Virtually every state in the country has a Safe Haven law.

What is a safe haven law? This allows a new parent to safely leave their child with a responsible person rather than abandoning the child or doing something even worse. The parents are free from prosecution, if they follow the regulations of the safe haven laws.

The laws vary by each state, so if you, or someone you know, is considering this, please check the regulations for the state. The child will then be placed in foster care and receive care and services.

So how do the regulations vary... more

I mentioned in this post about how the RAD magnet had managed to find yet another mom who had been through the mill with tough kids and not had any resources. I was at my first homeschool get-together last week and I met a mom who had adopted a couple of girls twenty years ago. Go figure … I still can’t believe how unlikely it was that I started a conversation with this particular mom.

Her story was way too familiar. Her now early-twenties girls were preschoolers when they were adopted from the state foster care system. The younger... more

After our first two attempts were thwarted by rain, we finally got the opportunity to go out to the pumpkin patch this weekend and spend some time together as a family picking out the pumpkins that we are going to carve up for Halloween. Halloween is the kick off to the holiday season for our family, so going out and getting our pumpkins is always quite exciting for the entire family.

My husband and I began planning our visit to the pumpkin patch early in the weekend. We had decided to go to the mall on Saturday, to get some clothes for our family cruise, and get our pumpkins the following day. Living where we do, there are a ton of farms in the area, most of which not only... more

On Sunday afternoon, we attended the annual church harvest party. It was another one of those great bonding opportunities where adopted siblings could make memories with their new family. Sometimes children who are newly adopted to your family feel left out when a sibling is reminiscing with “remember when,” phrases. That is one of the reasons I love these fun outings with our church family. It creates some “remember when” scenarios for all of the children.

When we arrived, some children were already going on hayrides. They were sitting on stacks of straw, loaded on a wagon,... more

I'm a domestic birth mother. My daughter was born in the United States and placed in the United States. On top of that, our adoption is fully open. I know where she lives and how to contact her family at a moments notice. I am luckier than mothers of domestic closed adoption, many of whom can only rely on hope of reunion. Beyond them, I am immensely more lucky than my sisters in adoption who happen to live in other countries and have children who were adopted into the United States.

This... more

I have been having some frustrating conversations with my 14-year-old daughter who has a learning disability and fetal alcohol syndrome, FAS. Lately, whenever I ask her a question about something, she tells me what she is currently doing. That is frustrating because her response has nothing to do with the question that I asked her. Whether this has something to do with her learning disability or her FAS I don’t know, but I do know that it only started last week. She has been part of our family for 10 years.

Yesterday, for example, she was outside playing army with... more

Time outs are the big fad of this generation. I have used them myself with varying levels of success. I found that time outs worked better when my son was younger. As he has moved on to his school-age years, I find that putting objects into time out works much more effectively to curb his behavior than putting him into time out.

People do time outs in different ways, but most agree on the formula of one minute of time out per year of life. For example, you would put a two-year-old child into time out for two minutes. When my son was a toddler, I gave... more

This post is part of a series on older child adoption in which I am applying things I learned from adopting a retired racing greyhound to hoping to adopt an older child. While there are obviously many differences, I learned a lot that can be useful in adopting an older child.

In my last post, Dog's Eye View of Older Child Adoption: First Few Days, I talked about the things we did to... more

A long feature in the New York Times this weekend looked at adoptive parent attempts to reconnect with the birth mothers of their internationally adoptive children, looking at the process and potential outcomes for those who decide to attempt connection before their children are old enough to fully participate in either the search or the decision-making.

Like every conversation in the adoption world, opinions range wide and fierce on this topic, and there is little agreement, if any, even amongst members of groups coming... more

Some people believe parenting is for a lifetime while others believe it is until they turn 18 year old or become independent. When I hear a parent saying, “I cannot wait until she moves out and my job is done.” I always question statements like these when I hear parents make them. Honestly this is a pet peeve of mine. I thought being a parent was a lifetime commitment not just for a few years.

While I do know that some parents think that when the child (as an adult) moves out that is when their parenting responsibility stops. I think we all need our parents which also includes parenting from time to time at any age. Heck…I am getting close to my forties and I need my parents... more