I raised the corners of my lips in what I hoped was a noncommittal smile. There really is no arguing with some people, and as an “oldschool mother,” this woman falls into that category. Even if it were possible in the pigeon German/English/grandiose hand gestures we were using to communicate to enumerate the various studies that have found exclusive breastfeeding (i.e. no fufu and okra) for babies under six months old to be the gold standard in infant nutrition or to cite the expertise of the kids’ playfully sarcastic pediatrician, I just don’t think I’d have a shot at being heard.

I mean, how many babies has science raised? This woman has raised at least two that I know of, one of whom I’ve met–and she’s a lovely, bright and charismatic human being–plus has undoubtedly assisted in the raising of numerous others one way or another. I imagined my debate attempts being met with the derision of an expert or worse: the “you’re going to kill your child” look.  I looked to the members of the room whose German abilities far surpass my own and whose relationships with this “mama” are far deeper than mine, but they were all busy doing the weird Austrian “ignoring thing” that seems to be synonymous with politeness around here and left me dangling with no idea as to how I ought to react.

And then there was another part of me that really desperately wanted to take “oldschool mother’s” advice, to partake in a tradition that has possibly been handed down from mother to daughter for centuries, to have my three month old baby’s first taste of real food to be okra and fufu, to delight as it transforms her screams into sleepy, stuffed coos, her irregular growth curves into the steep upward trajectory of the ideal “fat baby”–the gold standard for babies outside the U.S. and Europe. Nor do I want to upset a woman who is a source of two rarities in my life in Austria: interesting conversation and succulent food from somewhere other than Austria.

Meanwhile my daughter, still cradled in the arms of this lovely woman who possesses more maternal instinct than I do in my entire body, was infusing her screeching with so much passion, she quickly cycled through various shades of violet. My son whined in his piteous fervor for another game. And I just kept on smiling like an idiot.

1. Prepare like you’re the first person to have ever given birth in Austria’s long and glorious history. Sign the husband/translator up for private birth classes. Get acupuncture. Drink ridiculous amounts of magical “uterine-toning” tea. Take an at-home self-hypnosis course. Switch hospitals mid-pregnancy after major meltdown. Whine a lot.
2. Run to the hospital five weeks early with false labor contractions. Get annoyed when the doctors use their own magical concoctions to temporarily stop the pains. Promise not to return until the baby is crowning.
3. Put up with four more weeks of contractions of varying intensities. When water finally breaks, suggest watching one more episode of Modern Family and encourage the husband/translator to take a shower before heading to the hospital.
4. At the hospital, partake in all kinds of fun and exciting tests as labor pains intensify. Try not to cry when the midwife declares you to be about 1 cm dilated nor kick the doctor during yet another ultrasound. Contemplate the surprisingly violent art hanging on the wall instead. Who was in charge of purchasing that giant bloody explosion and what were they thinking?
5. After tests are finished and you are settled into your own private labor room, proceed to beg for drugs. Do this loudly and insistently. Refuse all natural offerings such as birthing balls, jacuzzi baths and that damn hypnosis recording. Don’t resort to biting your husband/translator during an especially painful contraction, but seriously consider it.
6. The more you beg for drugs, the slower everyone in the room moves. You must be at least 2 cm dilated to receive an epidural. Congratulations! You are 3 cm. The husband/translator must fill out a pile of forms. Rejoicing in actually getting to fill out forms he can read, he proceeds to do just that. Very. Very. Slowly.
7. Seriously consider getting a new translator.
8. Perhaps you can call the husband/translator’s father. His English is pretty good. He is Dutch, after all. Good English seems to be in their genes.
9. Progress! You finally get to move to the actual delivery room. The midwife promises just fifty more checks/tests and then she will call the anesthesiologist. You briefly regret all the violent thoughts you’ve entertained about the midwife up to this point until the next contraction hits.
10. Oops! Nevermind. You’re dilated to 10 cm, but the baby’s still a little high up so the midwife gives you permission to push “a little” to get it into a better position.
11. Whatever you do, do not end this push. If you do, it may take another month to get this baby out. Out pops the head. Keep going! And there’s squirmy jumble of limbs.
12. Take a breath and hang out. As the midwife didn’t have time to call the doctor nor get her gloves on to catch the baby, there are a lot of forms to be filled out and tests to be run before you and the snorting baby get to move to the next phase of this adventure.

