LETTERS FROM HOME: MAKING DOUBLE, TRIPLE SURE LILY GETS LOVED

July 11, 1996

Dear Julie,

Last weekend DC and I went to St. Louis to meet the baby girl our friends David and Chris adopted in China. Her first name is Lillian, middle name Jianglu. Means River Jade.

She is 7 months old, loves to play with her feet and gurgles a lot. This is all that is expected of her.

We got an up-close look at how babies change lives. Not just the part about having to wake up every few hours, and not being able to go anywhere spontaneously, and having to bug her room so that you'll always be there when she needs you. Lily has the ability to make time expand.

Chris took a leave from her teaching job but still is co-authoring a book about educational theories, running a household that now includes a 20 or so-room mansion they are house-sitting, and being Lily's full-time nanny. David still runs a company but also shares as many of the Lily duties as possible.

That's the big change. Their individual lives, which they'd sort of gotten used to running over 40-something years, are now in orbit around Lily. As they were leaving China with her and Lily was experiencing some intestinal difficulty that made them wish they'd brought along a pediatrician instead of a baby book, David began wondering what he'd gotten himself into. Chris already knew.

Then the magical phenomenon known as bonding occurred for him. I could see why.

Lily looks at the world with wonder and loves all she sees. You can have your holy books. This is the purest expression of God I know.

I read that though parents tend to treat babies as barely sentient beings, they already possess the intelligence necessary to create a bomb or a Mona Lisa. They just haven't yet learned the techniques we think of as communication. But communicate Lily does.

Joy, anger, the whole spectrum of human feeling is expressed in sounds that have not yet been coded into words, in the language of a body that has not yet learned to restrict itself.

Chris' school puts a belief in children's native intelligence into practice. Instead of having the three R's pounded into them, students are encouraged to dream, explore and create in whatever ways they want. When that is the starting point, Chris says, the three R's become tools for expression and enjoyment that are eagerly learned.

We enjoyed our days in St. Louis. Saw James Taylor, went home to a 100-year-old mansion. It's in one of those neighborhoods people do pictorial books about. Such a book that included a picture of the house was sitting on one of the tables.

The mansion is three huge, artful stories of things that no longer work. Things like showers, a faucet here and there. It was just like our home on hormones.

When the mansion owners return from their extended sailing trip, David and Chris will go back to their own house in the country. A room is being added on for Lily and there might even be room for a sister. This will be Lily's home.

Someday she will learn that she was abandoned and probably never will find out why. She'll discover that she comes from a place so far away that most Americans never have been there. And some people might treat her as if she's different from them.

I hope she remembers to look with wonder and love.

These are just a few of the thousands of challenges Chris and David will face. When they arise, no doubt David will wonder what he's gotten himself into, and Chris already will know what she's going to do.

The adoption announcement included this poem one of Chris' students wrote.

For Lillian

When the baby cries,

Sing her a lullaby.

And let her splash

When you give her a bath.

And after you give her a bottle,

Make sure you burp her.

And make double, triple sure

You love her.

And when she grows up

Play with her.

Swing her around,

Read her fairy tales,

And buy her cute clothes.

And kiss her goodnight

Till she doesn't think

She'll have bad dreams.

And take her good places.

-- Amanda Calhoun

First Grade

New City School

Sam Blackwell is a member of the Southeast Missourian news staff.