ever-fixed mark

A few months ago, the “birth story” meme seemed to be percolating through the blogosphere. Some of those birth stories referenced previously posted birth stories, and I spent several hours reading about back labor, pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes, HELPP, PROM, emergency hospital admissions, loony doulas, and Dan Rather sightings during labor. At first I was a bit sad that I didn’t have my own birth story to convey, but by the time I finished reading the fourth or fifth one I was basically congratulating myself for having the foresight to adopt, because this was some scary stuff. I mean, Dan Rather? Isn’t there some kind of Old World superstition about the ill effects to your child if you look upon an old anchorman’s face while your baby’s in utero?

And I do have my own delivery story, if not a birth story. Yesterday was the two-year anniversary of Aitch’s arrival in our lives, the odiously-termed “Gotcha” day. (I have to agree with Mimi Smartypants on this one; we’re trying to think of some more innocuous but not yet completely meaningless alternative, like “Homecoming Day.”)

Backing up a bit: We got Aitch’s referral in late September. Normally, babies are escorted home within 3 - 4 months, but at the end of the year Korea issues a quota for emigration permits, and some time in November or December when the quota is reached, all adoptee travel is halted until the new year. With a backlog to process, it can take several months for the waiting babies to come home. We were told, gently but firmly, not to expect our baby until February or March. So I was driving home from a business trip in Connecticut (don’t hate me because my work is so glamorous) when I happened to check my home messages and heard this one from our social worker: “Hi, it’s me! I’ll bet you’re so excited! I’ve been expecting you to call me! Bye!”

I called her back immediately. “Why am I so excited?” I asked cautiously.

“Because your baby’s coming home! Didn’t [other adoption agency person] tell you?”

Well, no, she hadn’t. It turned out that two days before, the social worker had found out that our baby was scheduled to travel. She had been chatting with another person from the agency about the new arrival activity, and this woman said something like, “Yes, I was just talking to Denise about this.” The social worker misunderstood, thinking that her colleague had talked to me about our baby’s arrival, and didn’t bother following through with an official phone call. I suppose after a few days went by and she didn’t hear from me she figured she’d better make contact, so she left that message.

That’s right. The social worker has one task to fulfill between referral and the baby’s arrival: Call the parents and tell them that the baby is coming. And our social worker wasn’t 100% clear that this was her responsbility.

Needless to say, we requested another social worker this time around.

Eventually, we received the information that our baby was to arrive at Terminal C in Logan on Thursday night (our social worker told us Terminal E, but by this time I was checking the veracity of every word out of her mouth, including “and” and “the.”) So on Thursday evening we got dressed in some respectable clothing and drove to the airport, the same trip we make once or twice a month for work. It was so very routine — I knew exactly where to park to get to the walkway to the terminal easily (Level 4 at Logan–otherwise you’re stuck walking up a grotty stairwell or waiting for a dirty, slow, behind-the-Iron-Curtain looking elevator in the cold).

We had decided not to have any friends or family members come to the airport with us. Our family lives out of town, so any family at the airport would have been staying at the house, and we wanted to have a few days alone with our new baby. There is a lot of information/opinion on the internets about the proper way to bond with a newly adopted child. A lot of experts advocate a quiet environment, with all the baby’s needs met exclusively by the parents; in other words, no grandparents or friends should hold, change, or feed the baby.

This theory causes a lot of controversy on the message boards, what with people worrying that they ruined their baby’s attachment by letting Grandma hold him, or pissed off Mother-In-Law royally by refusing to let her give the kid some Cheerios. It didn’t have an effect on our decision, though. After a long international trip surrounded by hundreds of strangers in various planes , I didn’t think the baby would be that fazed by a few extra faces at the airport. But Husband and I, as first-time parents, wanted the time to react to our new baby without a lot of eyes on us. It just felt like a private moment to me.

There were three other families meeting their babies that night, and we were obviously the only ones that had any such qualms. The other entourages ranged from a modest Hollywood starlet size (a few hangers-on) to “Bono has dinner with the Pope.” We were the only new parents in the group. We did feel a little lost in the crowd.

We arrived around 7:30, without eating dinner, and of course the plane, en route from San Francisco, was delayed. Husband and I decided to hit Legal Seafood for some grub. “Be careful!” the greeter told us. “You don’t want to get sick!”

