From Micah

Oooh, loud noises again. That must be Daddy watching that flat box on the wall again. Sounds like it's a Bruce Lee movie; he's also shown me The Matrix and a bunch of other violent movies. Mommy doesn't like me being exposed to those movies, but Daddy tells her I don't understand them yet. What, does he think that just because my eyes don't open for very long that I can't tell a bad movie when I hear one?

I think I'll practice making squinty faces for a while. Maybe I'll use every muscle in my face to yawn. Mommy and daddy seem to enjoy watching me make faces, even when I'm having what Mommy calls a party in my pants. Can they give a guy a little privacy, maybe a New Yorker to read while I'm doing that? I hate it when they have to unwrap me to clean up after the party, too -- I'm kind of embarassed at how skinny my legs are, and they get cold quickly.

Other than that, I'm doing pretty good. My big news today was that my umbilical cord fell off! I'm pretty excited, although now mommy is threatening to make me start doing tummy time, which I heard is bad. Daddy is already trying to get me to work on my triceps, though, so I guess I'd better get started training.

These folks feed me pretty regularly, and I'm drinking about 13 ounces a day now. I can tell that mommy has a harder time getting the bottle in at 2:30 when I wake up for my snack -- I keep telling her she needs to open her eyes, but she doesn't listen to me. Mommy usually stays on the couch with me until that feeding, then Daddy takes over while mommy gets some sleep.

Tonight, Mommy and Daddy discovered a restaurant that will deliver food to our hotel, so they're very well fed as well!

When they're both awake, Mommy and Daddy spend a lot of time looking at me. I must say that I'm looking pretty good, even though I still have a shiner and some other bruises on my face from the delivery, but I've been having pretty good hair days lately. I wish Daddy would stop poking at my ears, hoping that they don't pop away from my skull, and that mommy would stop fussing over the big bump on my nose. They told me a joke about a mommy and a daddy who both had their noses fixed and were surprised to have a baby with a big nose, but I don't get it. Daddy has started calling me "Hawk" and Mommy sometimes calls me "Little Bird," particularly when I'm in the sling and starting to root for food.

I thought I'd show you some pictues of the room I'm staying in, including my bed (thanks, Ilona!), Daddy reading near my changing table, me modeling a cute outfit that my cousins Rachel and Sarah wore when they were little, and the kitchen where my bottles get sterilized. I've also included a funny picture that Mommy and Daddy took when they were trying to get me to pose for my passport photo.

Gotta go for now; I think it is time for another long nap!

Two strikes we're out.....

Today it was back to the embassy for passport pictures and then to a nearby hospital to get our DNA test. The DNA process is quite complicated: two witnesses from the embassy have to come and watch the sealed envelope be opened; there was also an official who documented all the details of the test, a very kind and elegant doctor who did the actual swabbing, and a nurse or assistant of some sort. The whole thing is quite a ritual. The doctor was nice enough to do this for us today; usually DNA tests are only conducted on Thursday and we missed our appointment. The DNA test is now sitting in its little FedEx envelope, waiting to fly to the US for processing. I don't want to jinx our luck by speculating about our departure, but it will take at least 2 business days to get the test to the US, and 2 days to process it, so we're cutting it pretty close to get out of here by next Sat.

Anyway, it was a long morning, and we arrived back at our hotel hungry for lunch. We decided to be adventurous and -- gasp-- cross the street in front of our hotel to go to a restaurant for lunch. Now, crossing the street is an adventure in itself; it is a three lane road in each direction, but with no lane markings and construction in the middle where train tracks are being built. Nobody pays any attention to lanes, though, and everyone is weaving through traffic; also, the motorized rickshaws are only half a car wide, so you could potentially have 6 vehicles coming at you at any moment. Getting across the street is like playing Frogger, and was pretty terrifying with a baby because you just have to step out into traffic and hope they don't want to hit you.

So we finally got to the other side; there are two restaurants there. The first ushered us up a very steep set of stairs to their "fine dining" section, which was extremely dark, hot, and heavy with the scent of incense. We turned around and headed to the other restaurant, which looked brighter and cooler, but alas, we arrived just as they were lighting their incense and this heavy, perfumed smoke was billowing visably through the restaurant. We're pretty smoke sensitive ourselves, but exposing our little guy's lungs to that seemed unnecessary. So two strikes and we headed back to the hotel room for some peanut butter and mango jam sandwiches on stale bread with lentil soup. Thank goodness I stoked up on energy bars and whey protein shakes for Adam; if we really get desperate, we'll start drinking formula I think. I've got to get over to the grocery store for some more supplies later today.

LATER: I just found out that next Sat. is India's independence day and the Friday before is a long weekend here.... if the magic FRRO office is closed on Friday, as I assume it will be, it looks like we could have to stay here through another weekend and would make my mistake with the DNA test yesterday a very costly one. I've already sent two very pleading e-mails to my contact at the DNA lab, hoping that she'll take pity on us and try to arrange expedited service for us. I have no idea how long DNA analysis takes, though, so there may be some physical reason why it can't be expedited. I don't even know how I"m going to break this one to Adam....

