He's incorrect, of course, since, when he traveled home with us from his birth country, Korea, he increased our family to five. I don't blame him really. It's only been four months since he came home from Korea and, in his foster home, he was the only child, at least the only young child. You see, Dylan had two young-adult foster sisters, in addition to his foster mother. He had the completely doting attention of three women. So you can see how dividing the time with his older sisters, Josi, 4, and Lilah, 3, seems paltry in comparison. I think all babies, to some degree, feel this way but, to a baby who's used to having it all, the transition is especially grueling.

Don't get me wrong, Dylan adores his big sisters. And in return, Josi and Lilah alternate between mothering him and tattling on his adventurous attitude and actions. Picture Josi, only a few inches taller than her baby brother, half carrying, half dragging Dylan across the floor while he laughs hysterically and you'd see what our family life is like now that Dylan is a member of it. But that would just be part of what it looks like.

Dylan is not upset with the girls or even with my husband or me. He just wants more: more fun, more attention, more hugs. If, for example, Lilah falls and scrapes her knee, Dylan begins crying preemptively, knowing that Lilah will now get some of my attention and he won't have all of me.

Since we're still in his adjustment period, I've tried very hard to give Dylan all that he needs. Not all that he wants, because that would mean moving to a deserted island, just Dylan and me! But I pick him up almost every time he asks for it and I certainly spend the majority of my time and attention on him. Because she's still very young, Lilah has reacted by becoming a bit demanding herself, which has worked out just fine. Her demands ensure that she gets enough of me, too, and she's happy and fulfilled.

Josi, however, is a different story. She's infinitely patient with Dylan and just as sweet as ever to me, too, but she now says things like, "Mama, I love you a lot, but I love Da more." Or, "I'd rather play with Lilah because she's more fun." Both are totally fine, but for a girl who spent the first three years of her life?with the same attitude toward my attention as Dylan's currently having, it's a big change. Dylan and Lilah light up my days, but I miss my big girl more than I can say. I'm so thrilled at the relationship she's built with her father and sister and relieved that her transition to a big sister of two has been largely smooth and happy. But, as I try to carve out some alone time for us each week, I am often wistful for the past, when it wasn't such an effort.

On to the next challenge.

Dylan's a hitter. He hits when he's mad. He hits when he's frustrated. He hits when he's tired or when he's wound up. He hits me—a lot, actually—when we're snuggling and he's content. He hits me upwards of 30 or 40 times a day. We've spoken to several post-placement social workers who say it's a baby thing or a boy thing.

And maybe it is. But I'm not particularly keen on being beaten by my child.

Although hitting isn't an adoption issue per se, I feel like I want to simultaneously teach my son good behavior and be sensitive to his history and the strides he's made in the methods I use. Since separation has been such an issue, for example, a time-out isn't the answer. But a firm "no" is met with laughter and another hit. Advice anyone? In stubbornly refusing to accept that it's just "natural" behavior for a boy, am I making a mistake? How can we curb this behavior?

After multiple conversations we've had with our post-placement social worker, I now know that the problems he's had are fairly typical. He alternates between reaching out to strange women on the subway ("You look nice. Want to be my next mom?") and exhibiting full-blown panic attacks, complete with body-drenching sweats and hyperventilation, if I leave him with Jeremiah and the girls for a quick trip to the gym. But to see your child suffer the way Dylan does is intense, to say the least. As a parent, I want to take all the pain away. As an adoptive parent, I know that he needs to weather this storm in order to come out more whole on the other end.

It's all been a bit hard on me, too. Sure, I've had fantasies of my getting, say, appendicitis. You know, just serious enough for a brief break—er, hospitalization. Of course, I'm being silly, but a breather from the intensity—even just an afternoon date with Jeremiah—does sound amazing, and I don't see one coming in our near future. I can’t imagine leaving Dylan with our sitter, even though she’s the absolute best.

I'm glad, though—even relieved, I guess—that we're finally sinking our teeth into the tough stuff like separation anxiety. Now that Dylan is showing signs of being attached enough to fear my loss, I can begin the process of earning his trust, in addition to that beautiful all-encompassing love. And I can begin to prove to him that I'll keep coming back. For now, after each and every (long, exhausting) day, I promise my son that, although I'm not his first mommy, I will be his last. He doesn't understand the words yet but, as he settles into my arms and touches my cheek, I think he's beginning to get the picture.

It's been almost three months—seriously, three months?—since we brought our son, Dylan, home from Korea, and if it's seemed to you that I've been writing on my blog on AdoptiveFamiliesCircle less than usual, rest assured that I feel like I'm just coming up for air. We've had impossible-to-maintain highs, had way too many sleepless nights, and gave Dylan a whirlwind introductory tour of New York State.

We've also had a lot of those beautiful ordinary moments. You know, like swinging at the park, playing with bath toys, and having all three of our kids happily playing at the piano (as you can see pictured here).

We're not waiting anymore, as the blog's former title, The Waiting Room,implied. We're living. It's a messy, hectic, putting-out-fires-every-other-minute sort of life, with all three kids under the age of 5. But it's also kind of perfect—for us, anyway—and so it's time to change the name of this blog. I'm no longer in The Waiting Room. Now, our life is The Perfect Blend.