“Why would we get sick?” Husband asked, puzzled. The greeter got a funny look on her face and I hustled him away, explaining that she thought we should be so nervous that we would throw up our dinners.

When the monitor finally showed a landing time for the plane, we lined up with the other families outside the door from the gate. The babies were the last to get off the plane; the greeter went down to the gate to check ID bracelets and exchange some paperwork, and then they came out the door. As the first baby was walked out a swarm of relatives swooped in on it. I recognized Aitch, but for a few anxious moments his escort couldn’t make any progress. “Excuse me, that’s our baby,” I said, tapping a few entourage members. “That’s our baby.” They nicely cleared a path, and then he was in our arms.

He was calm and adorable, with a monk-like tonsure surrounding a fairly bald head, and long earlocks. The fattest cheeks you’ve ever seen. He was unperturbed by the new adults he’d been handed to. A store alarm was going off, with a flashing red siren, and he kept snapping his head around to look at it. He was wearing a yellow two-piece sweatsuit with a Hello Kitty-type character on the breast. A bib with two sets of ties was fastened around his neck and around his chest.

I know I’m supposed to write something transcendant here about the first time I held Aitch in my arms. I’m supposed to say that our eyes locked and we bonded instantly, and that I felt I was always meant to be his mother. But, honestly, the situation went from “meeting my adopted child” to “caring for my new baby,” and my mind was occupied with the physical accoutrements of babyhood. He didn’t have a coat. We had brought one of those baby sacks that was meant to keep him cozy in the car. Should I run back to the car to get it, then carry him to the car in it, and then undo it to strap him into the car? What if I couldn’t get the car straps on? Wouldn’t he be less exposed if we just carried him quickly the few outdoor feet to the car, then popped him in the sack right away? But then what kind of mother would I be if I took my kid outdoors in January in New England with no coat? I had failed the first motherhood challenge within five minutes.

While we were debating, we spotted our neighbor, a flight attendant. She graciously took some photos of all three of us together (the one advantage of an entourage–someone to hold the camera). It was actually nice to see a familiar face. (Incidentally, she gave birth a few months later, and the on-call doctor turned out to be her husband’s junior-prom date–now, there is a birth story!)

We decided to whisk him to the car. (It didn’t matter; as we found out when we got home, the kid was dressed in at least four layers under that yellow sweatsuit.) On the way home, my mother-in-law called; when informed that we were in the car on the way home, she asked, “Who’s holding the baby?” (We made a mental note to explain the car seat laws to her.) When we got home we poured two large glasses of wine and changed, fed, and put our baby to sleep for the first time. In all the pictures we took that evening, the wine glasses figured prominently, prompting more than one comment.

He was home. It was so simple: a trip to the airport. No life-threatening conditions or even body-altering experiences. Just one life-altering one.

A friend of a friend asked for some information on adoption, and as I was e-mailing her explaining the different options with my agency, I realized that it is really hard to talk about one’s choices regarding adoption without making statements that may be taken in a very negative way. This should not have been news to me, since earlier this week I pissed off some people by commenting on Julie’s blog that one of the reasons I had preferred international adoption to domestic was that I thought that most US birth mothers (who have a choice about who adopts their babies) would want to place their children with a couple who planned to raise them in a religious tradition, and it would be difficult for us to get a placement for that reason. According to Julie’s readers, there are some non-religious birth parents out there. I’m glad to hear that, and I’m sorry to offend any woman who has already made the painful decision to place her child for adoption, but considering that the majority of Americans practice a religion, I still think it was a safe assumption.

So you hear a lot about ignorant adoption comments from the general public (although I, personally, haven’t experienced that many), but there is a lot of room for conversations between adoptive parents to be misconstrued. I kept rewriting my e-mail with this in mind, imagining the worst possible construction being given to my words.

For example, you say, “We chose Korea because the children receive such good foster care.”

She hears, “Anyone who chooses a child who’s institutionalized is looking at a whole host of problems.”

You say, “We chose Russia because we thought it would be easier to raise a child of the same race.”

She hears, “Mixed-race families are too difficult.”

You say, “We chose China for our second adoption because we thought it would be great for our daughter to have a sibling with the same background.”