Est. time from hospital admission to baby: 2 hours

This week I have some painful emails and phone conversations on my to-do list. We’re pulling the cord on our adoption, so all parties involved need to be notified. It was a tough decision, but one I’m surprisingly okay with now that it’s been made. In fact, it’s like a giant weight has been lifted and I can finall

y breathe a little easier. I haven’t been able to breathe since we arrived in Austria, and that’s a freaking long time to go without oxygen.

For those who’ve been keeping tabs on this particular journey of ours through my haphazard Facebook updates, here’s what happened. Shortly after we moved here, Christian had to acquire health insurance.

Because he works in Liechtenstein but lives in Austria, we’re not covered by Austria’s national health plan yet the law requires us to be covered (not to mention that as a family, you just kinda have to be covered by insurance anyway). He spent months shopping around and talking to agencies and putting up with my badgering. “I don’t care what the plan has. Just make su

re it covers the next kid,” I would growl whenever the topic came up.

At some point, Christian received information from one insurance company that any insurance company in Austria must cover an adopted child. This left Christian free to sign us up for the fanciest plan we could afford with a different company. Fast forward to the crisis of last month when I fell in love with a child with a possibly terminal case of Leukemia. Even before discovering how serious

the situation was, Christian sent a query off to our insurance agency to see how much our rates would increase if we adopted the child. The company’s response: your rates won’t increase because we ain’t covering it!

Umm… Excuse me? What? After several panicked phone calls, we discovered that a) we’re locked into a two year

contract that we can’t get out of without Christian quitting his job or relocating to another country and b) Austria doesn’t care whether or not private insurance covers an adopted child. Oh, and c) we are possibly the only people in the entire country who’ve run into this problem.

Adding further pressure to the mess was our impending home study update. Because so much had changed in our

move, we needed to have a fair number of things edited in our home study. Both our adoption agency and our social worker had told us not to complete an update until right before our adoption approval from the U.S. was about to expire because the waiting times in our country have jumped exponentially since we signed with our agency almost two years ago. Thus we were running up against a wall, since as part of the U.S. government’s approval process, we’d need to prese

nt proof that our adopted child would be covered by our insurance provider.

Even then, it probably would have been possible to complete our home study update. Both our “insurance guy” and myself

found it very strange that it would be potentially possible for a child to fall into an insurance hole in Austria. There’s probably a program wherein the government would have picked up the child if it was rejected by private insurance, and they probably would have been willing to say as much in writing.

However, for all our e

fforts, all we would have earned would be the opportunity to wait some more. In the past year, since we officially earned a place on our agency’s waiting list and thought the wait would be another year and a half (tops!), our agency has placed 6-9 months worth of families, and announcements have been made suggesting the system is just going to slow down eve

n more this year if not grind to a halt. Even the unethical agencies operating in the country we’re adopting from have seen their projected waits jump.

When Christian and I had made the decision to adopt, it wasn’t because we were out of options. I mean, sure, there was no way in hell I was going to give birth to another child in a Dalian hospital, but if we had been so inclined, we could have figured out a solution. No, we decided to adopt because i

t seemed silly to give birth to another child when there are so many children out there in need of parents. There are still so many children in need of parents. That certainly hasn’t changed. But if you’re waiting in a possibly 2 year long line that’s just growing longer by the minute, there comes a point that the child you’re waiting for doesn’t quite have that need. There are thousands of people who would fly across the world for a shot at being his o

r her parents, and some of those people don’t have the luxury of a choice. They’re in that line because it’s their last shot.

And for all of that and more, our adoption journey has come to an end. It’s been an expensive learning experience in terms of time, money, and emotions, but something we apparently had to go through in order to strong enough to tackle what awaits us in 2011.

I found out about the girl a little while ago from an emergency request sent out by my agency. “We have a little girl suffering from a life-threatening disease with an eighty percent survival rate in developed countries but that can’t be treated in country.” I double-checked the statistics in several medical journals, and sure enough, it looked like a pretty good shot. I sent off a message to Christian to find out if he minded if I requested more information on the girl. He thought 80% sounded like a pretty good shot, too.

The first parts of this girl’s story that were returned to me weren’t promising. She’d been given introductory treatment several months ago, a treatment that 95% of children respond to, and it didn’t take. With that information, her chances of surviving five years plummeted. I asked some questions about the tests they performed and what drugs were actually used in the treatment–afterall, she’s not in the West. I looked up studies run in India and China on the disease. I located a pediatric oncologist near us that had taken part in some interesting European trials. I found out stem cell transplants improve the prognosis somewhat, that Austria has the best cancer survival rate in all of Europe. I grasped at any little straw I could get. And then I made a mistake.