In which someone cries like a baby and it isn't Micah

Perhaps the name of this post is enough to tell you that we're not going to be home as soon as we'd hoped. Today was our embassy day: a day I've been preparing for by reading other peoples blogs, downloading forms, and obtaining documents for months. The embassy was about an hour away; our day got off to a bad start when I told our drive that we were going to the US embassy and he hadn't the faintest clue where it was... turns out that here it is always referred to as the American Embassy, and he didn't equate the two. But we finally arrived, right on time at 8:30, and we were only 2nd in the queue. Without going into too many details, the end result was that we sat in the waiting room (dimensions: 6" x 12"), with only a quick trip to a restaurant for lunch, until after 4 pm, long after all their other customers had left, and left without having provided them with the evidence they needed to forego the DNA test.

Micah was an absolute trooper through all of this, sleeping quietly in his pouch almost all day, except for 2 bottles. Thank God he's an angel baby so far. He showed his displeasure by offering the embassy his two messiest diapers to date. Mommy didn't have that option at her disposal, and by about 3:30, she was crying hysterically in the now-empty office. The situation was so frustrating; it really felt like we were suspended in the 9th circle of pergatory. Making it worse was my realization that this was a VACATION day for me. So not. Adam was a real trooper, too, despite the fact that we didn't bring along quite enough calories to sustain him all day.

Although DNA tests are usually only collected on Thursdays, the embassy was able to finagle an appointment for us tomorrow morning. The DNA test needs to be fedexed to the US for processing and an e-mail response sent back. If we're REALLY lucky, we'll have everything we need by the end of next week, but if any link in the chain takes longer than it should, it may mean staying through the following weekend. Right now we're debating whether we have the chutzpah to take Micah to the Taj Mahal while we wait. It would be making the best of a bad situation as far as we're concerned, but we're not sure about all of the logistics of it from the baby perspective. We're going to talk with Amit tonight to see if we can figure out something to make the time pass more easily.

On the plus side, we did get to meet Rob, who was there to collect his twins' passports, and we'll definitely look him and Tricia up if we ever get to Singapore again. Right now, the idea of another exotic wandering vacation isn't sounding very appealing, though, and we're starting to have fantasies about renting a cabana on a beach somewhere and spending our days building sand castles. We're also eagerly awaiting word from Nik, who is camped out at the Ramada waiting for the birth of his twins. His wife Lisa is due to arrive on Sunday night, and we just hope the twins wait for her to arrive.

Thanks to everyone for your well wishes; we'll certainly need you to keep hoping and praying that things happen more smoothly and the time passes quickly.

In which I submit my membership application for the bad mommy club

Desperately needing a change of scenery from our hotel room, we've been talking for several days about going to a local mall. Now, anyone who knows us knows that we're not mall people. We've been known to attract the attention of security while trying to use unauthorized exit doors of Ikea, and Adam breaks out in a sweat at the mere mention of the word "mall." So that tells you how desperate we were, and how few places there are to walk around.

So we took a cab to an upscale (read: noisy, bright, overstimulating) mall, where we enjoyed an inexpensive food court dinner, went to a bookstore, looked at an Indian clothing store to see if something would fit me (nope, anything big enough to fit me looked like a shapeless housedress), and then headed back to the food court to feed Micah. When I reached in the diaper bag and discovered that I had included the bottles, but not the baggie with the nipples in it. Aaaaagh! Next thing you know I'm going to be one of those parents who leaves their kid on the roof of the car and drives off? Luckily, this American-syle mall had an American baby store, where I paid American prices for a new bottle, then asked the fellows at a coffee shop (a rarety here in a tea-drinking land) to run some hot water over it for me. Micah didn't really like this different style of bottle, but at least we got some formula in him.

We decided we had had enough and went downstairs to hail a cab.... only to find that for some reason, cabs didn't frequent this mall's "zone" and that the only way to get back to our hotel was a three-wheeled auto-rickshaw, which seemed both unsafe and highly polluting to baby's lungs. (These auto-rickshaws are pretty funny and a great hoot to drive in without a baby, but you breath in a lot of exhaust and it feels like you're in a video game each time you get in one.)

The mall's security chief called a cab company, and patiently (more patiently than me) waited on hold for 25 minutes just to speak to someone, and then found out the cab couldn't come for an hour and a half. He simultaniously had someone outside trying to find us a cab. Finally, just as we were about to give in to the idea of the rickshaw, one of the guards was able to get a regular city cab, not the fancier aircon'd cabs most tourists use. Even though the driver had never heard of our hotel before and didn't speak English, he got us back to our hotel for only 150 rupees, as opposed to the 320 that the hotel's cab had charged us. Our quiet hotel room never looked so inviting!