She hears, “People shouldn’t adopt children from different racial backgrounds, because each child will feel alone in the family.”

You say, “We didn’t want to specify a girl or a boy — you don’t get to do that with a pregnancy, why should you with an adopted child?”

She hears, “People who specify a gender are playing God.”

When you adopt, you are forced to make a lot of uncomfortable choices — age, race, gender, health status, the level of contact with birth parents. You may opt out of some of these choices, but not all of them. For Korea, for example, you have to fill out the dreaded health preferences form — and nothing makes you feel worse than saying that you would take a child with a heart murmur but not a harelip, with a club foot but not a Hepatitis B carrier, especially when you know you would accept and care for a biologically-related child with any of those conditions by default.

In order to make a choice, you need to have a preference. To have a preference, you need to view one choice in a more positive light than another choice. You can’t talk about your preference for one without implying your lack of preference for another. And by “lack of preference” I, of course, mean prejudice, a word that’s verboten in adoption conversations.

How can we talk about this without offending? I try to remember to use generic “social worker speak”: “There are many different options: you have to choose what’s right for you.” True…but not very informative.

Our agency hasn’t had a referral for Korea for almost a month. We are, therefore, still number eight, but with the heightened expectation that a big bolus of referrals has to be coming in any day now.

There are so many more sources of information on referral activity now than the first time we went through this. Our agency has always had a recorded “hotline” message that they update every few weeks, but last time I didn’t find out about this until just before I got our referral. Actually, we were planning on adopting from the Philippines, but we decided to fill out the additional paperwork for Korea because it was a low level of effort (one form) and we thought Korea would be a good back-up. It wasn’t our first choice because we were told the wait was 18 - 24 months, and the Philippines wait was 5 - 9 months.

We had been waiting 5 months on the Philippine program when our social worker called us and said, “So, are you still planning on filling out the Korea paperwork?” We had filled it out 5 months before, but it never got to its destination. So we re-sent it and got on the Korea list much later than we had planned, making the likelihood of a baby from Korea seem even more distant.

We had been waiting 9 months on the Philippine program with no end in sight when I stumbled upon the hotline and decided, just for grins, to see what was up with the Korean program. I heard, “The next family on the list waiting for the referral of a child of either gender has a program application date of…” and then our date.

I called the social worker right away. “Are we next on the list from Korea? How can that be?It was supposed to take 18 months, and we’ve only been on the list for 4 months!?”

She said, “Well, I remember seeing something in my e-mail that the Korean program was going quickly…let me check.”

We were next. The call came three days later, and then we had to explain to everyone that we were getting a little boy from Korea, not the Philippines.

Now, with all the message boards I consult on a regular basis, there’s no chance of such a surprise. I know what position I am in line and even the names of some of the families in front of me, so when they post their referral news I’ll be able to gauge how far up we’ve moved. I even know that a baby was scheduled to be arrive at Logan tonight, and that referrals are often sent with escorted babies; I was at Logan for a meeting this afternoon, and I was actually checking out the terminal for arrivals, thinking maybe I could spot my referral as soon as it landed on US soil.

We’re still number eight, but we’re getting closer. I am so excited.

Aitch is recovering from his ear infection, but not quickly enough. His temper has been so vile lately that we’re running out of epithets…I mean, endearments…that contain the word “crab.” Examples: My Little Crab Rangoon, Sour Crabapple, Crab Salad, Soft-Shelled Crab.

Seriously, it’s getting ugly. We’re trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, because he’s sick, but if this keeps up and it turns out it’s a permanent personality change, we’re going to have to have him kidnapped and taken to some kind of baby boot camp in Montana for an attitude adjustment.

Two weeks ago, when Husband was away frolicking in Key West* for the week, Aitch and I were very chummy. He would regularly cuddle up to me and whisper, “Wuv you, Mommy.” This week, after I returned from my grueling trip, where I spent a week slaving to put food on our table**, Aitch has decided to punish me by crying hysterically whenever I try to take over child care duties from his father. (For the record, he doesn’t act this way when Husband comes back for a business trip.) To make things worse, Aitch has categorically refused to return my “I love you.” That hurts.

Last night I put him to bed, and there were some signs of softening toward me. He was cradled in my lap, and I was singing and talking softly to him as he stroked my face very gently with his hand.

