Book review: Over the Moon

Another adoption-related book that was recommended by Amazon reviewers is "Over the Moon: An Adoption Tale." Like "A Quilt of Wishes," this story and its illustrations were inspired by the adoption experience of its author (and illustrator!) Karen Katz. In this case, the adoption took place in Guatemala, although the country isn’t mentioned by name.

"Once upon a time," the story begins, "a teeny-tiny baby was born." The infant beams, cradled upon the softest cloud in the middle of a golden meadow. Fireworks burst around her organically, as if all of nature is celebrating her arrival.

As you might guess from this opening, "Over the Moon" is more a fairytale than a factual account of the adoption process: the child is appears as if by magic; the parents pick her up and take her home. There are no complications or delays, nobody ever frowns, and the skies are not cloudy all day. Life is very simple and very grand. (Because of this simplicity, the story would be accessible even to very young children.)

I enjoyed the text's lyrical moments ("you grew like a flower in another lady’s tummy"), but for me, it is the illustrations that really make the story. Every page overflows with beautiful, bright colors, curves, interesting shapes and visual textures, playfully dancing images, and a sense of perspective that may owe something to medieval art (size represents not distance but importance in the story – "extras" are small, named characters are medium, and our protagonists are enormous) . The pictures are a lot of fun (and would make fun folk-style appliqué quilts).

The images do more than just accompany the text: they help us to see the parents’ joy more eloquently than any words could. On the pages where the radiant parents learn their child has been born, for instance, the mother leaps into her husband’s arms. They quite literally are floating - off the ground and over the moon! Although the artistic style is quite different, I was reminded of the way happiness lifts Chagall's lovers off their feet (cf. Romeo and Juliet or Lovers with Flowers). Here too, it seems, joy is a natural law that more than exceeds the puny laws of physics.

In these pictures, Katz, quite simply, has captured the essence of joy.

Twenty quilts

A selection of twenty quilts from amongst those I've made (or started) over the last few years

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Personalize your fictional family!

DH suggests, given people's tendency to gravitate towards the familiar, that there might be a market for popular picture books with parental permutations. Just sketch in (or erase) a parent in the background, do a global search-and-replace on some pronouns, and the book appeals to a whole new audience!

You could imagine extending this so that potential buyers could go through a checklist to select the parent's/parents' genders, races, statures (endomorph vs. ectomorph), features, etc., and really come out with something completely personalized.

Do you think it'd sell? ;)

Families just like yours

Sandie and I have both been looking through adoption-related books online lately. At Amazon, primarily. Amazon has more reviews than any other online bookstore I’ve seen. Many of the reviews are really insightful, and there have been several occasions where they have inspired me to revise my shopping list.

Sometimes, though, reviewers’ concerns or issues color their comments so much that these reviews become virtually useless for others.

One of the issues for some of the adoption book reviewers seems to be the composition of adoptive families. I found reviews from single mothers who, instead of evaluating a book on its merits, stated that they had simply chosen not to purchase this book because the family portrayed included a father. Likewise, I saw reviews from adoptive two-parent families dismissing other books simply because no father was depicted.

I found myself somewhat puzzled. Things like an interesting, well-written story and engaging illustrations are my top priorities for a picture book – and these are the things that I, like most readers, hope to learn about in a book review. A comparison of the fictional family and the family of some stranger on the internet just isn’t all that helpful or relevant to me.

Now, I do understand the impulse to give your child books and things that speak directly to her situation. When I visited American Girl Place last year, I was fascinated with Jess, the 2006 American Girl doll of the year, because she was half Japanese (like my own hypothetical children would be). Even though I don’t have a daughter (or even the prospect of one on the horizon), I still considered digging deep into my wallet to purchase the doll. (How often do you find a mixed race doll, anyway?) It’s important for children to see that there are interesting, worthwhile people (fictional or non-) who look like they do, act like they do, have experiences like theirs, or are similar in some other respect.