We're all resting up now for our big outing to the Embassy tomorrow, where our fate (having to stay here until early next week or through the end of the week) will be decided....

Day 6: So this baby walks into a bar....

Greetings from the VITS hotel. We're settling in here, anxiously awaiting our embassy appointment on Thursday. We're in a really lovely 2-room apartment, with a king-size bed and desk in one room, sitting area and mini-kitchen with a breakfast bar in the other. The hotel price includes a fabulous buffet breakfast and the best gym I've ever seen in a hotel, with personal trainers just waiting there to make you work. We've been enjoying hanging out with Nik, and Kerrie and Mark; last night for Mark and Kerrie's farewell evening, we all met up with them in the bar downstairs for a drink. (Lest anyone be tempted to call social services, the bar actually wouldn't let us in with Micah, so we drank our beers in the restaurant instead.) We're very sad that Mark and Kerrie are returning home today -- we will miss them!

Today we went back to the hospital to collect our paperwork that we need for the embassy. This was our first trip outside the hotel since we arrived on Sat. night. While there, we also got to introduce Micah to three couples who are here to get their party started -- two couples from Australia, and a couple from Hungary. We enjoyed showing off the baby and helping these couples see what the prize is at the end of this process. While we were chatting with these couples, three Indian women were also admiring the baby, and asked a few questions about how old the baby was and whether a boy or girl. They held him for a minute, and we later realized that they were the foreign couples' surrogates. We hope that they'll figure out that Micah was Rajeshree's, and let her know what a beatiful, healthy baby she helped to create. We hope that it gives her some comfort to know that.

Other than that, my big event of the day was getting my phone's sim card re-charged. This was a big understaking requiring three trips to the hotel lobby and two trips outside the hotel. The first trip was unescorted, and I couldn't find the shop I was being directed to. The second trip, with one of the hotel valets, required stops and three different, tiny stores that specialize in selling mobile phone cards, and included crossing the very busy 6 lane road in front of our hotel in rush hour traffic. Once we had purchased the recharge, my escore consulted with about a dozen different people to try to figure out how to check whether the recharge had gone through. In India, many people purchase their phone time on a pay-as-you-go basis rather than a monthly plan, so this whole effort netted me a rechare for the equivalent of $2.00. It will be interesting to see how long this lasts; I'd rather not go through this again!

Outside this fairly elegant 4-star hotel is well-ordered chaos. There are small shanty dwellings tucked together with stalls selling all sorts of things, from chickens to fresh sugar cane juice to haircuts and mobile phones, the streets bustling like Manhattan at rush hour, but with small children in neat school uniforms, women in beautiful saris, men on ancient bikes balancing 3-foot high boxes on the back. Mark and Kerrie's room had a view of some of the twellings, and we spent some time watching the comings and goings of people, and were impressed with how hardworking and clean the people were, and what a marvelous it was that children were being taken care of by the whole community rather than just their immediate relatives. The people of India are so much more industrious than we're used to -- Amit explained that it is because there are no social safety nets here, so if you don't work hard, there's no unemployment check, health care, school for your children, or place to live. We're also impressed with how hospitable people are here. There's a much stronger service ethic here, underlined by the sanskrit saying, "Guest is God." We wish we could get out of Mumbai to exlore the parts of India with more natural beautify, but ti doesn't seem to fit into this trip......

For Rachel

Dear Cousin Rachel,

You asked to see some pix of my fingers and toes. Luckily, my mamma was inspired to take some close-ups of me yesterday while she was waiting for the hospital to let us leave! I know your birthday is coming up, so I'm sending these as a present to you. I wish I could be there for your birthday, but right now it looks unlikely. I can't wait to meet you!

Love,

Cousin Micah

Our first visitors

Today Micah was delighted to welcome his first visitors -- Nik from Australia, who is expecting twins in the next few weeks (Lisa, get here soon!), and Kerrie and Mark from Canada. It is really wonderful to meet all these people whose stories I've been following for the last year, ever since we first started this surrogacy adventure. We're also hoping to meet several other intended parents and new parents who are scattered at other hotels in Mumbai.

Micah continues to grow and change before our eyes. The swelling across the bridge of his nose is going down a little bit and his eyes are getting more alert and focused. Yesterday when we put him under the warming bed naked, his flailing hands surprised him, today he seems to have more confidence. His neck and back muscles are getting stronger by the minute, and he'll be ready to go to the hotel gym at the VITS with Daddy. Meanwhile, mommy and daddy are becoming sluggish, deconditioned, and dehydrated from spending 4 days in our rooms!

We're also seeing more and more resembolence to Adam, to the point where the other day, we joked that we should get a DNA test to find out if we actually had an Indian ED!

If and when the pediatrician shows up this afternoon, we're planning to essentially discharge ourselves and get the heck out of here. Next stop: a real bed!

Pictured above: Nik (top), Mark, Kerrie and me, our improved solution to the UV protection problem, and an opened-eyed photo of Micah.