“I’ll always love you, Aitch.” I cooed. “You know why? Because I’m your mommy, and mommies always love their little boys.”

He grinned drowsily and caressed my cheek.

“You know what else?” I said. “You love me, too.”

He looked directly into my eyes and said very softly, “No.”

“Of course you do, Aitch,” I said. “Why don’t you say, ‘I love you, Mommy’? That would make Mommy really happy.”

He smiled beatifically and whispered something.

“What was that, dearest?” I asked, leaning closer.

“No way.”

Crab cakes with tartar sauce!

*He was in Key West but says he barely made it out of the hotel room. I believe him because he came back just as white as he left, and he didn’t take the sunscreen.

**Whereas I was enjoying business class service to and from Europe and only had to work a day and a half.

Aitch has an ear infection, his first. His sleep patterns have been interrupted, so we got him down for his nap rather late yesterday, around 3:00 p.m. He protested at top volume for a few minutes, then suddenly dropped to sleep.

He did not wake up until 6:00 a.m. the next morning. That’s over 15 hours of deep sleep. He only moved once, around 7:00 p.m., when he sat up, looked around, and then flopped back down in the same position. I don’t think he even turned his head.

I spent the 15 hours alternating between relief at the unexpected respite from caring for a sick, crabby child, especially well-timed since I was sick and jet-lagged myself, and Husband had been holding the fort alone for days; guilt at my relief; concern that he must have lapsed into a coma; certainty that he had contracted African Sleeping Sickness, which I just saw on “House”; worry that I would wake him by prodding him to ensure that he wasn’t in a coma; and wonder that a human body could sleep that long.

I’m looking forward to the day when they make crib mattresses with embedded sensors that detect heart rate, body temperature, respiration rate, and blood pressure, and transmit it to your baby monitor. But then I would just worry that a leaky diaper would short-circuit it and electrocute the baby.

I heart Anthony Trollope. Over the past few months, I’ve been reading the six Palliser novels. I went slightly out of order, so I’m currently finishing the series with the fifth, The Prime Minister. Although I have hundreds of pages of reading pleasure ahead of me, I’m already a little sad at the thought of leaving these characters behind forever. In my imagination, the Duke and Duchess of Omnium will soon be shunted off into a Limbo of lost characters, just short of the Paradise of fresh sequels. I picture them hobnobbing up there with the cast of Serenity and Lord Peter and Lady Harriet Wimsey, bemoaning their premature demises.

I’ll also miss Trollope’s gentle yet apt snarkiness. Take this description of a young man from The Prime Minister: “I would not say that Ferdinand Lopez was prone to do ill-natured things; but he was imperious, and he had learned to carry his empire in his eye.” I’m pretty sure that Trollope had a two-year-old in mind when he wrote this, and if I didn’t know better I’d say he had foreknowledge of my two-year-old.

So there I was tonight, sitting on a plane, completely absorbed in the question of whether Ferdinand Lopez would stand for Parliament, or back down in the face of Arthur Fletcher, when I happened to look out the window and see that we were flying at an extremely low altitude directly over the center of London en route to a landing a Heathrow— so low, in fact, that I could make out the very Whitehall to which the characters in my novel were aspiring, along with the Tower Bridge and the City. I gratefully closed my book for a few minutes to admire the spectacular view, set against the backdrop of a grenadine sunset.

I worry, sometimes, that I’ve spent half my life with my nose in a book or a web browser while Life in all its drama has been unfolding, unnoticed, before me. I am always resolving to live more in the moment, and less in fiction. I don’t think I would have enjoyed the view half as much, though, if I hadn’t been able to picture the Pallisers and their friends pursuing their fictional lives in the streets and drawing rooms below.

I grew up in Pennsylvania Dutch country, where the majority of my classmates and teachers had German surnames, and German was a mandatory subject when I was in junior high. The first sentences we learned were to describe the weather. Our teacher would ask us to look out the window, and we would respond in one of three ways: “Die Sonne scheint.” “Es regnet.” “Der Himmel ist grau.”

I’m in Berlin, and der Himmel ist grau. Boy, is it grau. I haven’t seen the sun for two days. Not only is the Himmel grau, but der Boden, covered in dirty snow, is grau also, as are most of die Gebäude, with their scary seventies facades and even worse interiors.