When our son, Dylan, came home from South Korea, it began: the wordless stares from strangers we passed on the way to school, at the park, at Target—you name it. And because their stares made me uncomfortable, the people behind them felt hostile to me—and so I assumed they were. A month into our life as a transracial family, though, it became clear that jumping to this conclusion about all passersby who gave us a second look wasn’t going to work. I needed to do better. To be better, more fair. I’d stare at us, too, I thought. We aredifferent. But I’d be staring in appreciation because I think being different—being a blended, transracial family—is great. Maybe others were, too.

Cut to last week when Jeremiah and I drove to small-town western New York with Josi, 4, Lilah, almost 3, and Dylan, now 1, to introduce our newest member to our extended families and old friends. Three hours into the trip, we stopped at a diner for dinner. A middle-aged man and an elderly woman sat at the table behind me, and I heard snippets of their conversation. “I wonder what their motivation would have been,” the man said. It could only mean us. After all, Josi and Lilah are biological, each of them a mini version of one of us. It’s a question I’ve had a hard time answering myself, and it stung to hear it over my shoulder. But when I caught the woman’s eye while I was picking up Dylan’s fourth dropped spoon, I did something crazy. I smiled. And then she smiled back, and so began a lengthy conversation between our tables, mostly centering on the loveliness of our children. As they left to pay the bill, the woman complimented the girls and let a hand linger on Dylan’s head, as if she wanted to take a piece of him with her.

I thought, That wasn’t so awful. In fact, it was pretty incredible. So I decided to keep trying it. Throughout the trip, whenever we got the look, I smiled. Sure, sometimes she or he looked away, embarrassed. But much more often, I heard encouragement, kind questions, honest curiosity, and good old-fashioned fawning over all three children with an emphasis on Dylan, a ladies’ man already.

That wasn’t the best part, though. My favorites were the fellow members of the adoption community—numerous adoptive parents with grown biological and adopted children as well as a Korean adoptee—who stopped to chat throughout our trip. In one 10-minute period, during a different dinner out, two men—one, a long-haired biker and the other, a Wall Street type—stopped, individually, to tell us how lucky we were to be part of the adoption triad.

All too fast, the trip was over. Late in the evening, Jeremiah unpacked the van as I lugged three groggy children down the block to our New York City apartment building’s entrance. Two elderly women walked toward us, and I felt their stares. I smiled. “Are all three yours?” one of them asked. And when I answered yes, her response was this: “They’re all perfect. How do you do it?”

“Without much sleep,” I laughed, and we continued on our way. Welcome home.

Two days after we met our son, Dylan, in his Korean foster home, we walked the short block from our guesthouse to the office of Social Welfare Society (SWS), our Korean adoption agency, to take custody. An hour-long playdate aside, we were strangers to Dylan and he to us. I worried that the next few days could go very badly—for all of us.

And they did.

When we first arrived at the SWS office, Dylan was pleased to see us but anxious about his surroundings. This wasn’t unusual, we were told. He was always ill at ease at SWS. Aha, I thought. This explains the weepy, whiny boy in the videos we received before coming to meet him. They were filmed at this office. He hates it here.

The next moments went by in a blur. We exchanged gifts and thank-yous with our social worker and Dylan’s foster mother and, too suddenly it seemed, were being sent off (though it felt like we were being pushed away) into an elevator with our son. As the elevator doors closed, his foster mother stood only a foot away, a smile firmly planted on her face. I tried to match it, but my grimace gave me away. I was terrified.

It had helped me to think that his anxiety wasn’t sparked by our presence but rather the place. By the time we arrived back at our room, though, I had no scapegoat. Dylan was terrified, too—if not actually of us, then of the separation from his foster mother, not his only caregiver but the one who’d cared for him for the most recent several months.

Dylan cried for the next five hours. He took breaks to eat and sleep in my arms, but his main enterprise was mourning. Everything was new. And new, to a baby—well, shoot, to me, too—is scary. I had imagined this day, had grimly fixated on how heartbreaking it would be to watch my new son mourn his past mother. In reality, it was indeed agonizing, but it was also frustrating, scary, and horrible on my end. Sometimes, although I hate to admit it, I wanted him to just be done already. It was just too hard to watch and hear. How much time did he need? Then, of course, because I’m not a totally selfish wretch, my eyes would catch his, teary and swollen, and my heart would break all over again.

As you know, if you’ve read my recent posts, it got much better very soon. The frightened, despondent boy became a smiling, affectionate explorer just about as fast as he wrapped me and my heart around his finger.

But I’ve never been through anything like that first day, and I don’t know if I ever could again.

This all happened very quickly, but it wasn’t immediate. I’d like to take the next few posts to tell you about our trip to Seoul and our initial time at home. Today, I’ll start with our first moments with our son, which occurred at the home of his foster family within half a day of our arrival in South Korea.

