Memnison Journal

A very good op-end in the NYTimes on adoption; nature versus nurture and the misty past:
I AM not adopted; I have mysterious origins.
I have said that sentence many times in the course of my life as an adopted person. I like it so much I put it into the mouth of a character in [...]

Having a much less immediately lethal form of leukemia and being an adoptive dad of a Chinese girl, this story hits home: a kid in Ohio adopted from China has a nasty version of leukemia, and is in desperate need of a bone-marrow transplant.  There’s this little problem, however, about finding a genetic match from [...]

Today was Mere’s ‘family’ birthday party out at her great-aunt Marlyce’s house in Elgin, and we moved the time up somewhat because of the weather; it was getting slick and messy from sleet and snow.   And also, it looks like Mere is coming down with a cold.  She came home, and moaned and crashed very [...]

No, really.  This is.  A web friend who adopted a young girl from China who is deaf (but has cochlear implants) posted this on her blog, and it took my breath away.    It’s the story of a deaf girl who wants to learn how to play the violin…watch it.  it is about four minutes long, [...]

Panic in various circles over the mistaken notion that ‘Obama’s going to shut down gun shops and confiscate our guns‘.
Various people who were proclaiming Obama’s victory in  OMG terms now doing a ‘never mind’ response.
Dogs are adopting kittens in Jiangmen, Meredith’s home town in China, but you can’t adopt or foster children if you aren’t [...]

From Nico Pitney in HuffPo:
3) John McCain has skipped more votes during this session than any member of the Senate except for Tim Johnson, who had major brain surgery. He hasn’t cast a single vote in five months, since April 9. All of a sudden, McCain is demanding that the presidential race shut down so [...]

More excerpts from the journal, this time from the day we actually adopted Meredith (the day after we got her).  Again, see some pictures of the day on Flickr - the picture below is something the Jiangmen paper later got out of the files of the orphanage when the paper was running that stupid ‘Dick [...]

Today is/was the eighth anniversary of our adoption of Meredith in Guangzhou, China - and it’s a big day around here.  As you may have guessed, she’s the center of the household, and we all love the stuffing out of this wild, brave, wacky child. Below is some material from the Journal for the day [...]

Going back to my response posts,  I want to stress that I never assume that anyone voting against Obama is a racist, or that Republicans are racists, or that either on the Republican ticket is a racist.  I know better.
I’ve lived with serious racists, had racism and sexism used against me and mine (you do [...]

We are trying to trudge through an immense pile of TiVo’d stuff, and still have half the gymanstics and the opening ceeremonies to go through.  A few thoughts:

I can’t imagine who the heck programmed this stuff, but lawzy me, I never knew that the USA audience was so up on nearly naked women - er, [...]

The major vacation expense that we have around here is and has been for a long time Sissy Trips so that the twins can see each other ever so often. This year, there’s been two times - March camping in Kentucky and May for a long weekend camping thing in Georgia (with a brief [...]

Reports from the quake region from Time and from the Associated Press.    Also, side items of a police officer breast feeding orphans, and orphans from a 1976 quake in China reaching out to help these children.
Adoption in China is a new trend. In recent decades, government rules made it difficult, fearing that some people would [...]

A new report out that says that race should be taken into account in a far more direct way in regards to adoptions:
Despite these issues, the new report, written by Susan Livingston Smith, program and project director for the institute, supports interracial adoption. It concludes that the practice “itself does not produce psychological or social [...]

As I have said before, the twins change and grow around each other over time, and this is a short log of their looks (comparative) over time. Meredith Grace (mine) is a little taller and sturdier build than her sister, lost her teeth earlier, has a more tomboyish style, and is left-handed. [...]

AP and the BBC are both reporting that the Vietnamese government just decided to cut off adoptions of Vietnamese orphans to American citizens, closing down contacts with 42 US adoption agencies.  The US Government just put out a report that there was widespread baby-stealing and baby-selling going in in Vietnam for the ‘U.S. market’, so [...]