I asked to see her picture.

I knew better. You can’t be unbiased if you looked at a picture. The moment there’s a picture, numbers turn into a person. In this case, it was a bright-eyed, chubby-cheeked little girl with creamy milk chocolate skin. “How could this happen to her?” The voice in my head screamed, “She’s a fighter. Her odds of dying can’t possibly be 2 out of 3.”

Christian, who was spared the agony of the picture, read all the plummeting numbers and reports that I presented him with an engineer’s eyes. “I just can’t do it,” He said. “I can’t take that shot.” I knew it, and I couldn’t ask him to. It was crazy, a 50-70% chance of heartbreak.

Except that my heart was already cracked. When I finally accepted this wouldn’t be our daughter and sent the email to our agency saying such, I felt something slipping through my fingers. I had lost something that I never had. I can only hope that someone else picks it up, someone who can beat the odds.

The following post is based upon a diary entry from late August, less than two weeks after arriving in Austria:

Within a week of arriving in Austria, my body was already rebelling against all that so-called fresh air. While my brain was busy trying to fathom how on earth the smell of cows could so permeate everything, including the train, my body was busy oozing Chinese toxins to fend off a new foe: nature.

The initial battle was energetic and violent with explosive sneezes that threatened to knock my nose right off my face. Unidentifiable substances escaped the onslaught via any available orifice they could find. After a “surge” lasting several days, I finally grew fed up enough with the siege to call in chemical-weapon-toting reinforcements. The only problem? Sourcing weapons potent enough to do in the attackers.

So I trudged over to the only pharmacy in all of Bludesch, Austria with some hesitation. I’ve been to this particular pharmacy a few times during our past vacations to the area, and each time there was some trouble or another acquiring the nuclear-grade pharmaceuticals I was after. Although the pharmacy claimed to house any number of modern drugs for dealing with any number of modern woes, it seemed whenever I went in there with Christian as my translator, we came out with some medieval contraption for sucking snot out of noses or a magical mix of herbs and flowers meant to be drunk with tea.

Don’t get me wrong. I love me some natural medicine so long as I’m healthy. I’m a sucker for those silly vitamins constructed of whole foods and random fortifications of minerals that proclaim unverifiable properties. If you stick ginseng or gingko or some random-ass Asian mushroom no one’s ever heard of but that’s supposed to protect you from some obscure form of cancer, I will probably at least try it. But if my brain is being attacked by a series of suicide bombers and a machine gun has taken up residence inside my nose, I need something conjured up by 20th or 21st century nerds and patented by multi-billion dollar companies, something that can only be found within the World of Man, something scientifically engineered to wreak as much havoc as biologically possible. For times like this, “Natural” just won’t do.

However, out here in Western Austria, where people normally stick crystals in drinking water in order to “energize” it, the temporary benefits of modern medicine seem to be frowned upon, and no more so than by a particular pharmacist at the only pharmacy in the village of Bludesch. This is why I was so nervous about going by myself. If I can’t even get this man to sell me modern medicine with Christian in tow to act as my voice, how on earth was I going to get this accomplished by myself with only a handful of German insults to my repertoire?

The doors to the pharmacy slid open automatically as I neared, giving me no opportunity to turn back lest I look outrageously stupid, so I entered. At 11 am on a weekday, the place was overrun with little old ladies, chatting away with one another and the pharmacists. Flowery concoctions of various kinds were passed back and forth across the sales counter. I queued up and began mentally practicing the one mantra that might get through this: “Spechen Sie englisch?” I really had no idea what on earth I was going to do if the person I asked answered “Nein.” Perhaps walk away crying.

Fifteen minutes or so later, though, it was time to find out. Relieved, it appeared the one pharmacist I knew with the “natural” love affair didn’t appear to be working that day. Instead, I found myself face-to-face with another older pharmacist, an unknown quantity. “Sprechen Sie Englisch?” I gurgled hesitantly while crinkling up my nose to keep another sneeze from detonating.

His response: “A little.”

Well, gosh darn it. “Yes,” I could deal with. “No,” at least would have left me with pantomimes at my disposal. But “A little” actually gives one very little information, especially when dealing with an unfamiliar culture. For example, “A little” in Dalian, China usually means, “If you speak very, very slowly, utilize gigantic hand gestures, and bits and pieces of your terrible Mandarin, I might grasp what you’re getting at within the next hour.” Whereas “a little” in Amsterdam, The Netherlands seems to mean something more along the lines of, “I probably speak English better than you do, but since I’m Dutch and thus loved by everyone, I’ll try to use small words and speak a little slower so your American brain has a shot at comprehending.” But what does it mean when a pharmacist in rural Western Austria over the age of 60 says “A little.”