As a child, I enjoyed books like that - books where I felt like could relate to the characters. Periodically I came across a character who maintained her self-esteem even while displaying a terrible shock of ginger hair; or one who prospered even though she shared some very familiar weaknesses. It was comforting to feel that, even if I was flawed, at least I wasn’t uniquely flawed. ;)

But the characters in my beloved books didn’t have to be my Doppelgängers for me to relate to them. Even when I was very young, I, like any child, was able to make the imaginative leap between myself and the strong-willed badger heroine of Bread and Jam for Frances, between my concerns and those of the humble little pig in Charlotte's Web; I didn’t need to sprout a striped pelt or grow a snuffly snout to see myself in them. I loved the pioneer stories like the Little House on the Prairie series and Caddie Woodlawn, and I adored learning about Jewish life in turn-of-the-century New York through the sisters of All-of-a-kind Family, even though my own life was very different.

It was wonderful to be able to visit these fictional (or semi-fictional) worlds, so different from my own, and yet so similar. How many things I learned, and how many questions followed, with so many new experiences to process. I would not have learned so much if the protagonists had been just like me.

Details of self, family, community, faith, may differ in any given book, but our human concerns, deep down, remain the same: Who am I? Where do I fit in my family and my community? Am I loved? Is there some higher or deeper meaning to my life? Will the world be a better place because I was here? It is this common humanity, the things that make us human, that bring us together.

I think there would be room in my adoptive child's library for stories that reflect her specific experiences, for stories that speak to her on a more universal level, and for stories that do a little of both. She'd miss out on so much otherwise.

Other people's wishes

Here is a page of all the wishes that were sent in for one family's Good Wishes quilt project. While it's not the same as paging through the scrapbook itself, skimming through these wishes does give a bit of a taste of what that experience must actually be like.

(They sent some nice ones, didn't they?)

The finished quilt is pretty too. I only wish the site owners had linked each wish to its square, as I am curious to know how the contributors chose to express some of those rather abstract wishes in graphic form!

(But my friends and I were always in search of an unbreakable, secret code for passing messages when we were small - so perhaps knowing that only you, with the help of your superfantastic scrapbook decoder, will ever be able to uncover all your quilt's secrets is part of the fun!)

Speaking (of) heirlooms (part 2)

Ceremonial clothes from the mid 19th through the mid 20th centuries were featured in a Honolulu Academy of Arts exhibit back in 2000-2001. The exhibit, entitled "Family Ties in Asian Textiles: Children's and Adult Costumes from Japan and China," focused primarily on children’s wear.

Like the heirloom clothes and other textiles my family has passed down from generation to generation, these garments speak volumes about the people who wore them. A high infant mortality rate meant that families engaged in "lavish celebrations and rituals" to try preserve the lives and ensure the prosperity of their precious children. Wishes for well-being and prosperity were often woven right into the children's clothes: symbols (like lucky or protective animals and plants), auspicious colors, and even the stitching itself conveyed the parents’ fervent wish that the child should flourish.

One custom in particular, practiced in both China and Japan(!), should by now sound familiar to you:

in China… the Hundred Families Coat [was presented] during the child's first month. This coat was made from silk fragments from many different families and symbolized the combined good fortune of one hundred families. This custom was also practiced in Japan where the robe was called the Hundred Virtue Kimono.(Asianart.com, "Family Ties in Asian Textiles")

While the Academy was not able to obtain any such robes for this exhibit, an article from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin confirms that the curator had "seen them in a couple of pictures."

(As documentation from an actual textile historian, this finding is tremendously exciting to me. I am considering trying to contact the curator to try to learn where she saw these pictures!)

What symbols do we have in Western culture that convey to a child of the early 21st century just how much she is valued? Will they continue to speak eloquently 100 years hence; or will a textile of our time be so steeped in our popular culture, all Disney Princesses and Dora, that our descendants will need a cultural historian to decode its meaning?

I can't wait to see how the friends and family members who contribute squares for the Good Wishes quilt address these questions. (If the fabric itself remains cryptic, there is always the wish scrapbook!)

Speaking (of) heirlooms (part 1)

When I was small, we kept a pretty strict clothing budget. One of the department stores in town was rumored to have great prices, and seemed, to us kids, like a good way to stretch our dollars. My mother said no: the clothing, she explained, was cheap because its construction and fabric were cheap; they would not stand up to the bike riding, tag playing, base sliding, tree climbing, and overall horsing around of one daughter, let alone two.

By the time we had both outgrown a piece of clothing, regardless of where we had procured it, it was often consigned to the scrap heap. I'm not sure what became of these scraps. A vogue for traditional crafts like quilting sprang up with the American bicentennial (as my patriotic patchwork blouse, ca. Christmas 1976, aptly if somewhat humiliatingly attests); but, one ill-fated foray into the world of corduroy patchwork pants aside, nobody in my family made patchwork things then, and nobody would for another 15-20 years. So I know we never used any of those scraps in quilts.

