As a writer, its important to know your strengths and weaknesses. Being aware of these flaws only helps to make your writing better, and to avoid the inevitable pitfalls that one can find themselves in because of them.

Take me for instance. Prone to spelling errors and questionable use of grammar, I know that I am a multi-edit type of person. Sometimes my writing makes the first cut, sometimes the 5th. Generally speaking though, two to three edits seems to be my norm.

I have also learned from painful example that when I attempt to be funny, witty, or sarcastic I usually end up looking like an asshat. So is something I try to avoid.

My wife recently brought to my attention an article that appeared in the Daily Southtown titled “Foreign orphans better than ours“. It had surfaced on an international adoption group that my wife started and had caused quite the stir. No doubt Mr. Kadner’s intention.

Adoption is an emotion soaked experience, it doesn’t matter if it is domestic or international. Here in th states the public is largely uninformed about the adoption process, costs and reasons that people turn to adoption.

I keep going back and forth trying to decide if Kadner was attempting to write something satirical, trying to be funny or just clueless. I’ve always considered writing effective if it makes me think about something, generally speaking I like those thoughts to be about the topic being written and not about the mental state of the writer.

Kadner’s rant supposes that American orphan’s are somehow lesser in quality than international orphans. Horse puckey. What he fails to realize is that people turn to international adoptions because of a desire for structure, order and assured end results — A Baby.

Domestic adoptions of young children are subjective, an applicant family needs to be chosen by a birth mother. We personally have know people who waited over a year to be chosen, only to turn to international adoption for some semblance of a structured timetable.

Add to that the fact that almost a third of birth mothers change their minds and decide to keep the baby. Good for them, bad for the family that has become emotionally invested and wasted what could amount to years of their time.

Many adoptive families have already gone through years of heartbreak prior to starting the adoption process. These are people who desperately want to be parents, to raise a baby. Its an amazing experience, why is that so hard for Kadner to understand?

In the end, Kadner comes off looking like an uneducated bush league writer trying to be witty, and funny and failing miserably. His choice to people and topic to address could only be worse if he had targeted the handicapped or mentally ill. Oh well, I suppose he always has next week.

I think one of the greatest gifts of getting old is the ability to look back on your life and ponder why you acted a certain way or developed a certain habit or way of life. One of the things that I have noticed about myself is that I tend to be hopefully pessimistic about things.

That is to say that I am hopeful that things will go my way and work out, but prepared from the start for the very real possibility that it will fail. Looking back at the emotional roller-coaster that Karin and I rode for years trying to conceive, its no real shocker that I tend to hold this view.

I think its also a reason why I am so varied in my interests and hobbies. If I try something and hate it, I can just move onto something else. No pressure, no worry of failure.

Once in a while, everyone needs to step outside of their comfort zone. Today is my day. With the ever growing wait times in China, we decided to start a concurrent adoption for an eight year old girl from Taiwan named Chia-Jung.

We fell in love with her story and knew she was destined to be our daughter. So we applied to adopt her. We were one of five families under consideration. Yesterday we were told that they have narrowed the number of families down to three, and that we were one of the three.

They had additional questions for ourselves and one other family. What did this mean? Did they like the two who were asked more questions better than the one who did not? Or did it just mean that we needed to provide more information to match the one not asked? Maddening questions to contemplate. So, we provided our answers to the best of our ability and sent the paperwork off to be sent to Taiwan.

Normally I would try to not think about the process during the waiting period. I would assume that we would not be chosen, and prepare myself accordingly. Self, I say… SCREW THAT! I am going to hope and pray and wish and dream and invest myself emotionally with all of my will bent on the assumption that we will be chosen.

When or not we are chosen, I expect to be flooded by unbridled emotion. It will either by joy or grief, that much I know. What I refuse to do this time is wall myself off from the potential pain. All I have to say is…. You better bring it!

The day started overcast, the forecast for the day predicted it to be a cloudy day that would reach the low eighties. All in all, a perfect day to hit the zoo. Off we went for Brookfield Zoo here in Chicago to meet friends from a local China adoption group we belong to.

We get together fairly often, it helps ease the crushing frustration from this long and drawn out wait for our daughter’s referral. Seeing the kids and talking with others does have a calming effect — that from someone who never really bought into that sort of thing.

It helps too that they are all really cool and fun to be around. So off we went merrily on our way, a pack of couples and children, strollers and cameras to see the animals on display.

The attraction of the day was a baby polar bear, but he was inside both times we wandered past his area. By late in the day I was wishing that I was inside, the sun had burned away the cloud and it felt more like ninety.

The cicadas were fun breaks from the heat, every now and than a woman or child would scream as one felt onto them or into their hair. I offered money to a few people to eat one, but nobody took me up on the offer.

Luckily nobody counter bet me to eat one. I would have done it if push came to shove (at least that’s what I am saying right now in the comfort of my home… ), but it never came to that thankfully.

I don’t know what it is about the zoo but every time I visit it I leave feeling beat to hell, my legs hurt my joints ache and I really don’t know why. Sure we walked around, but nothing intense or even hilly for that matter. It has to be just the result of walking + sun + energy sapping nature of keeping an eye on your kid. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll get to experience the zoo on a Segway or even a Rascal (I’ll never forget that Seinfeld episode!).

The other thing that I seem to feel more as I get older is a sadness from looking at the animals. I am sure that the staff/management takes care of them like they were their own children, and the facilities are pretty impressive to see — but I just can’t shake the feeling that they would be better off in the wild.

I think by putting them in zoo’s we forget about their wild nature, we start to relate to them almost on a pet level and we not only lose an appreciation for their wild nature, but they loose their surface level natural instincts.

Its still there, but it takes more to bring it out than it would in the wild. Why can’t we take a page from some of the rain forest tours I have seen and suspend sully enclosed walkways thirty feet off the ground that extend across large unfettered and unrestricted tracts of land that have been transformed to be say a savanna in Africa?

It just seems like it might be a more natural way to see nature like it is in the wild. I think that might be why I enjoy our local arboretum the Morton Arboretum. Its over 1200 acres of forests, plains, wetlands, etc.

When I go there and walk around its almost like the weight of the world comes off my shoulders, the burdens of life melt away and I can enjoy just being out in nature. Its a pretty amazing place that I am so glad to have finally visited after so many years.