Since school is out and all the summer activities have started (summer school, VBS, Scout Camp, etc.) I have felt like Ethiopia has gone to the wayside lately. We missed our monthly Ethiopian Adoptive Families group this month simply because we had had a long week and the kids needed some down time. I haven't cooked Ethiopian food in a while either. I did add some berbere to spaghetti the other night, when I couldn't find cayenne pepper in my pantry. It had quite a kick to it too!

I am extremely happy that I have made reservations at an Ethiopian... more

An adoptive family and birth family call each other friends or, really, extended family. Someone says, "Well, that's not the norm." An adult adoptee finds his birth family who embrace him with open arms while also embracing his adoptive parents for the wonderful job they did in raising him. Someone says, "Well, that's not the norm." An adopted child isn't confused about her situation, understanding each person's role in her life. "Someone says, "Well, that's not the norm."

Who is Norm other than a guy on Cheers and why does he get to decide how we live our... more

When my girls first came home I avoided all shopping with them. It was several weeks before they saw the inside of a store and months before I did any major shopping with them. The first time I took them to Wal-Mart was to spend some gift cards that were given to them from friends. I initially didn't want to take them shopping, but they were having such a hard time with the "things" that their sisters had and they didn't. I thought I would take them and let them pick out their own stuff and not hand me downs others had picked out for them.

This trip was comical... more

All this week, here and on the Hoping to Adopt blog, I've been writing about affording adoption. I've discussed grants, loans, and saving techniques. I've purposefully avoided one big question, which I tackle today:

Can we ask our friends and family to contribute to our adoption fund?

My feelings on this subject are divided. Every year, I get at least a dozen requests to sponsor friends and family members for various causes. The Avon Breast Cancer Walk, Relay for Life, AIDS LifeCycle Ride, and so on. I get the Girl Scout cookies and the children with the catalogs full... more

As a new birth parent, you might be looking for a way to symbolically show your child's transition from one family to another family. In today's era of open adoptions, many families choose to have a ceremony to celebrate the transition.

Celebrate, of course, is a difficult word to use for the birth family. For birth families, the transition from one family to the other means that they have just endured a deep loss. The loss of a child, even in an allegedly voluntary situation like newborn relinquishment, is difficult at best. Finding a way to acknowledge... more

Yesterday's post discussed grants and loans for adoption. There are far more available now than there were five years ago. Still, not everyone is going to qualify for those - notice how many of them require you to be Christian, for example.

What else can we do to save money for adoption expenses?

I've gotten some great ideas from Adoptive Families magazine and from online forums and support groups. Some of my favorites are:

Have a mega-garage sale. Ask friends and family members to donate the stuff taking up space in their garages. If you've ever seen... more

I am a child of the 80s. I grew up watching Growing Pains. I remember one episode, in which Ben Seaver needs money to buy his dad a Father's Day present. His older brother, Mike (Kirk Cameron, my sister's teenage heartthrob) handed him a soda can and told him to go door-to-door. So he did. Hilarity, as always, ensued.

We can't really go door-to-door asking people to help us finance our adoptions. However, there are resources for everyday people to help us afford adoption.

Adoption.com offers quite a bit of information... more

For those of us who have adopted older children internationaly, the language barrier is most likely one of the hardest barriers to get over. While my Ethiopian girls (ages eight and six when we brought them home) picked up English quickly and are doing extremely well, I still worry a lot about when they are without Hubby or I. I don't want them to get confused or upset over questions about what they are saying or not understanding from others. I'm going to make a short story long, but if I leave out details it won't make a lot of sense.

This weekend we all went to an amusement park. We went to this same park last year when the girls had only been home a few months. I must emphasize... more

Mita and I were at our first joint counseling session (Mita's first ever)the other day. We were playing an emotions game. We took turns drawing a card with an emotion written on it and a facial description of the emotion and then we all shared of a time when we felt that emotion. Mita did great at it. One of the emotions picked was Surprise.

When it got to Mita's turn to share she said she was surprised when she came to the U.S. that not everyone looked like her, or where not "brown" is how she put it. In all of my preparation for the adoption of my brown kids, did I think to prepare her for all the "peach" people she was going to be around. We spent two weeks in Ethiopia... more

In the immediate aftermath of a failed match, you're probably not in an introspective mode, asking questions like, "What have I learned from this experience?" However, as the days turn to weeks and you begin to look to the future once again, I would encourage you to pause for a moment and ask those important questions. While dwelling on the past is never conducive to healing and growth, learning from the past can help us start off on the right foot toward the new version of our future.

So then, what questions should you be asking yourself in the wake of... more