You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up (Deuteronomy 6:7).

The Mother/Daughter “Mutual Admiration Society” continues this week! One of the gifts my daughter received at the Mother/Daughter Tea was a little diary. Every day she asks me if I will write something in it “about... more

Are you putting your adopted child at risk for developing asthma? A study of 3000 healthy children over a six-year period suggests that many parents are. Is your home is close to a busy road? Yes, then you have increased your child’s chance of developing asthma, hay fever, eczema, or other allergies by 50 percent. The study results indicate that those children living at least 1,000 meters away from a busy road were much healthier. What is the definition of a busy road? At least 10,000 vehicles a day drive on the road was the definition used by this study. Pollution has been linked... more

I received the following question from a reader who is an adoptive mom.

My son’s birthmom and her new husband are expecting a baby boy soon. I have saved a lot of the clothes my son wore as an infant. Do you think it would be ok to pass along some of these clothes to her? I don’t want to imply that she can’t afford to buy her baby clothes but these clothes are in excellent condition and I thought she might like to have them.

Let me start by reminding you that each birthmother is different. I can only explain how I would feel in this... more

When it comes to terminating a placement, there are some big questions involved.

How/what do you tell the child?

This is the hardest part of the whole process. The kids know that they have bad behavior so trying to sugar coat things is not going to benefit anyone. The kids will see right through it. You can tell the child the truth without being harsh. When we talked with Hannah we approached it from the standpoint of what was best for her. We also talked to her as a group. It was my husband and me along with her previous parents. We told... more

A fellow adoption news follower sent me a link to this "article." Of course, it's not an article. Instead it's a "Letter to the Editor" from a waiting adoptive mother to the newspaper in the city which the Pregnancy Pact teens all live. And by "Letter to the Editor," I mean "Letter to the Teens Themselves." Why this newspaper decided to print such an obvious and blatant "Give Me Your Baby" note is beyond me. It's... more

Three weeks ago our five year old foster daughter returned home to her birthmother. We have spent the 16 months of parenting her developing a strong relationship with her birth family. Not just developing a relationship with her parents, buts aunts, uncles, significant others, and grandparents as well. We worked on building this relationship for several reasons. First, we had parented this child for nearly a year when she was one and two years old. Therefore, we love her, we have known her for most of her life, and she feels like a member of our family. In addition, we adopted... more

There was a great set of questions posed on the adoption.com forums.

It seems that the placement of this child is not working out and the parents are going to ask for the child to be moved. This is a very difficult situation for everyone involved. The questions the poster asked are very valid and some that many parents have. How do you tell the social worker?

The best option is to be honest. Minimizing a child’s issues or what... more

A recent discussion on the forums has adoptive parents talking about how they would feel if the birth parents moved to their city. As a birth parent who doesn't plan on moving until my Husband retires, I wondered the flip side of the question.

How would you (or I) feel, as a birth parent, if the adoptive family moved to your (or my) city?

Depending on the size of your city (mine is small!) and your similar likes (many) and dislikes, running into your child's adoptive family without warning could be a possibility in this... more

I always think I'm doing a great job at this parenting after placement thing. Until my children grow and develop and smack me with new things. Just the other day, my older son and I were sitting at the table eating our breakfast. And he asked, "Why doesn't Munchkin live with us?"

Color me floored. He's always been a verbal child. Sort of slow on the physical scale (but within range; just meaning he was never a climber and so on) but always pretty darn verbal. He's recently been asking some "big" questions about various life things. Some are funny. Some... more

Because we home school - and home school year ‘round - we don’t really have an “official” herald that summer is here. No end of school year kick-off to really mark the passing of another grade. I chose to home school year ‘round, because, as a child with undiagnosed ADD (I wasn’t diagnosed until adulthood), I found that making the transition from the purely recreational back into a formal, structured schedule was really hard. Plus, it seemed like I had to play “catch up” a little bit since my brain atrophied a bit over the summer! This way, it’s not like pulling teeth... more