We landed at Seoul Incheon International Airport at about 6 p.m. local time, severely jet-lagged. I’d slept only half an hour, instead spending my night in a weepy panic, yet excited to catch a glimpse of the Korean landscape as it quickly gives way to the most gracefully beautiful city I’ve ever seen. Only 14 hours later, we were in a car with our Korean social worker, headed for the home of Dylan’s foster family. 

One of the first things our social worker told us, before we’d even left her office, was that Dylan was very wary of strangers. "Expect him to cry when he sees you," she said. With not much to go on, we braced ourselves for the worst.

When his foster mother opened the door, I couldn’t exhale. He was behind her in his foster father’s arms. I slipped in the door and locked eyes with my son. "Hi, baby," I breathed, taking off my shoes. "I’m your mama." He smiled.

During the next hour and a half, we played, Dylan slowly inching closer and closer to us until he was on our laps, in our arms. His foster parents and our social worker stole away, leaving us alone for a moment. He showed us he wanted us to pick him up and laughed when we did.

As we made our way to the car, our brief allotted time somehow already over, Dylan and his foster mother followed us outside. He’d begun crying as soon as the door had latched, and she’d brought him out to say one more good-bye. He was all smiles, once again, and our social worker translated his foster mother’s thoughts: He wanted to go home with his parents right away.

He’d have to wait two days.

When the wait was up, the three of us would begin a two-day period of trial by fire, the most difficult parenting my husband, Jeremiah, and I have ever experienced and a time of mourning our son almost couldn’t bear. That first meeting, though, was a gift, the promise of what—and who—we could be.

Let me explain. I'm a parent-by-the-book type. I don't mean that I follow all of the rules, and I certainly don't mean that I'm any better at parenting than anyone else. It's just the opposite, actually. I so often feel like I have no idea what I'm doing, and in order to maintain any level of parenting confidence whatsoever, I read parenting books. A lot of them. Some I love, some I hate, and my feelings for most fall somewhere in between.

Before we got the call, I read every adoption book I could find. I read memoirs written by adoptees and adoptive mothers. I read collections of letters written by birthmothers. I read books by adoption experts, as well as books by people who are considered experts but really shouldn't be. I read about transracial families, visible families, and blended families with biological and adoptive siblings. And everyone agreed: The first few months after adoption finalization would be tough.

So I worried. I worried about Dylan’s transition. I worried about my two biological daughters, Josi, 4, and Lilah, 2, and their reaction to our family's growth. I worried so much that my mother asked if I was sure I wanted to adopt. And then I worried that I didn't.

On the day that we met Dylan—we saw him for just an hour in his foster home—I sent a message to our family and friends: "So in love." What I meant was something more like, "He's great and I'm smitten." He is and I was, but it wasn't anything close to the love that I'd developed over the years for my daughters.

Two days later, when we took custody of Dylan and he spent almost five of our first hours together crying, I held him close and performed like a mother. But, when I looked at my husband, Jeremiah, I mouthed, "This isn't my kid." At least, it didn't feel like it. It felt like I was babysitting a very beautiful baby who missed his mother—very much.

For the next two days, my innermost self worried—and I admit this only in the strong hope that it will help someone else who feels this way—that we'd made a horrible, horrible mistake. Dylan was perfect: sweet, funny, surprisingly engaged with us from even those first terrible moments of mourning. But I couldn't force myself to feel for him what I knew he deserved. Still, we got on the plane, the three of us, and brought Dylan home.

That was last week. Right now, as I sit on the couch writing, I can barely resist the temptation to check on him. He's fine, but I can't get enough of watching him sleep. When he's eating dinner and, in one quick motion, sends half a cup of rice through the air like snowflakes, I feel zero exasperation. When I'm snuggling him to sleep and he's touching my face and looking into my eyes, there it is, that painful, exhilarating, clenching of the gut that I never felt until I became a mother.

I don't know what I expected, but I had no idea that I'd fall in love so fast.

As you read this, we're most likely in Seoul. Maybe we're meeting Dylan and his foster family. Maybe we're visiting the baby center where he received care. Maybe we're celebrating Children's Day, a South Korean national holiday, with our beautiful, new child.

The reason this one lingered in my mind is because of its universality. I remember a visit to Ikea in Brooklyn that concluded with my husband, Jeremiah, dragging an almost-hyperventilating toddler to the car as our daughter, Josi, screamed, “I want my mommy!” I, eight months pregnant at the time, waddled a short distance behind and caught the shocked stares of fellow shoppers who, in all honesty, probably questioned if Josi was being kidnapped. Granted, Josi is a miniature clone of Jeremiah, so the situation never got heated past the point of tension and annoyance. 

As an olive-skinned woman with dark hair and dark eyes who parents a blond, blue-eyed daughter, strangers frequently ask whether Josi is mine. Even my sister-in-law, who looks remarkably like Josi, has commented more than once that, if the three of us were walking down the street together, passersby would likely assume that Josi was her daughter, not mine.

I’m proud of my response to her comment then, as well as the way it still holds true now that the baby in question will soon be our Korean-born son, Dylan. "They might not realize that I'm the mom at first," I told her. "But when they see how much we love each other, they’ll figure it out soon enough."