It's Daughter's birthday today. She turns 4 today.

Unlike most adopted kids, who have the advantage of being able to mark two kinds of days-of-beginning (I was born on X and adopted on X), both of Daughter's special days kind of bracket Christmas, which overshadows everything.

She doesn't seem to mind, though. Any excuse for a looong party is good enough for her, nowadays.

We could all learn something from that.

Party! Cake! Is Barbie coming? She's on the phone(*)! Why isn't she coming?

I'll let you know how the dinner goes.

(*) This is literally true: Daughter got a Barbie phone for Christmas with a computer component... more

We really do have an ordinary suburban family living in an ordinary suburban home.

It's only farm-like in my imagination.

There's something about Christmas that brings out the strange questions in public. Or, well, the questions some of us parents regard as strange. It's the holiday for children, I suppose, and for distant relatives and family friends to catch up, so people switch to the channel in their heads dedicated to intimate... more

It's Christmas. A sweltering hot Christmas, actually. The candy on the gingerbread house has melted in a way nearly completely unlike snow, and I've gotten a sunburn from making a flowerbed as a gift. (Bouquets die, you know.)

One of the odd things for us during the Christmas we spent meeting Daughter was that it was *cold*. That and the slender Santas with jet black eyebrows -- there were lots of them, standing in shop doorways, hovering anxiously and merrily on sidewalks, ringing bells and looking bundled up and maybe a little hungry. I never expected to see quite so many Santas anywhere... more

Well, when I was a young boy...

...I had me them young boy blues....

The harmonica has more to do with my family than you'd think.

The harmonica, like the accordion, is a kind of musical instrument called a ... more

Three years ago today, I was on a bus in the middle of the Chinese countryside with My Audacious Spouse, the Boy (then aged 8) and, uh, my mom. And this strange new creature that wouldn't stop crying. The only baby on the bus who wouldn't stop crying.

Eventually, she did.

It's been getting better every day since.

Most of our photos from that day are a little blurry, but the day was a little blurry, too. ... more

Under a mystifying headline, The Tao is up?? (*groan*), Racialicious reports on an unusual rise in the stock of male Asian personalities.

I've been kind of interested in this ever since a friend of mine got a gig working on ... more

I made more not-really-Chinese cookery last night, and it got some compliments, so I thought, hey, people deserve to know. This is Chao Francais -- chao is Mandarin for "stir fry" and where we get the English word "chow" for food. Francais is from France.

I had some leftover vegetables and fresh thyme from the farm, and I had this idea -- what if I just used Chinese cooking techniques without any Chinese seasonings? And it worked. A Euro-trash stir-fry that doesn't taste like it was made by hippies.

(Whether or not I'd qualify as... more

From elsewhere on the Interwebs comes a reminder not to get too worried about certain things that really are a matter of perspective:

This morning my daughter who was born in China asked me, (blond, non-chinese mother), why daddy (also blond and non-chinese) don’t look like her. This is a question I’ve known would eventually be asked but before I could respond she finished her question by wanting to know why we don’t have long hair like she does.

This waffle iron obviously needs pumpkin, five-spice powder & orange zest before it can lead a meaningful existence.

Today, we had a perfect storm in the kitchen. I stumbled in this morning after a late night rocking a hungry toddler and a small girl with a bad toothache (praying it's not an abscess, since she just got a cap over a bad cavity -- we're telling ourselves it was because she spent her first year in an SWI, and not because we're lax... more

I was remiss, yesterday, in discussing son (son!)'s acquisition of language. I didn't mention his first word after "Mama." (The first is always "Mama.")

Daughter's next first word was "Uh-oh!" which was terribly sweet and funny as long as the fallen object wasn't fragile and priceless (it generally wasn't).

Her little brother's next first word was "Lulu." The dog's name. Generally spoken as "Looooooluhoooooooo!" in a tone of voice not unlike that... more