Spending a lot of time this Valentine’s Day with my other man — the short one who still sleeps with a sock monkey.

Girl is at a sleepover, and I thought Boy would be begging me to call one of his friends for a visit, but no. He seems happy to have his mom and dad to himself.

I haven’t yelled at him in 24 hours, which is pretty rare. We didn’t fight even when I told him he was going to miss the end of Godzilla because we needed to leave for church. He hasn’t rolled his eyes at me, hasn’t stomped off in a pout. It gives me hope.

I worry that Boy will soon travel to the dark side of the moon — teenagerhood, and that he and I will stop talking. I know the days are coming when he will no longer bury the piano in Lego Star Wars characters, when he will purge Spider-Man from his room. I know he won’t be my other man forever.

So I’m enjoying these days. I gave him Axe body wash, shampoo and cologne for Valentine’s Day. The smell of choice for 9-year-old boys. Now he asks to take a shower. He wants to smell good. For me.

First rule of design: If you can’t make it good, make it red.

This pearl of wisdom was bestowed upon me by a talented art director. Her words rang in my ears today as I put the finishing touches on Boy’s bedroom.

It wasn’t good, but it sure was red.

With a few unexpected days off, I decided to tackle the pit that is Boy’s room. First, I needed to get rid of the city streets wallpaper border that I hung when he was a toddler, to cover up some ballerina teddy bears left by the room’s previous occupant. I had a Spider-Man border to cover up the last cover up. However, Spider-Man was about half as tall as the last border, so what to do with the gap?

Why, paint it red, of course.

They warned me at Home Depot that red doesn’t cover up anything well. Oh peshaw, I thought. How hard could it be?

What they should have told me at Home Depot is that if you paint red on top of anything, it will look like whatever you are trying to cover up has bled all over itself.

So, a light coat of red spread over the truck-and-cars city scene turned into a big ugly traffic accident.

The people at Home Depot did suggest putting down a white primer. Well, I didn’t have any of that, but I did have an old gallon of white paint. It took two coats of that to cover the traffic fatality. Then, two more coats of red so as not to look pink. Wal-lah.

Do you ever get into the middle of the project and think to yourself, “No matter what I do, this is going to look half-assed”? Yeah, it was like that.

But no matter. Boy is happy with his newly painted room, enough so that he helped me haul about half of the toys out of it and he now has a place to play on the floor. He and Girl wanted badly to help me paint, but I kept telling them, sometimes at the top of my lungs, “NO! CAN’T YOU SEE THIS IS RED PAINT?!”

I stored the paint can in the garage, but I don’t know why. As God as my witness, I’ll never paint anything red again.

The swine flu has come to our house. Because I’ve been writing about it for my office, I know that you’re supposed to call it H1N1, but swine is easier to say. Less scary, too. H1N1 sounds a little too Space Odyssey-ish to me.

Boy has a mild fever, coughing, congestion and his asthma is aggravated. No sign of it in Girl yet. I’m wondering if Bob already had it two weeks ago (when he wouldn’t go to the doctor, even when I cast the evilest evil eye I could muster). As for me, I’ve decided I’m just not going to get it. Period. End of story.

Honestly, I’ve been scared shitless that Boy would get swine flu because, in my research for work, I kept reading that asthmatics are high risk. High risk for what, I didn’t exactly know.

So the trip to the pediatrician today was pretty much for my benefit as well. She didn’t even test him for the flu — she knows it when she sees it. It’s rampant in Fort Bend County, the doctor said. And most of the kids have a mild case, like Boy. She expected him to go back to school on Monday. As for Girl, we’re going to cheerleading practice in a few hours — no need to isolate her, the doctor said. If she comes down with a fever over the next few days, we’re to call the doctor for a second bottle of Tamiflu — which is getting hard to come by in liquid form.

So now we bide our time and see what the weekend brings. I’m really hoping that the little ache in my back is just the worry flowing out, and not a sign of swine.

On September 10, 2001, I was obsessed with the contents of a thick brown envelop. The stack of papers inside had taken more than six months to amass – birth certificates, marriage certificate, letters of recommendation, home study report, photos. Every scrap was notarized, and the notaries had been verified by the State of Texas and the whole packet bore the stamp of the Guatemalan Embassy in Houston.

That morning we were to take that envelop, along with a chubby brown baby, to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City as the last step in the adoption of our son. It had been the longest six and half months of my life, with the last three months the slowest and most painful leg of the journey.

In June 2001, we traveled to Guatemala City for the first time to meet our son, who was then three months old. His foster mother, our attorney and her sister, who served as an interpreter, brought him to our room at the Princess Hotel. Although it was 80 degrees outside, he was wrapped in a blanket and wore a Winnie the Pooh stocking cap, along with a heavy sweater and three layers of clothing. We stripped him down to his onesy the minute they left.

The Princess was one of three major hotels in the area serving adoptive families. You could spot us on the streets right away – white man and woman pushing a brown baby in an umbrella stroller. The Princess lent us the stroller and the pack-n-play our baby slept in. The waitresses at the hotel restaurant would smile and automatically take the baby from our tired arms so we could rest during meals. We got little sleep. We made bottles with powdered Similac and tap water from the hotel sink. To bathe, we held him like a slippery football in the green marble shower. By the end of our short visit, I felt as if I had become an expert at taking care of a strange baby in a foreign hotel room. And I was just starting to feel like his mama. But I had to give him back to his foster mom, crying all the way home and for months afterward.

On our second and final visit, Boy was six and a half months old. He had changed so much that I resented even more the time we’d spent apart, waiting for our paperwork to grind its way through two legal systems. On September 10, 2001, he would be ours.

Our interpreter and a driver collected us at the hotel and took us to the U.S. Embassy. But first, a quick stop to a van parked outside the government building. We ducked inside the van, sat the baby on a bench seat and snap, had his Passport photo taken.

The Embassy itself was much like a Social Security office or a DMV, only it was filled with white couples and brown babies. And the atmosphere was much happier. Everyone was smiling, relieved, joyful. Except for one woman – her attorney had just dropped off her new baby girl, and the baby was freaking out. The woman was just as distraught as the baby.
“That’s why we don’t do it that way,” our interpreter told us, pointing to our Boy, who was peacefully sleeping in the umbrella stroller.

When it was our turn, the Embassy representative asked us a few questions, shook our hands, gave us our baby’s Guatemalan Passport and a much thinner brown envelop to give to U.S. Customs, and that was that. We celebrated that night with two other adoptive families at the Princess. We called our babies the Three Amigos.

The next day, a Tuesday, we were packing to fly home when the phone rang. It was Dad. I only heard Bob’s end of the conversation: “Hey, how you… What? What? Christi, turn on CNN!”

We stood there and watched as the World Trade Center burned. Then a second plane hit.

We went to the airport anyway. No flights that day. Or the next day, or the next, or the next. The Embassy had also shut down. “Thank God we got our paperwork through,” became the mantra of the three families stuck at the Princess, waiting to fly home. We shared diapers, Similac and medicine – by then, all the babies had taken sick.

By Sunday we got a flight out, arriving at the ghostly Bush Intercontinental Airport. No one came to meet us because only passengers (those few souls brave enough to fly) were allowed inside the airport. We were greeted by men with machine guns – the same sight we gawked at in Guatemala City.