Ok, so this is more about our son than it is about the adoption, but I think it’ still relevant.
 Anyone who has met our son will probably have observed that he is not your standard issue 4 year old mixed kid. He’s brilliant and caring and thoughtful. He’s a very special little person, and I worry sometimes that he’ll have trouble in the wide, wide world because he’s not ‘normal’ enough.
In fact, this came up in a conversation with a neighbor, and Molly 
and I had recently discussed it. Well, true to his empathetic self, my boy, not 24 hours after my discussion with Molly, went outside and jammed one of the dogs’ racquet balls into the furnace intake pipe. Apparently he didn’t want Dad to worry.
I stopped worrying that he’s not ‘normal’ enough.
 I wasn’t mad, and the ball came right out (only held in by the suction from the furnace). When I asked him if he’d stuck anything into a pipe in the yard, he piped up with a ‘yeah’. I had to laugh. It was an absolutely normal, exploratory thing to do.
That boy is a smart one, no doubt. Our little girl will be, too.
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Okay, so just to put this out there: not worried about D. He’s super! And smart kids do fine.
Also, this was a much funnier story when told properly: we wake up one bright morning and our house is freezing. Charles starts racing around trying to diagnose the furnace, the pilot light isn’t lighting. We call a family friend who happens to be a furnace repair guy and Charles races up and down the stairs a few more times. Finally, he runs outside, and then comes back in sort of laughing. He asks Dillon if he poked anything into a pipe, and our lovely child who doesn’t know well enough to lie about it, said “yeah” and we tried to firmly discourage that while quietly cracking up. But the story’s much funnier if you picture Charles losing his mind for an hour in the morning, only to find a raquet ball in the intake pipe (which was luckily only a millimeter too small to suck the ball all the way down into the furnace).