Anticipating Gunner

Later this morning (Friday) we meet Gunner in person for the first time. It's a little before four o'clock in the morning and I can't sleep. Part of it is the ongoing effects of jet lag, but part of it is the combination of excitement and terror about meeting our new son. It's funny how our "normal" is defined by the world in which we happen to grow up. Yet my own children's world, the one I'm shaping for them, is going to be foreign to me. It's a strange feeling.

Surprise!

This is as good a time as any to share this photo. Robin is about 16 weeks along now, due in September. We found out a couple weeks after accepting our referral. Surprise!

Safe in the Air, Safe in Japan

We made it!

From Sunday to Monday we spent fourteen hours in the air during which we, as a family, consumed four feature-length films, six children's stories, ten meals, three hours of Leapster2 gameplay, four hours of Japan Airlines video gameplay (mostly Calvin), an hour studying the Boeing 777 safety card (that was Nicol), three hours of Disney channel, three magazine articles, and twenty hours of sleep (not at all uniformly distributed), all interspersed with periodic treks up and down the aisles and visits to the lavatory.

Calvin in the zone

To our surprise and relief, there was no whining, crying, or complaining. We even had a few measures we didn't have to deploy, like the read-to-me books on our Nook Color, a couple card games, and a huge bag of candy. The kids were in great moods the entire flight!

Calvin began to show the signs of a weary traveler while going through customs. But having a wailing three-year-old gets you expedited service in a lot of places, and Japan is no exception. Nicol, on the other hand, is a champion traveler. She had nothing but smiles the entire trip. Her excitement is exhausting but also contagious. She's a great influence on Calvin, who is often overwhelmed by the blitz of activity around him. Nicol sees the fun in everything.

Here's a brief anecdote from the airport about Japanese efficiency: A mere thirty seconds after walking through customs with what we thought was all our luggage, the airport paging system announced that they were looking for me. My parents, waiting for us in the lobby, heard the announcement before we got to them. It turns out I had left one piece of luggage on the carousel. An airport official whisked me back to the other side of the customs gate so I could retrieve it. I couldn't help but think that if I'd been so absent-minded at JFK, one of two scenarios would play out: the first is that I would get my luggage a week later, after it had been thoroughly inspected and run through various bomb/drug/cigar-sniffing machines. The second is that I'd be arrested. I certainly could not imagine a U.S. airport notifying me of forgotten luggage before I'd even left the airport.

Robin on the balcony of my parents' house

A minivan was our ride home, and while the kids were excited to play with their grandparents at their house in Ichihara, we all crashed by 8p local time. It turns out the typical pattern for travelers from the U.S. to Japan is to wake up at three o'clock in the morning after their first night here. Robin and I tapped our deepest desires for sleep to break this pattern, but Calvin and Nicol were not so strong. They were up and ready to go very early, and we finally released them from their room when we heard my parents stirring a little after five o'clock. We stayed in bed.

For our first excursion into the local neighborhood later that morning, we strolled up the bike/jogging path just outside my parents' house, passing a row of cherry blossom trees that are expected to bloom any day now. Some isolated trees are already blooming.

Calvin on the walking path across the street

A row of cherry blossom trees

Nicol and Calvin in front of a cherry blossom tree already in bloom

What I call the rocket slide

We continued on to a nearby playground where our children joined other kids from my parents' missionary team. It was a beautiful, cloudless day, the temperatures a warm sixty degrees. The park was full of children climbing on an assortment of playground sets. Calvin and Nicol took over this rocket slide, Nicol declaring that she was going to go down it a hundred times, and Calvin experimenting with different sliding techniques with the aim of achieving maximum speed. They played their hearts out until lunchtime, after which Calvin went to bed for a nap and Nicol watched a movie. After her movie, Nicol also put herself to bed for a little rest.

They both awoke from their naps at five o'clock the next morning.

Going for a ride

As we sit here at JFK airport preparing to board our plane for Japan, this is what I've been thinking.

Every now and then people make decisions that remind me of that feeling you get right after leaping off of a diving board for your first dip into a pool. Perfectly dry, you travel through the air and sort of wonder about the decision you've just made.

Sure, the pool's clear, cool water looked inviting as you approached the edge of the platform; and it's a warm, sunny day, perfect for a swim. But now, as your movement upward is overcome by the force of gravity and you're briefly suspended in the air, neither rising nor falling, you think, I wonder how cold that water is? Maybe I should wade into this. And how clean is it? Look at all the people reading and sunbathing in the lounge chairs. That sure looks relaxing. Maybe I didn't really need to do this. But it's too late. There is no changing your mind. The decision you made a second ago when you launched yourself from stability has set into motion a series of events that will transpire with considerable certainty. You will briefly fly through the air. Gravity will pull you toward the earth. You will hit the water at about 30 mph (I like the high-dive). You will get wet. So there in mid-air, as you begin to fall, you think, nothing I can do now but brace myself!

I've gotten this feeling many times in life. Choosing a college, accepting a job offer, putting a ring on a certain young woman's finger, then putting another ring - one signifying a deeper promise - on that same finger several months later.... Obviously I think all those decisions were good ones. But each time, once the decision in my head became a public commitment to another person (or people), I felt an overwhelming sense that I was no longer in control. I'd become a passenger of life, maybe having chosen a destination and a route, but far from being in the driver's seat (which may explain all the detours). This is how I've felt since accepting the referral for baby Gunner.

