Endless Bureaucracy

I was going to write a bit about the adoption process and the non-stop paperwork involved, but as I was writing it I was boring myself silly. So I figured I would just summarize it as follows:

• We started in January of 2005
• We had to do a lot of paperwork
• It took a long time
• We had fingerprints taken about 100 times (and had to get them 'updated', even though decades of forensic science has shown that fingerprints don't actually expire)
  
• We have been in the official waiting process since October 2005
  

See - boring. If you want an exciting story, I will tell you about the time I got choked at the Barnes and Noble.

Kim and Mike Decide to Adopt

(The Story You Won't Hear From the Media)

In 1993 I moved to New Jersey from Des Moines (French for "The Moines"). I moved to a leafy town called Summit, New Jersey , where I lived with a chatty chemist and a very funny woman named Katie (who looks like Kate Winslet).

I drove a Hyundai, worked at a soul-less corporation, and had my spleen explode while I was driving through the Holland Tunnel. It sounds more glamorous than it was, but sure, you could say I was living the dream.

One of my friends from BoringCorp (in the interests of anonymity we will call her 'Julie') told me on many occasions that I should meet her sister, the lovely and talented Kim. Julie was convinced that Kim and I were soul mates. Apparently Kim was a 'difficult' child, as was I, and Julie was sure that we would instantly fall in love. I thought that sounded like a fine idea, except I lived in leafy Summit, New Jersey and Julie's sister Kim lived in far off St. Louis.

As fate would have it, Julie and a few of her friends were going to Chicago for a New Year's party and invited me along (the party was dreadful, by the way). Kim was also in Chicago and we met that weekend. Not wanting to miss my chance, I talked to her for over 3 minutes before deciding that she was clearly out of my league.

About a month later, I was invited to a wedding in St. Louis and needed a date. I called Kim and asked her to go with me, and she agreed. It was clear from the moment that she saw me that Kim was attracted to my Niles Crane-like forehead and my strapping 145-pound frame (I had surgery a couple of months before and was still a bit thin).

We dated long-distance for a year and she eventually moved to Hoboken, just across the river from New York. Ten months later she agreed to marry me, and in May 1996 we got married in the Cayman Islands. I am of course very lucky - she could have done much better.

Prior to dating me, Kim's previous boyfriends included a dude with a small head, a long-haired photographer, an old lawyer, and Fenton, Missouri-based furniture king Brook Dubman. So actually, while I am very lucky to be with her, she is pretty lucky that she ended up with me as well.

Shortly after we got married we moved into New York City. I spent much of my free time perfecting my puppetry techniques and Kim avidly followed the NHRA Nitro-Fuel Funny Car Drag Racing circuit, so we didn't know if we would really have time to raise children.

However, we agreed early in our marriage that when we were ready, we wanted to adopt a baby. My Uncle Ron adopted a girl (the darling Amy) around the time that Kim and I started dating, and we had always sort of knew that we would adopt. But as I said, we weren't in any hurry.

We spent the first several years of our marriage enjoying New York and traveling the world. We scaled a glacier in New Zealand, climbed a big mountain in Oregon, and canoed the mighty Big Sugar river in Pineville, Missouri (that's the Mayor and his brother, left).

In late 2003 (not to bring you down, but the story must be told) our great friend Carney died suddenly from bacterial meningitis, and a few months later my dad (famed crimefighter Lee Roy) died after a short but brutal battle with lung cancer.

By this time Kim had been been teaching Sunday School (at 'Church') and became very close with a wonderful girl named DeYan (that's her being nutty, left). DeYan was born in China and is delightful, even though she is the only kid in the world who doesn't think I am hilarious.

It's weird, but the deaths of Carney and my Dad got us talking more and more about becoming parents, and Kim's relationship with DeYan made us look more closely at adopting a baby girl from China.

In the latter part of 2004, we made the decision that we would definitely start the process to adopt a girl from China. In January 2005, we jumped right into the adoption process - we thought we would have a baby in a year. We were off by quite a bit.

Stay tuned for more details of the process, including fascinating tales of paperwork, bureaucracy, and endless fingerprinting (I have radial loops- Kim has tented arches, which everyone agrees is pretty weird).