Lightly worn ceremonial clothes, like prom gowns and fancy baby dresses, faced a brighter future than the scrap pile. Some were saved to be passed down as "vintage" items to the next generation. A very few, handmade or otherwise special, were put away as family heirlooms. They sit alongside our great-grandmother's intricately engraved pocket watch, her impossibly small dove grey fingerless gloves, our grandmother’s spotless lace baby gown... All are precious treasures now (even more so when we can pair them with their stories).

The delicate and pristine nature of our ancestors' things speaks eloquently of their refined and proper natures, and of a world in which these qualities were much valued in ladies. I wonder what the things we choose to keep will say, 100 years hence, about the kinds of people we were, and the world in which we lived.

Go to part 2

Of ladybugs and bats

When I was in Nürnberg, I was given a small stone painted with a pair of scarlet ladybugs. I was told that these Marienkäfer (Mary’s bugs) were good luck.

I don't know whether I had an especially good harvest that year, as Sandie's ladybug lore promised, but I do know that whenever I see ladybugs in my garden today, I'm sure to have better luck in my struggles against the aphids. (Have you ever seen a movie in which a monster runs amok, stuffing hapless humans into his ravenous jaws? That is exactly what a ladybug looks like when she rampages through a colony of aphids. It is strangely fascinating to watch [as long as you are not an aphid!])

Now, if you have rejected these rosy godzillas as having only tenuous ties to Chinese culture, what other creatures might you select in their place?

If you look to Chinese art, you will find quite a number of animals (and plants) with cultural significance. As a Westerner, you may be surprised by what you learn: for instance, my only real association with bats is vampires, but in China, bats are a symbol of luck:

...[I]n China, instead of writing actual good luck characters (words), objects with the same pronunciation as the lucky characters are often used instead. The Chinese word for "bat" happens to have the same pronunciation as the characters for "good luck," so the bat has become a symbol of good luck.... The bats flying among the clouds [on a robe that is being described] are a reddish color. The pronunciation of the characters for "skies full of red bats" is the same pronunciation as characters meaning "the heavens are full of happiness and good fortune." (Kyoto National Museum, "Textile Stories")

(Admirable wit! I love being able to gain new insight into the designs like this. Since we don't have any real knowledge of Chinese, I fear most such puns fly right over our heads.)

Given our Western sensibilities, I suspect the only bat(t) we'll include in this quilt will be a cotton one. But perhaps one of the other creatures on this list of symbols in Chinese art will be auspicious in both Eastern and Western cultures.

This last gets at something at the heart of our whole discussion here. When two disparate cultures come together in an international adoption, there are a lot of adjustments to make, a lot of differences. Adoptive parents are probably glad to find points of commonality wherever they can. If they are told that both ladybugs (cheerful and good in Western culture) and bats (creepy and evil in Western culture) are considered lucky in China, who would doubt what their choice would be?

More on lady beetles

I've been researching lady beetles to see if they really are considered lucky in China and this is what I have come up with.

From Wikipedia:

Some people consider seeing them or having them land on one's body to be a sign of good luck to come, and that killing them presages bad luck.

and from the good folk at Ask Jongo:

The Ladybug is considered a kind of beneficial insects which protect crops from aphid (a bug that eats crops).But not many people know it is a symbol of good luck. The kind of superstition is believed in many countries: Central Europeans --and similarly some Swedes--believe that if a Ladybug crawls across a maiden's hand she would soon be married; Germans believe that the Ladybug is generally good luck but a traditional belief is that if there are less than seven spots you are guaranteed a good harvest; in England each spot means a lucky month to come; in French vineyards Ladybugs bring good weather; and, similarly, in Austria a Ladybug is a sign of good weather; its name in Iran means "Good News"; and Canadians say that you should make a wish and let the Ladybug fly away--the direction it flies too shows the direction from which your wish will come; the Chinese consider it good luck to find one in the house. But less and less people know about ladybugs, since they are rarely seen in cities now. Some people have heard of the story, but no one knows where it originated from.

So it think it is fair to say that the lady beetle is a symbol of good luck, but is not specific to China. For this reason, I think we will leave the lady beetles out of the quilt.

