore them all day, and so the thought lay heavy on her mind.

Today, it was rainy. Since going to the park was out of the question (that's what she and I usually do on Sunday), the three of us went to shoe stores to see if we could find a pair of shoes for her "like Daddy's."

We finally did in the boys' section of K-Mart. She had seen some Spiderman shoes earlier at Payless and had declared a marked preference for those. We finally ended up with some super-hero like running shoes that have race cars on the sides, zippers (the Spiderman ones had laces only) and lights that turn on when you walk.

"Hello, Batman," she said.

This was at home. I was sitting at my desk in the livingroom, and she had her new shoes on. Since they hadn't touched the ground outdoors yet, that was okay.

"Hi."

"No, go like this--'Hello, 'Piderman.'"

"You're Spiderman? And I'm Batman?" She nods.

"Okay--Hello, Spiderman," I say, and she shakes my hand in a heroic, superhero kind of way.

"See you later, Batman," she says, trooping off down the hall.

She had a rendezvous with the toilet. Even superheroes have to go.

John, March 26, 2006

Maia's hair band

This is a pic of the hair band that we found holding up Maia's top knot on May 5, 2004, during our train ride from Shymkent to Almaty. The director of the orphanage had let us take her out to be examined by an American doctor.

The hair band is a cross section of a bicycle inner tube. I think a razor blade had been used to make it. The compression stretched out the bottom side of the inner tube as it was cut so that the bottom side ended up a little fatter than the top side.

It's extremely strong and durable.

I like to think that she is like that. Strong and resilient.

John, March 24, 2006

Maia in her hat

This is one of my favorite pictures of Maia. It comes from early May, 2004, just before we adopted her. She was then two and a half months shy of being two years old. The photo was taken outside our hotel in Almaty, Kazakhstan. You can see Maia's impish personality from this picture, and her charisma. She's a beautiful and funny child.

Maia has always loved clothes, and this was the first outfit that we got for her.

At the orphanage, she had to share clothes with other children. There was a communal laundry, and nothing was really hers. I remember the third time we went to see her, they had dressed her up in all of this finery, and she spent a longish time admiring her shoes.

When they let us take her out of the orphanage in Shymkent to visit a doctor in Almaty, they dressed her in those same shoes. I took those shoes for Maia when we brought her back to the orphanage from Almaty, along with the sturdy rubber band that had been used to put her hair up in a top knot. On the train on the way to Almaty, I had examined the rubber band and had realized that it was a cross section of a bicycle inner tube. From the markings, it looked like someone had used a razor blade to slice the inner tube in sections. I kept the band as a symbol both of the poverty of the orphanage and also of the ingenuity of its people. When she's older, it will be something for Maia to touch that came with her from the orphanage.

John, March 23, 2006

ps Thanks to Raghunath Rao for instructing me on how to post pictures.

A white lie

I was working on my laptop at the small desk in my mother-in-law's livingroom tonight, when Maia came out in her dinosaur pajamas. We are staying there because our house is being remodelled.

"Come sleep by me, Daddy," Maia asked. She sleeps on a futon next to our bed.

I followed her back to our bedroom and lay on one side of her. Kristina lay on the other side.

"Ouch, Daddy," she said. I had given her a good night kiss. "Your hair poke me."

"I'm sorry, sweetheart," I said.

There was quiet for a while.

"What's that smell," she wanted to know. "Is that you, Daddy?"

I laughed. I thought she was talking about the spaghetti we had had for dinner. I hadn't brushed my teeth yet, as she had collected me before I had gotten to that point.

"Soap," she said. "I smell soap, Daddy." It was from my shower. Which I had gotten to.

"Go to sleep, sweetie," I said.

I could hear it raining very hard. We've had several days of rain. After a time, it died down.

I thought she had gone to sleep, so I slowly got up to go.

"Where you going, Daddy," she wanted to know.

I laughed at being caught.

"Are you going to the computer?" she asked. She says it, "com-poo-tah,"

"Yes, sweetie."

"And you not going to office?"

"No, sweetie," I said. "I'm going to be right outside."

She let me go then.

Kristina came out after Maia had fallen asleep. I left shortly after that to go to the gym. About a week ago, I had a dream in which I had had a stroke. Actually, it was worse than that--my field of vision clouded on the right side, and I couldn't do anything about it. It was as though the stroke were coming, like an accident in slow motion, and there was nothing I could do about it. The dream was so real that when I woke up, I was sure that I couldn't see.

