Last night, just before midnight, our adopted daughter Sarah Gertrude
Kestenbaum was born at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan.  She's 19
inches tall (long?) and 6 pounds 15 ounces, extremely cute, and everybody
is doing fine.

It's an open adoption, and we have been in contact with the birth mother
since late April.  She did us a big favor by coming up from Toledo, Ohio
to give birth in Michigan, so we won't have to deal with interstate red
tape.

The world of adoption is very different from the way it used to be only a
few years ago.  In the old days, the agency would receive and place
newborn babies in an atmosphere of secrecy; the unwed mother would "give
up" the child, and prospective adopters would spend years on a waiting
list subject to arbitrary agency criteria.  Nowadays, the birth parents
(usually just the birth mother) "make adoption plans" and choose the
adoptive family; prospective adopters have to advertise themselves to the
birth parents.  So, we were chosen by our birth mother, and we expect to
have an ongoing relationship with her.

This way makes a lot more sense to me, especially given the damage that
was done to my father by the secrecy surrounding his childhood.  He wasn't
adopted, but for various reasons the family wanted to cover up his
mother's divorce, and so he and his brother were inconvenient facts; they
grew up mostly in foster homes and reform school.  On her deathbed in
1984, his mother was introducing him to people as her "nephew".

I guess our timing is either spectacularly bad or evidence that all kinds
of life changes tend to happen at once.  Among many other things, Janice
has quit her job at Wyandotte Hospital (she'll start a new job at St.
Joseph's Hospital after some time home to care for our newborn), and I'm
currently a candidate for the state Legislature.  As I wrote this, there
are volunteers in our dining room sticking labels for a big mailing, and
our treasurer was up until 7am this morning working on the campaign
finance report that is due tomorrow.

And all this happened during a big power blackout that affected much of
southeastern Michigan after the severe thunderstorms of a few days ago.
Downtown Ann Arbor and all of its traffic lights were still out some 36
hours after the storm.  Fortunately our house was not affected (and
Beaumont Hospital had made some kind of emergency arrangement), but the
server that provides my email and hosts my web sites was not back up until
this morning, and my treasurer's house is still dark.

(My pessimistic friends are saying this large-scale power outage is just a
foretaste of what will happen on January 1, 2000, since Detroit Edison has
many thousands of processors and pieces of equipment which are still not
ready for the date change, and there isn't enough time left to check and
fix them all.  This alarming news came out at a recent hearing in the
state senate last week or so.)

The baby will be released from the hospital probably on Saturday; in the
meantime, Janice's mother will be coming up from Kentucky to assist us.

Of course, we will be in court very soon to complete the legal process for
the adoption.

Yours in sleep deprivation, babbling on and on in slightly manic mode,

                          Larry Kestenbaum (& Janice Gutfreund)