NB - Apparently, they are called ladybugs in the US, ladybirds in Commonwealth countries (this is what I gew up calling them) but the correct name is lady beetle and thus they shall be called by me forever after.

Book review: A Quilt of Wishes

While scanning the web for information relating to the 100 Good Wishes custom, I came across a reference to a children's picture book on just this subject. After waffling over the hardback version in my local bookstore, I decided to purchase it in paperback from Amazon.

The book is called "A Quilt of Wishes," and it was written by Teresa Orem Werner and illustrated by Nathan Tremlin. From the acknowledgements page, it is clear that the story was based on the Werner family's experiences preparing for the arrival of their internationally-adopted daughter, Natalie Xiao Li.

The story tells of Xiao Li, an orphan in China, and her adoptive parents. While the parents wait for the adoption process to complete, they worry about their little girl, wondering whether she is safe and warm there on the other side of the world.

Remembering how her childhood quilt brought her warmth and comfort, the mother begins a quilt for her baby daughter. Friends and family members learn about this blanket, and send scraps of brightly colored cloth together with beautiful wishes for the little girl. When the quilt is complete, the mother sends it to China.

Xiao Li's nanny opens the box and admires the beautiful quilt, remembering the 100 Good Wishes quilt she was given when she was a child. But this quilt only has 50 squares. She takes it home with her that night, and, in a lovely scene, "within an hour, fifty women who had come to love Xiao Li... showed up with squares of fabric to be added to the quilt." Together they use red thread to stitch the old and new squares together, creating a quilt that will wrap Xiao Li in love and good wishes that stretch from the land of her birth to the land where her future lies.

(As a quilter, I wondered briefly how they added new squares without completely deconstructing the old quilt, but I found myself too caught up in the story to give more than a passing thought to such technicalities.)

When the parents come to get the little girl, the new and improved quilt stands as visible testimony to just how deeply she was loved and cared for even before they held her in their arms. The mother wonderingly realizes that the soft blanket which had been meant to comfort her daughter has comforted her own fears as well.

If there were anything I would change about this sweet book, it's probably something that's partially my own fault. When I saw the hardback version at my bookstore, the illustrations were intensely colored but lovely; when I opened the box to look at the paperback I purchased online, I saw pictures that seemed heavy on magenta. While this gives the Good Wishes quilt a luscious ruby border, and makes the famous red couch at the White Swan Hotel practically glow, it also means that the mother and baby appear sunburned throughout the story. (I probably should have paid more attention to the relative colors of the book covers when I viewed them online.)

While the hardback is a little more expensive (as you would expect), the author has pledged to donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale to the FTIA foster care program in Changsha, Hunan, China, so that other babies can receive the same quality care that her daughter Natalie did.

FTIA supports foster care programs in Hunan and Zhanjiang, China. These programs sponsor carefully selected foster families to care for children who would otherwise be raised in an orphanage. While the orphanages give the children the best care possible, in-home foster care allows for children to receive much more personal care and attention than an institution can provide.

Donations to these programs are used to provide foster care and better quality nutrition for the children. Participating foster parents receive training and education by our FTIA staff in China to better equip them to care for the children.

100% of all monies received for these programs are used for the children – nothing is deducted for any kind of administrative expenses. All administrative costs are provided for by FTIA. (FTIA, "China Foster Care Program")

The early years are such a critical time in a child's development that programs like this really can make a tremendous difference in the lives of those little ones. It's hard to begrudge a few dollars to such a worthy cause.

Buy it in hardback:

To be Chinese or not to be Chinese?

I asked my Chinese friend Stella about the validity of the following 3 Chinese traditions:
1. Ladybugs for good luck
2. The Invisible Red Thread and
3. The 100 Good Wishes Quilt

Here is Stella's reply:

Yes I've heard all of them. I wouldn't say they are the Chinese traditions. I'd say they are from some of the folk stories. Very interesting, hey? The second one appears in many books - novels or whatever books, mainly love books...but it can be applied to whoever that meet with each other and become friends or whatever, even your enemy. If the people's lives or activities are always tangled, yes, it applies.

Real traditions vs pretend traditions

I'm also curious about the genuineness of other "traditions" popular within the Chinese Adoption community. I read on Amazon this week that the belief that ladybugs are good luck began about 10 years ago when an American couple saw a ladybug just before they received their referral. Now, that's a lovely story, but I don't want to be raising my child with a false understanding of Chinese beliefs and customs so if that's the case, then ladybugs are out.