I opted for the American stereotype of speaking everything slowly and in the form of a question: “Do you know what an allergy is?”

The pharmacist raised an eyebrow as if he’d just realized he was conversing with a talking dog, “Yes…”

“And anti-histamine? Do you know what that is?”

“Yes…”

Great! I waited for the man to run off to this box of allergy medicine, but he didn’t budge, leaving me wondering what magic word I was missing in order to make the medicine materialize, “Well, can I have some?”

“Yes…”

Oh come on now! Did he think this was a survey? I began fumbling in my pockets as if pulling out money would make him realize I was serious, but something finally clicked before I could wave my wad of cash at the man, “What kind of allergy do you have?”

What a perfectly practical question to which I had no answer. At this point I could be allergic to any number of things: grass, trees, cows, cheese, bread, a lack of smog and construction dust, whatever they’ve replaced lead with in paint in countries with strictly adhered-to building codes, caucasians, tap water that is not strangely greasy, the smell of flowers, stars, Sundays with nothing to do… I sniffled up the blob that was trying to sneak out my nostrils and opted for as general an answer as I could conjure, “Umm… Nature? Can you sell me something?”

The pharmacist sighed. To him I might as well have been a small irritable child, “Would you like a box of ten or a box of thirty?”

Ten or thirty what, I didn’t know and couldn’t care less, this was the first promising moment in our conversation. Surely this box would spell my redemption in this sorry fiasco of a move that had left me on a strangely clean continent surrounded by very nice people I hardly knew who all seemed so desperate to please me they left me nothing to do and a husband and son I rarely saw anymore. “Oh, just give me ten now and if it turns out I need more, I’ll buy more.”

And finally, finally a box miraculously appeared, filled with equally miraculous pills entirely dreamed up, tested, and manufactured by man. “You should take one a day. It’s best in the morning, but if you get too sleepy, you can switch to taking it at night. That’ll be 6.90 euros.”

I paid with minimal fuss and walked out of the pharmacy on a cloud. Sure, I’d completed my transaction while utilizing nary an ounce of German, but at least I’d completed it. On my own. I popped a pill out of its plastic bubble and swallowed it dry, savoring the scratchy, choking feeling of success.

The next day, my so-called “allergy” had finally developed into a cold or a flu or something else equally nasty plaguing one with fever, chills, sore throat, body aches and all the usual accouterments. Left with no other options, I submitted myself to my in-laws’ offerings of teas, herbal remedies, and mineral supplements. And you know what? Medical science aside, sometimes being looked after by family–even if you have trouble thinking of them as your family–isn’t so bad. In fact, it’s not bad at all.

1) ISP sends ships the modem to us in the mail.

2) Tech guy comes over to the house to flip a switch and plug the modem in to make sure it works.

3) The day after the tech guy visited, someone over at the ISP headquarters or phone company or something flips a switch to route the DSL river toward our house, thus actually activating our internet connection.

In America, the entire process would be done by machines, but it would take less than a week. In China, it would require a dozen people and ten hours, but would be completed within a day. Yet here on the continent that created a special fork just for fish, it takes an entire month. It’s like the entire country is on an eternal coffee break.

Regardless, we have internet now, and I have two and a half months worth of Austrian adventures to post, so hopefully as I get a few free minutes here and there this week, I’ll get a bunch of new stuff up.

Before I’d finished finalizing the details of my flight, August 1st, the dreaded packing date had arrived. The movers were horrifyingly on time, Christian and I were both unfortunately hung over, and the apartment was already a complete wreck. Having never partaken of nor witnessed an assisted move before, neither Christian nor I really had much idea of what the whole thing entailed. We walked threw the house, army of uniformed movers in-tow, and pointed at what we wanted shipped. Then before the command had even made it through the translating chain, poof, it was wrapped, taped, and hidden away in a box that was then assigned a number, a label, and the owner, “Mr. Christian.”

Soon enough, the movers were on auto-pilot like some kind of blue-jump-suited, multi-armed Rube Goldberg Machine, leaving Christian and I with a surprising amount of leisure time and far too little coffee–thanks to the packing of our espresso machine–to properly enjoy it. We took turns walking the dog, playing on the internet, and blaming each other for items that mistakenly were or weren’t packed while the moving machine toiled away. What we didn’t do, however, was kill each other. The movers, whether their blessed swift indiscrimination took the thinking and the arguments out of our hands. No longer was moving a matter of forethought and planning and trying to get rid of one another’s possessions. Moving, rather, had been reduced to its purest essence: pointing and taking naps.

