When Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Jim Higgins interviewed me over the phone for his July piece on weblogs, we discovered our shared involvement in adoption. He’s pointed me to Rainbow Kids, a self-described “online international adoption publication”. The current issue has a review article on the common medical problems encountered in children being adopted from abroad; and a celebratory personal adoption story from Higgins himself on the adoption of his daughter Zoe.

I was two weeks into fatherhood before I remembered that all babies were not Chinese. That’s

because I spent the first two weeks of February in a southeast China hotel with my wife Karen

and our new daughter Zoe, and 10 other American families and their new Chinese daughters. If

you want to imagine the atmosphere, think of your freshman year in a college dorm, only you’re

married, your dorm is as swanky as the Pfister Hotel, you’ve just been handed a tiny 10-month-old

swaddled in three hand-knit sweaters (even though it’s 60 degrees outside), and you’re surrounded

by 1.6 million Chinese people, many of whom haven’t seen an American in person before…

[So far in browsing their site though, I can’t find anything approximating our experience of adopting our daughter from the exotic state of …Maine.]