Also popular is this:

"An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but never break." Ancient Chinese Belief

Apparently this refers to adults who will eventually marry. Does it matter? I'm not so sure.

Let me consult my sources and report back regarding the validity of these "customs."

Where in the world are we?

Having trouble picturing or remembering just where in the world we are? Click here to see!

You can click on our countries to see our mugs, or click and drag on any spot in the world to zoom in on the map. (Unfortunately the free version of the code doesn't reveal cities or terrain, so zooming in is really only useful if you want to focus on the contour of a national boundary.)

Pondering the history of 100 Good Wishes quilts

I love old-fashioned research. I practically leapt for joy in school the day we were assigned to examine old magazines and I found an early 20th century ad for Jell-o. (It was pitched as an upscale item, can you imagine?) I could probably pitch a small tent in the library stacks of any major university and live happily the rest of my days if I only could smuggle in a few necessities (a coffee maker, my sewing paraphernalia, perhaps a cat...).

When I was planning my wedding, I indulged my love of research by tracking down the origins of the traditions we included in our ceremony. Armed with this information, I set out to edify our soon-to-be-dumbfounded guests by explaining in our program what the heck we were actually doing up there slurping that sake and why there were origami cranes everywhere. Our guests seemed to find the presence of the blurbs tolerable enough – or maybe they just turned the page – and it brought me deep satisfaction to put disparate pieces together to form a meaningful whole.

In the case of 100 Good Wishes quilts, however, we may be facing a puzzle that we may not easily be able to solve: just where did the idea originate?

Using the keywords 100 Good Wishes and Bai Jia Bei, I performed a few online searches and skimmed through the results. Google returned a ream of blogs where people like ourselves cataloged their experiences creating these quilts. Many users seemed to have copied and pasted the following explanatory paragraph into their blogs verbatim without attribution:

To welcome and celebrate a new life, there is a tradition in the northern part of China to make a Bai Jia Bei, or 100 Good Wishes Quilt. It is a custom to invite 100 people to contribute a single square patch of cloth. The 100 patches are sewn together into a quilt that contains the luck, energy, and good wishes from all the families and friends who contributed a piece of fabric. The quilt is then passed down from generation to generation. (100 Good Wishes Project 2000, "Introduction")

A few sites referred back to a Yahoo mailing list for adoptive parents (a possible source for the quote) where the concept was apparently broached in the spring of the year 2000. The web site for this mailing list remains vague on the details, stating only that "adoptive parents and prospective adoptive parents on the APC listserv learned of this tradition," not where they learned it, or from whom. Even the webmaster of this Ur-site admits, "We have not been able to find very much information about this tradition...," although she notes that one of the site members found a passage in a book by Pearl S. Buck that seems to capture its gist:

She must offer the child as an adopted son, by symbol, to other powerful families in her clan. Yet what friends had she? She thought and she pondered and she devised this plan. From the head of each of the highest one hundred families in the Empire, she required a bolt of the finest silk. From the silks she commanded the palace tailors to cut one hundred small pieces and from these make a robe for her child. Thus he belonged, by symbol, to one hundred strong and noble families, and under their shelter the gods would fear to harm him. (Pearl S. Buck, "Imperial Woman," p. 60)

This may be the closest we can come to a historical reference without access to a university library.

But, as another blogger points out, how much does the history matter? Although "we've got no real documentation," does the origin actually "matte[r] at this point since the tradition has established itself within the China-adoptive community"? Whether the custom of creating a 100 Good Wishes quilt has been practiced for hundreds of years in China or whether it was a more recent invention built on Chinese ideas, the idea of wanting to share the love and luck of 100 families with a baby is just as valid and just as meaningful. Even if it weren't a tradition before, it certainly is one now.

I cherish the hope that more evidence will come to light. In the meantime, I leave you with this quotation, as independent verification that the tradition did not spring fully formed from the head of an imaginative list member but probably is actually practiced in some parts of China today: "For those of you who have asked about the '100 Good Wishes' quilt, it is Chinese tradition in Northern China. I have a volunteer right now who is from that part of China. She explained that not only do they create quilts but they also make food and deliver it to the new family with their special wishes."