Berlin in January. Whose plan was this? Oh, right: They Who Pay the Bills.

This is my first trip to Berlin in more than twenty years, except then it was my own bright idea to go on a pleasure visit in the dark of winter. It was 1984, when I was doing a junior year abroad in Bremen. The exchange rate for the dollar was about the highest it would ever be, about 4 marks to the greenback. A few friends and I decided to hitchhike to West Berlin. This involved several rides to the East German border, and then finding a Westerner who could take us all the way from the border to West Berlin. We made one pit stop in East Germany to get gas and grab a bite to eat. We were terrified by the guards who checked our passports and fascinated at the thought of being in a Communist country.

It was a relief to get to West Berlin. Because of the high exchange rate, we were able to afford a very nice pension on the Kurfurstendamm. We spent a two days seeing the sights and two nights visiting bars and clubs in the extremely frigid December weather. Then we decided to visit East Berlin.

I believe we crossed the border via the subway, not at Checkpoint Charlie. I was disappointed, because I wanted to see the place where my German professor had escaped from East Berlin, walking through the checkpoint dressed in a U.S. Army uniform that his girlfriend had smuggled in to him. We had to purchase a visa, or some other kind of travel document, and exchange a certain amount of money for East German marks before we crossed.

We emerged on the other side of the Wall to a ghost town. It was Sunday, and the city was deserted. We walked through the empty streets, looking for something to do. We came across the famed Unter den Linden and strolled down it for awhile, until we approached the Brandenburg Gate from the Eastern side. A fence stopped us well before we got to the Gate. You would have had to jump the fence to make a run for the Wall. We pretended to take photos of one another so we could capture the surroundings, fearful that the police would emerge and confiscate our film.

We walked around for awhile, looking for entertainment, but there was nothing to do. The money we had been forced to exchange (which we would not be able to change back) was burning holes in our pockets, but we couldn’t buy any souvenirs: there were no stores. We went to a cafe to pass the time and spend some money. The waitress was not friendly. No one tried to chat with us or practice their English, as they often did in other cities. We ordered coffee and pastries. “No pastries.” OK, some soup. “No soup.” Sandwiches? Fries? Anything on the menu? No, no, no.

Of anything, that made the biggest impression on me: there was nothing to spend our money on. That might seem like a typical American consumerist response, but I think it went a bit deeper than that. Imagine a government so screwed up that they actively prevented people from contributing to the economy! It was hard to conceive of a regime that so vigorously thwarted actions in its own best interest.

Yesterday, I walked from my hotel up to Unter den Linden and then down the same route, approaching the gate from the east. The route is still obstructed, but by a large construction zone, not by a wall. Walking around the construction, I could go through the gate on foot, moving from east to west, a trip that would have gotten me shot twenty years ago. I arrived at the gate about the same time as a large contingent of protesters, doctors complaining about low pay and bureacracy in the state health care system.

I was floored: An organized protest, in a part of the city where the locals under East German rule would not have ventured without official business. And when I tried to warm my toes in a cafe, I had to walk half a mile before I found one that was not overrun with the crowd.

Seeing this contrast, it’s hard for me to believe that there are people out there who are so blase about government interference in private lives that they would overlook unsanctioned eavesdropping on the American people, or aid and abet China in censoring speech. If you don’t see the problem in this, please arrange some time in a country where the government abridges personal freedoms. It’s no longer 1984, but you can still find such places. Stay a nice long time, and then tell me if you still think wiretapping without warrants is still a good idea. January is such a nice time to travel.

I got my hair colored and cut yesterday. I called too late to get an appointment with my regular stylist, so I had to rely on my emergency backup stylist. The emergency backup stylist has now cut my hair twice, and I think she’s done a better job than the regular one, which puts me in a quandary, since they work in the same salon. How uncomfortable would it be for me to switch? Should I just start scheduling appointments with the new one, and hope the old one forgets about me? Should I call the old one and explain, regretfully, that my schedule can no longer accommodate her daytime hours? Or there’s the path of least resistance: put up with substandard haircuts.

The whole hair styling experience is fraught with tension, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know what rankles more: the exorbitant fee (representing a whole month’s rent, not so long ago); the ridiculous tip (which I’m afraid to reduce, because she’s CUTTING MY HAIR! She could ruin me!); or the two tedious hours a month it takes to get it done.

