Noelle Dreams & Beyond

As adoptive parents, Chris and I have heard stories about all the questions we will get from people we know and from strangers when they see us with our children. It's important to be prepared for this because our children will be listening and looking to us for reassurance when folks (with perhaps good intentions) make rude remarks. Rather than coming up with my own post about this issue, I thought I'd copy an article from the experts. GRACIOUS ANSWERS TO AWKWARD QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR ADOPTED KIDS by Deborah McCurdy, MSW via Lois Paul of Help the Children When we adopt a child who looks different from us, we generally feel we can handle the stares and loss of privacy that go with the territory. We may find, however, that the frequent questions and comments of strangers and relatives sometimes annoy and worry us. At the heart of our anger and anxiety is the fear that our adopted child will be hurt by thoughtless questions, or that their older siblings, who look less exotic, wil...

For parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, not only of transracially adopted children, but of all children, this is an excellent resource with advice from real parents on issues of race, racism and parenting. I hope everyone in our family will read this and put the advice into practice. Click on the post title or copy and paste this link into your browser: http://www.newdemographic.com/Ebooks/How_To_Be_An_Anti-Racist_Parent.pdf

Another question we get quite often is, "Why did you choose China?" One part of the answer goes like this: Basically, China appeared to have the strongest international adoption program of the countries we researched. They've never had to stop the program since it began, with the exception of a few months several years ago due to the SARS epidemic. Other programs have quite suddenly and unexpectedly shut down, leaving adoptive parents without answers and with their dreams crushed. So this seemed like a pretty strong argument for China. Additionally, there are lots of agencies that facilitate adoptions in China, which speaks to the strength of the program, and the process is relatively clear, consistent and predictable. . .with the exception of the wait of course (though there's even some predictability there once you understand the process). We also read over and over again about the good health of the children in China. Most of them are born in the countryside, where...

The following was emailed to my Mommy Forum on 12/31/2006... On the eve of a much-anticipated new year (at least on our end!), I thought I'd do another "lesson" for you:) This time I decided I'd write about the ever-growing wait time to try to answer any questions you may have. This will not be exhaustive by any means -- there are so many issues that affect the wait, many of which no one outside China even understands, so all we can really do is speculate and just hope that the wait will stabilize soon. As you know, we have a log-in date (LID) at the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) of June 23, 2006. We started the process last January, but as far as China is concerned, our LID is the only date that matters. So while we've been waiting almost a year, we're "officially" just over the 6 months mark in terms of the referral timeframe (meaning the time from our LID until we get matched by the CCAA with our child, i.e. referral.). This is helpful ...

The following was emailed to my "Mommy Forum" on 9/23/2006... The following article was written by Xinran, a Chinese author and journalist born in Beijing in 1958. Her parents were imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution when she was 7 years old, and she spent the rest of her childhood in an orphanage. She moved to London about ten years ago and began writing a regular column for the newspaper The Guardian. She has written two books, The Good Women of China and Sky Burial (next on my reading list), and two years ago she formed a charity called The Mothers' Bridge of Love (MBL) to help Chinese children living in poverty. You can learn more about this charity at http://www.motherbridge.org/ . By sharing this article with you, I am hoping to provide some understanding of the mothers that abandon their baby girls in China. ________________________________________ "It's different for girls: 'Do the foreigners who adopt our girls know how to feed and love them in...

The following was emailed to our female family members and girlfriends 9/14/06... Hi, dear women friends and family! This is the first in a series of emails I'll be sending over the next year to my "moms" (literally and figuratively). Most of the emails will be educational while others will be fun, informative emails about China's culture, history, etc. I'll include the men in the family on some of them, but I'll probably let you disseminate the majority of the lessons to them and let this primarily be my mothering forum. Why am I doing this? First, there's a lot to learn, and this will help me be diligent about staying on top of my education. You may be thinking that the parenting journey upon which Chris and I are embarking is really no different than bringing a child into the world biologically -- based on all the reading I've done, that just isn't so. While our child will be like any other child in so many ways, there are special considerations...