In the end, a few things got packed that shouldn’t have, virtually Nico’s entire wardrobe for one, one of the landlord’s couch cushions for another. A few things didn’t get packed than should have–Nico’s winter coat–but for the most part, everything magically ended up where it ought, and by 2 pm Monday all of our possessions (all 103 boxes) had been loaded into our container in preparation for their two month voyage to our new home, leaving us with an apartment filled with echoes and a marriage still intact.

The stickers have managed to survive. They’re all over the couch and the coffee table, some times they “star” for a day or two on tv, and doing a “sticker check” of my daily outfits has become a habit. Thankfully, though, Nico has also managed to get past the initial sticker addiction in which he was whining every half hour for another sticker hit. Consider it all a sticker truce.

This is perhaps part of why when Nico bounded up to the door proudly waving around one of his sand toys that cradled the corpse of a dead goldfish, I may have shrieked and jumped a little more than necessary. Well, that and we don’t even have a goldfish.

Or rather, we didn’t have a goldfish until we left the house this morning.

One of the troubles with living as a foreigner in China is people like to give your child things. Especially if your child is Nico. This has become a particular headache in the past two weeks when I began the “culling” phase of our move and Nico proceeded onto the “let’s collect goldfish” phase.

The first two fish Nico acquired were from one of the compound fountains. Apparently, it had to be cleaned out and Nico being cute and charming and in adoration of all things “fish” managed to weasle the apartment managers out of a pair of goldfish. I dealt with the situation by convincing him the goldfish would be happier in a different fountain.

The second pair of fish were a gift from Ayi and her husband when they  greeted Nico with what I like to call a “fish death ball” as we dropped him off for an overnight at their place. Basically, this contraption is a little ball on a key ring that some enterprising person fills with water, gravel, and fish. These are then given to children who run around with them as children will, shaking them all up until I presume the fish die. Nico’s guppies survived the night and so I rewarded them with a transfer into a proper fish bowl for the time being.

Today, however, somehow brought yet another pair of goldfish. I’m not too sure how Nico acquired them as I was busy being horrified by the story of how he had killed the dead one (the second one remains alive for the time being and is hanging out with the guppies). Apparently the fish-killer reached into the bowl and squeezed it to death. Ayi related this story to me with the same mildly giddy excitement that she tells me about all of Nico’s morning escapades, leading me to believe that she didn’t find the goldfish corpse nearly as traumatizing as I did. Indeed as far as I can tell, after Nico killed the fish, she proceeded to fish it out of the bowl and placed it in the sand toy which Nico was gleefully carting around when he greeted me at the door at noon.

As the last murder Nico committed involved impaling a fly on the edge of a coin, I wasn’t sure what to do with the remains of the present kill. Both Gaudi and 狐猴 the cat were tossing carnal glances at the body, but I just couldn’t handle the prospect of little golden fish guts around the apartment. So I opted for the preferred fish burial of my youth.

“Come, Nico. We need to bury the fish,” I said as I picked up the body and walked off to the bathroom, Nico trailing along, insistently pointing back at the fish bowl where presumably he thought the fish would begin swimming once again if I just dropped it in.

“No, no, Nico. The fish is dead. We need to let it go.” And let it go I did. As its body glided down the toilet, Nico finally realized the seriousness of the situation.

You see, things that go down the toilet never come back up.

Three hours later, the boy was still tearfully pointing at the bathroom calling out, “Fish! Fish!”

And if I never get him potty-trained, this will be why.

It’s been a whirlwind of activity since then. Movers had to be found. The dog had to be made EU import-ready. Apartment and car hunts needed to be launched. A new language learned (well it’s not new for Christian). Furniture bought. Jobs given notice. Ayi given notice. Adoption agency and home study guy given notice. Things given away. Friends bid farewell…

As of now, we’re in the final stretch with one month left in China (our stuff leaves on the slow boat in two weeks). As we get closer to the day of departure, loose ends actually are getting tied up and what once seemed like a Herculean effort is proving doable by mere mortals.

As part of our move, this website is also going to be changing with the hopes that without any silly things like real jobs to distract me, I’ll be better about updating it.

Next stop, Dornbirn, Austria!