Our Thursday evening

Thu Dec 4, 2008 at 10:00 pm | 1 comment

Eliana did homework.

Karys did handwork.

Two for two

Wed Dec 3, 2008 at 11:00 pm | 3 comments

I emailed pictures of our son to the mother from Idaho mentioned in yesterday’s entry.

Carmi received an email reply from her this afternoon. She showed the pictures to their new son and their son recognized our son right away.

I believe we’re two for two.

Our son, the skier

Tue Dec 2, 2008 at 11:00 pm | 0 comments

I was cleaning up the kitchen tonight after dinner while Carmi enjoyed a few minutes of computer time before giving the girls their baths.

From out of the bedroom, Carmi said, “Our son is probably going to know how to ski.”

“Water ski?”, I assumed since he is from a coastal city.

“No. Snow ski.”

“Get outta here.”

We just finished following a family from Idaho who brought home another 12-year-old boy from our son’s orphanage. This family received a CD from the orphanage with over 100 photos that included their son taken between 2001 and 2006.

Now THAT would be a cool surprise.

The mother posted most, if not all, of the photos online for our yahoogroup to view. Several of the pictures showed children skiing on what we think has to be manufactured snow.

I’m kinda hoping our son doesn’t have an interest in snow skiing. I’ve been a few times in my life and have spent more time on my rear end than on my feet.

Doctor searches China for sick child’s family

Mon Dec 1, 2008 at 10:00 pm | 4 comments

As Monica Miyashita stood in a government office in China and met her beautiful dark-eyed daughter for the first time, she felt a nagging desire to know the girl’s story.

Who were the people who gave her precious baby daughter life?

All the orphanage workers could provide her and her husband, Mark, were sketchy details about how Xinhuan “Huan Huan,” as she was known in China, ended up abandoned and alone.

When she was just a day or two old, she was discovered tucked inside a box alongside a city wall on the streets in Guangdong province of China. (Her adoptive parents would later tell her she was like Moses, placed in a basket so she could be sent off to safety, to a better life.)

Now, four years after her adoption, her Orrville parents are desperately trying to bring their daughter’s missing biological family in China back into her life to cure her of a deadly disease.

Five-year-old Lydia Miyashita is battling an aggressive form of leukemia that doctors say requires a bone-marrow transplant.

Her best chance of survival is to get a transplant within the next month or two from a relative ideally, from a brother or sister who shares many of her genes.

But who were the people who gave her life? Did they have other children, too?

And could those strangers halfway around the world in a country of more than 1 billion people be found in time?

“We all knew that the chances of getting hit by lightning were probably greater,” Mark said.

“It would be very unlikely for a child and a birth family to reconnect,” Monica agreed. “Very unlikely.

“Pretty much everyone said, ‘It will never happen.’”

Everyone, it seems, except for one doctor-turned-detective at Akron Children’s Hospital, who just happened to be from the same Chinese province as Lydia.

Dr. Xiaxin Li, the new director of the bone-marrow transplant program at Akron Children’s, was determined to find Lydia’s birth family back in his homeland and, in the process, to find a possible cure for his young patient.

“If they’re a local family,” he told Lydia’s parents, “they’ll come forward.”

And now it appears possible that some of them might soon be coming to America to save her.

Read the entire article here.