Celebrating Michael's LOA

There are countless ways to celebrate receiving LOA for the newest member of your family.

Around here, however, we have a standard approach to marking milestones in the adoption process: eating Chinese food.

And especially because we were eating an uninspired dinner of frozen ravioli and jarred spaghetti sauce when we got the call from our agency on Monday night, it seemed the least we could do was mark the occasion the next evening with something a bit more appropriate.

Thank goodness we live just minutes away from an absolutely amazing Chinese restaurant where the chef just happens to be from Changsha, where we met Louis. The world is so small.

So Tuesday night, after Louis and I stopped to visit Aunt Treasa at her library and collect his summer reading prizes...

(and, yes, that is his summer reading shirt--complete with a cat wearing a Chinese hat)...we met Baba for a quick bite to eat.

The photos don't do the food justice. And we were too busy inhaling soup and lo mein to worry much about photography.

Still, in between arguing over who got the mushrooms and snow peas in the three bowls of soup--it's never much of an argument, and Louis always wins--we reveled in being one step closer to our little brother and son Michael.

Because Monday was also Dragon Boat Festival, the Chinese lions outside the restaurant were wearing red ribbons. (Louis is pretending that the Chinese lion is biting him.)

Then we turned to the fortune cookies.

"Mama," Louis asked. "Fortune cookies are from China?" And I launched into a feeble explanation of how fortune cookies are a Chinese-American, rather than Chinese, tradition.

Then we cracked the cookies open.

There are many fortunes we would like to have found inside the cookies.

"A big trip is in your future."



"Someone you love awaits you."

"You will receive good news soon."

"The next three months will fly by."




Instead, the fortunes were rather bland. But after the outstanding dumplings and won ton soup, could we really expect the cookie fortunes to be exceptional?

Besides, we don't need a fortune cookie fortune to tell us we're getting closer to bringing Michael home. The elegant LOA document we received from China says that loud and clear.

And that--along with some delicious Chinese food--made for quite a few smiles this week.