I think Maia knew that I had been fibbing to her about staying home and that she forgave me for it.

This pic was taken in July, 2005, just before her third birthday.

John, March 23, 2006

My Mother's birthday party

We held my Mother's birthday party on Friday, March 17th, even though her birthday isn't until the 20th.

It was the only day that we could all be together. Maia, Kristina and I flew in on Thursday night and stayed with my brother, Mark, and his family.

Maia was a very good girl during lunch. It was at a fancy place, so she really couldn't run around, and she didn't but once or twice.

This morning, I had gotten up and then went back into our suite to go to the bathroom. She was sitting up in bed (the three of us had slept in the same bed), so I climbed back in with her. She lay down and we pulled the covers up over ourselves.

It gives me so much pleasure to take care of her and to let her take care of me.

I wonder sometimes how she'll be when she figures out what happened--whether she'll still let me take care of her. I hope so.

We have spaghetti

I'm a lawyer with my own firm, and my wife, Kristina, does part time work for me.

Today was one of her days in the office, so we went out to dinner.

Maia was in her car seat when I got outside to the car--Kristina had just picked her up from preschool. Maia was fussy as she often is after preschool and before dinner.

"I wanna go on the restaurant," she said, beginning to cry, as we turned up Alakea Street.

We had been talking about going out to a restaurant for dinner. Maia's crying as we turned up Alakea Street had seemed to come out of nowhere.

" 'To the restaurant', Maia," I corrected her.

More crying. "Don't cry, we're going to go. Where would you like to go?" I asked.

More histrionics.

"How about Zippy's?" I asked, making a right turn onto King Street from Alakea for Zippy's. I know that she likes spaghetti there. Mostly because of the garlic bread. "Misgetti," she calls it.

"Yay, Zippy's!" she said.

"Yay, Zippy's!" I said.

She was happy, I was happy, Kristina was happy, and we all stayed that way through dinner.

At the time that this happened, I thought it was just a tantrum. It was only writing this that I put it together--Alakea is the street that we take to go home from my office. Maia has an extremely good spatial memory. When we turned up Alakea, it must have looked like we were going home. If we had kept on going up Alakea, we would have been headed home; when we turned onto King Street, it was clear that we weren't going home.

I need to remember that when she cries, it's probably for a reason. Especially when the crying doesn't appear to have any reason at all.

John, March 10, 2006

Maia, the comedian

She's always been a comic. She likes to make faces and to make people laugh. She makes herself laugh, too.

Just after she turned two, I took Maia and my mom to a McDonald's. Maia wrinkled up her face around her nose, and that made my mom laugh because it looked so funny. For the next 15 minutes, Maia played with my mom that way, making her laugh again and again with her wrinkled up nose. My mom called it her "funny nose face."

At about the same time, we discovered that Maia could mimic a kung fu fighter. She'd tense up all her muscles, and grimace, and make herself shake just like the kung fu fighters when they're righteously outraged in those old Run Run Shaw films. Everyone would laugh. "Do kung fu, Maia," we'd ask, and she'd do it and repeat it for as long as we wanted to laugh.

I hope she keeps that. Kind of a Lucille Ball, Elle DeGeneres talent for comedy.

This is a pic from about the time of the visit to Micky D's--October, 2004. I had been taking pics of her, and she wrinkled up her face at me.

Maia blows bubbles

This morning, Maia went outside in her "big girl" shoes, favorite T-shirt, and panties to blow soap bubbles. She calls that T-shirt her "baseball" (not her "baseball shirt," just her "baseball") because it has a large white ball on the front of it.

Maia has always had a thing about bubbles. Her other favorite T-shirt is her Paris shirt. She likes it, she said, because it has bubbles on it. But she can't stand bubbles in her orange juice and will refuse to drink it if it has bubbles clustering around the sides of the glass. Has to have them all spooned out.

I took a photo of her and will put it up if I can figure out how to do that.

Once someone asked me why we would want to shoulder the costs and burdens of raising a child someone else had brought into the world.

Trying to specify exactly what Maia has brought to our lives is like trying to weigh a bubble. You have to be there, watching her blow bubbles in the carport before preschool in her baseball and big girl shoes.

Why I'm here

My wife and I adopted a beautiful little girl on May 7, 2004. I want to create a record for her of our thoughts about her, and of things that have happened since she has been with us.

That's why I'm here.

This pic is from May 28, 2004--about a week after we got back.

John, March 6, 2006.