Back to the diving board analogy. I've never regretted splashing into the water after a dive. I love that feeling, and I've always put enough thought into it that no matter how cold the water is, I know I'll enjoy it when I'm surrounded by it. But after all these years jumping into pools on hot, summer days, I've never shaken that feeling. Now I'm suspended in the air. In a few days, I'll brace myself.

Preparing for Korean Cuisine

This morning I discovered that eating Korean food makes me wake up with a headache and reeking of garlic. Last night we had a small, celebratory dinner at a Korean restaurant a few minutes from our house. We ate gun mandoo (pork and pork dumplings, sort of) and sushi for appetizer, then for main course we had bulgogi (ribeye), joomulback galbi (prime short ribs) and bibimbap (indescribable). It was topped off with a dessert whose name I didn't get, but it was a bowl of sweet, sugary liquid with rice floating in it. It tasted better than it sounds. In fact, everything was tasty, but I'm concerned we won't have the luxury of ordering by pictures and numbers when we're in Korea.

Oh, there was something called soju served throughout the dinner. I drank a lot of it. This is the likeliest cause of the headache.

App for that?

Does this Blogger app for the iPhone work? (Can you tell I've deviated from the list?)


- Posted using BlogPress from Robin's iPhone

"To Do" List

For your amusement. This is the list of tasks we wrote down for ourselves last week in anticipation of Monday's phone call. The idea was to get them all done before boarding the airplane Sunday. Funny what makes it onto these lists:

1. Make hotel reservations for Seoul
2. "Buy" plane tickets
3. Organize NCAA March Madness pool
4. Make sleeping arrangements for Brooklyn
5. Paint bedroom trim
6. Install bathroom mirror
7. Install shower glass
8. Install bathroom baseboards
9. Buy and install soap dispenser
10. Assemble crib
11. Find crib
12. Buy replacement parts for crib (added two days later)
13. Watch NCAA basketball
14. Plan a celebration dinner at the local Korean restaurant
15. Clean house
16. Set up Gunner's blog
17. Install safety gate at top of stairs
18. Prepare airplane-friendly kid entertainment
19. Download Nook books
20. Clean guest room
21. Arrange dog walker
22. Watch more NCAA basketball
23. Repair A/C duct
24. Plan food for trip
25. Get Nicol’s homework
26. Borrow Leapster games
27. Fix shower grout
28. Buy and install doorknobs
29. Buy and install door hinges
30. Strip and paint doorway
31. Do taxes (while watching NCAA basketball)
32. Set up high chair
33. Wash Gunner’s clothes
34. Buy diapers, wipes, baby food
35. Clear out chokable toys from playroom
36. Clean car
37. Buy booster seat for Calvin
38. Install baby seat for Gunner
39. Fly to Korea

Travel Plans

Here is a brief run down on our travel plans. In a later post I'll reveal Robin's secrets on how she got all our flights using frequent flyer miles when, in fact, we are not frequent flyers. But for now, here's the important stuff:

1. Saturday, March 26 - drive to Brooklyn, NY for an overnight stay.
2. Sunday, March 27 - depart from JFK airport for Tokyo, Japan.
3. Monday, March 28 - arrive at Narita Airport in Tokyo, then ride the train to Chiba to stay with my parents for a couple days.
4. Thursday, March 31 - depart from Narita airport for Seoul, South Korea. Arrive in Seoul a couple hours later.
5. Friday, April 1 - meet Gunner Jin face-to-face! Go back to our hotel (without him) an hour later. Hope we made a good first impression!
6. Monday, April 4 - day of "The Transfer." I don't know what else to call it. As far as we're concerned, this is the day Gunner is brought into our family, though technically we are only considered "temporary guardians" at this point.
7. Tuesday, April 5 - back on the plane, thanks for staying, hope you enjoyed South Korea, now get out! The Korean program does not want us loitering about in their country with our new baby. I will try to explain this when I better understand it myself.
8. Tuesday, April 5 - in a flight that seems to defy the space-time continuum, we arrive at JFK in New York only five minutes after leaving our connection in Tokyo. We hope to drive our family of five straight home from here.

Hanging out in Japan for a couple days while en route to Seoul may sound like poor planning given the recent seismic, tidal, and nuclear disasters that have struck the nation. We are not going into this casually. But it turns out all the available flights took us through Narita anyway. The option to acclimate to the new time zone in the company of my parents, who have been living in Japan for a year now and dearly miss their grandkids, is more appealing than that of hauling our two kids from one 14-hour flight onto another bound for Seoul without giving them a day or two outside the confines of an aerodynamic tin can. On the surface, it probably is a bad idea. In the deeper context of our family's growth, we hope it's a wonderful, memorable trip.

Phone Call

Yesterday we got the phone call inviting us to South Korea to meet and bring home this little guy. Isn't he cute?

Although we've been waiting for this call for a few months - you could even say almost a year - the event has initiated a whirlwind of chaos in our home that will last until... well, until all of our kids are enrolled in Summer's Best Two Weeks? I hope you enjoy following along on this adventure over the next couple of weeks as we fly over, with our five-year-old and three-year-old in tow, to meet baby Gunner Jin.