Once in a while you come across a story that moves you right to the core; this is one of them.

The Baron Family of Washington State has three grown biological children and eleven adopted children. Five of the adopted children have disabilities. When you look at the photo (which I can’t post, but you can click the link to see), you see a mini-United Nations that is working well.

The adopted children range in age from nine to eighteen, and hail from Guatemala, Ethiopia... more

Happy New Year's Eve everybody! To celebrate the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008, I am highlighting my favorite 12 posts from 2007 on this transracial adoption blog. I have chosen these posts for a variety of reasons, but mostly because they truly represent to me what transracial adoption is all about, and what I feel the most passionately about. I hope you enjoy the recap. :)

#8 - Walking... more

This article, After DNA Diagnosis: ‘Hello, 16p11.2. Are You Just Like Me?’ in Friday’s New York Times tells the stories of several families who have had genetic testing done that pinpoints their children’s exact chromosomal variations causing their children’s disabilities.

It’s exciting that technology now enables us to scan all 46 chromosomes through a simple (but expensive) blood test and identify the exact variation, additions or deletions to the DNA chain. These... more

Charles Dickens never wrote about adopting from Russia, though his stories featured plenty of orphans. Still, I am tempted to sum up the year 2007 in Russian adoptions by borrowing from the opening of one of his greatest books, "A Tale Of Two Cities":

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything... more

Some people believe that I’m very anti-school and translate that into being anti-teacher. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, our eldest daughter is about to become a teacher. Sadly, I see many challenges and pitfalls ahead of her as she starts a career with the public school system.

I’ve been watching carefully a local story that has been brewing since early September, when the special ed director of a metropolitan county, Sharon Purdie, was “reassigned” to a new position “director of special projects” by her district’s superintendent. This reassignment of a veteran special educator came after parents filed a due process case against the school system for abusing... more

I read a very disturbing Newsweek article called When Adoption Goes Wrong. I wrestled with whether to write about it but concluded that this is information that hopeful adoptive parents need to know about to protect themselves.

The article begins with a story about an adoptive mother who beat her adoptive two-year-old child to death. (Can you see why I hesitated to write about this?) While there is no justification for what this adoptive mother did, hopeful adoptive parents can benefit from reading... more

As an adoptive parent, do you sometimes question which of your child's behaviors stem from your child's adoption and which are simply your child's personality? I find myself wondering this sometimes because I want to be sensitive to helping my child work through any adoption-related issues.

For example, my seven-year-old son is a very confident little guy. He has no problem with going to a new camp at a new location in which he does not know a soul. It does not phase him in the least. By the time I pick him up on the first day, he not only has several... more

At times, I have found it difficult to transition my parenting tactics when a child's behavior has significantly improved. Think about how you parent each child in your home. A toddler needs constant supervision and so do some older children. For example, a child who has perpetrated another child, self-mutilated, or extremely destructive may require vigilant parenting. You may need to either remain in the same room as the child or strategically place monitors in rooms so you can hear everything going on. You remain on high alert, ready to intervene within seconds.

Think... more

I've done a lot of thinking lately about kids who end up being adopted by a family in another country even though they have living relatives still in Ethiopia. Sometimes adoptive families feel so uncomfortable about that idea that they tell their agency that they want to adopt only 'true' orphans, kids who have no living family at all. That is certainly a legitimate choice, and I totally understand the feelings that lead families to make that choice.

However, I think that sometimes families do not fully understand how alone a child can be in the world even while in the care of a member of their extended family. Certainly there are uncles and grandparents who do a good job taking... more

We homeschool “year-round,” meaning we don’t have any long breaks (like three-month summer breaks). Part of this is because of the way I grew up. Traditionally-schooled as I was, and my ADD undiagnosed, coming back from a long break was really, really hard for me. So now that I homeschool, I deliberately chose to make our vacations much shorter, so that any breaks wouldn’t be so hard to rebound from.

Winter break is usually two weeks (sometimes three), but even then, the kids generally read or do some sort of educational activity sporadically throughout the time off. Next week, many of their outside classes will begin again, and we will get back to a more structured routine.

To... more