Or maybe it’s the monthly explanation to Husband of why a bottle of Miss Clairol and a trim in front of the bathroom mirror wouldn’t do just as well. “It’s not like you’re doing anything that…dramatic,” Husband opined.

Dramatic, no, but, as everyone knows, comedy’s harder than drama. I have comedic hair. I have a vast forehead, a widow’s peak, and cowlicks that resist bangs. On a very dry day, with proper application of hairstyling products and devices, these flaws can be camouflaged with artful styling, and my hair even looks shiny, healthy, and full of body, but under any other conditions my coiffure shows itself for the frizzy, wiry, forehead-baring mess that it is.

The thing I hate most about my hair is that it’s not rise-and-go. Most people wake up with their hair plastered to their heads. It’s not a great look, but run a comb through it and it’ll do. When I wake up, my hair is puffed up and wired into whatever bed-wrinkled position I slept in, and only a wash, blow-dry and style will get it to go back down again. This is a difficult state of affairs for a mom. I can’t just run Aitch out to preschool or even take him to the playground without a shower, or a hat.

When I joined the Peace Corps, my biggest worry was not about the language or job or culture, but what my hair was going to look like if I didn’t have reliable access to hot water and electricity so I could beat it into submission each day. For several years I let my hair run wild: no haircuts (couldn’t afford them!), limited washing, and mostly air-drying. The other volunteers were doing the same. It was very freeing, if not very attractive. Straight hair got straighter and limper; frizzy hair got larger and curlier. The other southern-European frizzy-haired ethnic types and I were known as “The Big Hair Club.” At the risk of turning this blog into a Peace Corps retrospective, I submit a photo from those days:

In retrospect, I think the camel may have been balking because he was frightened by the looming shadow of my enormous hair.

Yesterday Muslims around the world celebrated Aïd el Adha, a commemoration of Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Ishmael. (Yes, that’s Ishmael, not Isaac: Christianity and Islam differ on this one.) In Tunisia the holiday was known as Aïd El Kébir, which translates roughly to “Big Party,” and a big party it was.

Because it was a sheep and not a cow or turkey who pinch-hit for Ishmael, the Aïd features the sheep prominently, both as ritual and as a meal. Before the festival, every family that can afford it buys at least one sheep and spends days or weeks fattening it up. The children in the family often become quite fond of their little animal friend, so the horrible dawning of the realization that their pet = dinner is a kind of primal scene for those kids that plays out across Tunisia each year. (And my mother-in-law thinks I’m awful for not going along with Santa Claus?!) On the day of the Aïd, the head of the family says a prayer and slaughters and butchers the sheep. The women cook up the whole thing–roasted sheep’s head, sheep’s head soup with eyeballs, sheep’s stomach filled with sheep intestines, sheep testicles, and (of course) your run-of-the-mill mutton.

I observed three Aïds during my time in Tunisia. The first was with a family in Tabarka, a beautiful beachside city in the north. It was terribly hot, because the Aïd is celebrated according to the lunar calendar and shifts 11 days each year, so at that time it was summer. The night before the festival, my friends and I slept on the floor of another volunteer’s house. His neighbors all had sheep in their courtyards, and toward dawn I could hear them all bleating. In my sleep it sounded reproachful: “Men. Me-e-e-e-e-en. Me-e-e-e-en.” To this day when I hear a sheep make noise, it sounds like “Men,” not “Baa.”

The second Aïd was in Bou Ficha, another beach town farther south. The day started out hot and we continued to bake in the sun as we watched our hosts dispatch three sheep, putting aside some of the meat for charity. The party was held at the two adjoining homes of our host family. The family was middle-class, so they had recently built a new house, right next to their old house. The kids lived in one house, the parents in another. These were not fancy Saudi prince villas, but simple stucco-over-concrete boxes, around 2000 square feet each. I kept asking questions about this arrangement, thinking that I just wasn’t understanding the answers, but that seemed to be the upshot: They had a lot of money, so they built two houses, and why have the kids annoy you if you don’t have to?

At one point, the daughter of this family was charged with firing up the grill to cook the sheep’s head. She had trouble getting the fire started, so she broke out the traditional bellows:

Yep. A hair dryer.