100 Good Dishes, anyone?

Decorated quilt squares

One of the questions Sandie asked me early on was whether contributors could send "other things" to go in the quilt.

Most makers of 100 Good Wishes quilts request that contributors send a simple square of washable (and pre-washed), 100% cotton fabric along with a wish for the child. Ideally, the fabric should have some significance to its contributor or be in some way related to the wish. However, if you like, you can also include things that are a little fancier than plain pieces of fabric.

The quilt below shows examples of some of these fancier squares. It is a memory quilt that my mother and I made for my grandfather when he was in hospice care during the last months of his life. My mother had observed that the people there who usually had the best interactions with hospice visitors were those who had some item of interest over which they could interact: the item provided a natural "hook" to catch the visitors' interest and inspire questions. She thought that a lap quilt, in addition to providing some warmth for a somewhat frail elderly man, could also serve as such an item of interest if we designed it to include something from each member of the family.

To create this quilt, I sent a letter out to each of my grandfather's descendants explaining our project, and asking them to decorate a square. I included a square of white muslin ironed onto freezer paper (to stabilize the fabric) and black Pigma micron fabric markers with acid-free ink. I also asked them to send (or email) photos so I could print these onto squares using an inkjet printer and fabric treated with Bubble Jet Set.

Some of our family members know how to sew, so we also ended up with four squares (shown in the four corners below) that featured appliqué, embroidery, and piecing.

When I had collected all the decorated squares, I arranged them in the following "Trip Around the World" style quilt:



Squares with pen-and-ink designs, embroidery, appliqué, or pieced patchwork are all options you could consider for inclusion in a 100 Good Wishes quilt, or any other memory quilt. (Photo transfer of any type is probably not ideal for any quilt that will be washed frequently, so I don't recommend it for a quilt that will reside on a child's bed. However, if you plan to hang your Bai Jia Bei on the wall, it should work just fine.)

Hint: While you have leeway to change the size of plain fabric squares on the fly to fit what you need, you may not be able to trim decorated squares without obscuring or destroying their designs. Therefore, if you plan to include decorated squares in your quilt, you should know the exact size of your desired block (rather than just a ballpark figure) before you request squares so you can let potential decorators know.

Hint: Tell block decorators to leave at least twice as much room for seam allowance as you actually need. I use a 1/4" seam allowance (standard for quilting), and, even though I asked the contributors to my grandfather's quilt to leave a half inch border of white space around the design, some still took their designs right up to the edge.

Intro from Down Under

Hello all. As Fionn said, this blog will be about the creation of a 100 Good Wishes Quilt for the Chinese baby that my husband and I are currently in the process of adopting. We are still in the early paperwork stages so it is still some way off, and we won't start asking for fabric until we are officially approved to adopt which, all going well, I expect to be about mid this year.

I know absolutely nothing about quilting but I do know about friendships, and I know I am so lucky to have a wonderful friend (who has never even MET me IRL, mind you) who has so generously offered to give so much of her time to do this for us. Thanks Fionn :).

A bit about us

Sandie and her family are in Australia. I'm in the U.S. We first met each other on a naming board about 7 years ago. If I recall, she was looking for a name for her second child at the time, while I was immersing myself in names as a passionate hobby. We've since taken up residence at another board, where naming is just one of the subjects that occupy our busy little minds.

Last year, Sandie and her family began the process of adopting internationally; they hope to add a little one from China to their family once they make it through the labyrinthine process. (You can follow the progress of her adoption and learn a bit about her and her family on her blog, Ashanti Child!)

Somewhere around the start of the year, Sandie made a comment on our bulletin board about a 100 Good Wishes quilt, providing a link to a site I had actually perused myself before. (I am a quilter and am always poking around the web looking for new ideas and inspirations.) I jumped at the opportunity to take on the project with her, admitting sheepishly that I had actually already been trying to figure out how I could do it as a surprise. The roadblock, of course, was that there was no plausible reason why she should turn over the entire contents of her address book to me without a really creative excuse; while I am as big a plotter and planner as the next person, creativity of that level just completely eludes me.

So, the quilt won't be a surprise, but I think working together just may be more fun - and I am sure there will be plenty of surprises along the way!

If you are adopting internationally, thinking of constructing a quilt yourself, or just passing through, I hope you'll consider following along with us on our little journey. I think it'll be a lot of fun.