My third Aïd was celebrated in Kairouan, an inland city further south that bills itself as “the fourth holiest city in Islam.” For me, that begs this question: How far down do they rank “holiness” for Islamic cities? Is there some Jordanian basketball team out there putting their hands together and chanting, “We’re seventeenth holiest!” to pump themselves up before a game?

It was so incredibly hot and dry for this Aïd that I could feel my eyeballs dehydrating. Our hosts had several small children, which gave the event a frenzied Christmas-day feeling. Children, blood, and knives: a winning combination.

With the mercury hitting 145, most of this day was a surreal blur to me.

The amazing thing about my three Aïds was the hospitality I was shown by my hosts. In all cases, I was a stranger to the host family, having traveled to spend the holiday with an American friend. My position in their country was suspect. A single female “volunteer,” without husband or family to protect her, could be considered a loose woman at best, a spy at worst. (Imagine a bunch of Arab students, seemingly without jobs but with a government source of income, moving in next to you. Would you have them over for Thanksgiving, or call Homeland Security?) Still their neighbors were always quick to invite me and a number of other tag-alongs to their family feast. I have never before or since experienced such openness, such willingness to share, such a readiness to take you in just because you’re there and have the terrible misfortune of being far away from your family.

In the spirit of the most generous hospitality I’ve ever experienced, Aïd Mabrouk! and welcome to my blog. If you’re celebrating De-lurking Week, feel free to leave a comment.

In Christmases past, Husband has set the bar pretty high for gifts in terms of thoughtfulness and creativity, so I always feel a lot of pressure to come up with something great for him, even though he has been gracious about every gift I’ve ever given him, no matter how routine.

This year, Husband gave me a much-coveted and oft-requested video iPod. I must confess that I already own an iPod Mini, which I use for running. (The Mini, by the way, is quickly becoming a hot item on eBay since it was recently discontinued in favor of the Nano. Even Kate Spade is sticking with the Mini; they have cute little cases, if your style trends that way. Or, for the ultimate in convenience, what about one of these handbags so you don’t have to go digging around for it?)

Anyway, I really need the video iPod to store the home movies I’ve been making for Aitch every month or so since he joined us. Each video is set to background music and is the length of one song. They include transitions, photos panned using the “Ken Burns” effect, and other filmic affectations like letterbox format and lens flare. (God, I love it when I’m able to work “filmic” into a sentence.) They’re basically the digital equivalent of that new suburban-mother obsession, scrapbooking, in that they take a lot of time and effort and are of little interest to anyone but the mother and the subject’s grandparents. (Let’s put it this way: Spielberg has not yet called.) But I’m too lazy to put together a baby book, and I love playing around with my iMovie software, so there.

This is what’s great about the video iPod: it’s is going to be like a really high-tech brag book. I can’t wait until the next time some stranger on a plane starts making small talk. As soon as I hear, “Do you have any kids?” I’m going to whip out my iPod and say, “Here’s a video of my son on Christmas morning! And one of Hallowe’en! Here’s a video of his first day in the States! Here’s his trip to visit his grandparents! And I have 500 or so photos I can show you , too!”

Or maybe I’ll just jam the earbuds in my ears and watch a downloaded episode of “The Office.” (Does anyone know if they make smaller earbuds? Those things don’t fit in my ear porches, or whatever you call them.)

My gift to Husband was on the decidedly lower-tech end of the imaging spectrum. I got him a pinhole camera, which sounds like a science-class project that you could make out of an oatmeal container, but this version is a beautifully handmade camera from Hong Kong. It’s a small wooden box, about the size and shape of a large digital camera, with a pinhole aperture and a hand-operated shutter:

I can just see Husband at some event that other people are documenting with their expensive digital cameras and camcorders — a kids’ soccer game or pageant — and then he brings out this camera made of wood, like a prop for the Flintstones.

Then, of course, when he gets his pictures developed, I’ll scan them and load them onto my new iPod, thus completing the Technology Circle of Life.

Here’s my maiden effort with the pinhole camera:

Not too impressive, eh (but yet, sort of impressionistic)? I definitely underestimated the shutter speed, thinking any speed I was able to achieve manually would be more than slow enough for exposure. I also overestimated my ability to hold the camera steady. I’m looking into some faster film and a tripod, and will report back.