Category — Adoption

I have gotten a number of emails from people due to the recent thread on APV regarding recurrent pustular outbreaks on the hands and feet of children who have already been adequately treated for scabies.

As I was gently nudged by a few of your requests, I did submit a response to that thread.  Unfortunately, it must have been weeded out by the moderators of the APV group on accident, because it still has not appeared amongst the new messages.  I realize moderating that site is volunteer based and time intensive, I just find it to be a little frustrating to use that resource since there is about a 3-7 day delay to our postings (and in my case, I spent a lot of time typing out a response to the thread on acropustulosis and it was never posted).  Personally, I don’t see the need for a moderator on that site given the extensive process you have to go through to become a member.  I think it’s redundant to check all membership applications AND continue to pre-approve each individual post.  But that’s just me.  Anyway, I’ll respond to that thread here, so if people could pass this along to those APVers who were searching for more info on “recurrent, itchy bumps on the hands and feet of their adopted kids,” it’d be greatly appreciated.

Many of you have inquired to find out whatever happened with my study on infantile acroputulosis.  It was published and the full-text just became available via Epub ahead of print in May.  I do apologize for the delay, but the publication process can take close to a year once something is accepted to a competitive journal.  This article was accepted to the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology (also known as The Blue Journal or JAAD, www.eblue.org), which is the most widely read and most highly respected dermatology journal.  That is fantastic considering the goal of the research was to increase physician awareness of this condition.  Unfortunately, you cannot access the full article unless you go to a medical library that subscribes (or buy it in pdf form for $31.50, but I think that’s a bit pricey for 1 article!).  If you are interested in the brief version, here is the link to the pubmed abstract:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21632152

The full-text article is quite lengthy and has several images of IA (some taken by me, others by people with children involved in the study), as well as a histologic image of a biopsied case we had.  You’ll also notice Travis is an author on this publication - he calculated all our statistics.

You can at least print the abstract and give it to your pediatrician/family doc if you think your child has this and has not been diagnosed or your pediatrician has never heard of this entity.  In response to 1 specific post on APV, infantile acropustulosis is NOT contagious.  That said, there are other diseases and infections on the differential diagnosis that are, so you really need to verify a diagnosis like this with your pediatrician or dermatologist.

Thank you to all those who participated!!  Hopefully it’ll better prepare pediatricians, family docs, and even dermatologists to recognize this in internationally adopted kids.  The other result of the study you may not be aware of is the coincidence between infantile acropustulosis and eczema (referred to more specifically as “atopic dermatitis” in the article and abstract).  Interestingly, ~50% of kids w/ acropustulosis in the study also have eczema, and an old study showed a similar incidence in that subpopulation.  There’s no cause and effect implicated and the sample size was too small to make any generalizations, just something to be aware of in our kids, and something professionally I find fascinating.

First, I want to point any local readers to a RIDICULOUS sale Ambajam is having this week in Denver.  Details are below, but it’s a MUST if you are in the market for baby gifts: 

In case you don’t know Ambajam, it’s the maker of the world’s most wonderful baby blanket.  Just ask Fin, Shane, and Jack!

Quick update on Fin: She had gotten into the midnight snack cycle and largely stopped eating dinner.  She would honestly look Travis in the eye and say “see daddy when my sleepin’ for cottage cheese and yogurt honey!”  That was her version of “goodnight daddy, see ya at 4am!”  So 2 nights ago, we told her at dinner “tonight there will be NO MORE cottage cheese or yogurt honey in your bed, so fill your belly now.”  That night, she woke up SCREAMING “cottage cheese,” which went on for hours.  I paced the hallway while Travis stayed in her room.  The next day, she told us “no more cottage cheese in bed,” and we said “that’s right Fin.”  Last night, no wake-ups.  Can you believe that?!  She ate a HUGE dinner tonight and topped it off with cottage cheese (her fave) before hitting the sac, so my fingers are crossed.  I’ll keep ya posted and thanks for all your input!  Oh, also, I hope everyone read my friend Sarah’s comment about leaving food/snacks in her room.  Seems harmless, and I actually had considered it, but it is most definitely NOT safe to give kids food unsupervised so I’m glad she pointed that out to me and others.

So, in the comments on my last post, Christina pointed us to an article on a website for adoptive families that talks about the new ABC show I mentioned, Find My Family.  I read the first few sentences of this article and IMMEDIATELY knew from whose point of view that article was written – had to be an adoptive parent (I didn’t verify that, but I can’t imagine it’s anyone else’s vantage point).  And actually, the author struck me as a fairly insecure adoptive parent.  However, reading that post made me realize why I have felt so conflicted about the show ever since I saw its first preview: it seems like it’s the kind of reality TV exploitation that will leave clueless American viewers with all sorts of assumptions and presumptions about what it feels like to be an adoptee. 

Unlike the author of that article on Rainbow Kids, I don’t care that the makers of the show don’t focus on the adoptive family side of things.  I’m not offended that the show a show about birth family searches is called “Find My Family;” it doesn’t threaten my role in my children’s lives to recognize they have another family.  Aren’t we, adoptive parents, already over-credited by the media?  And doesn’t that create issues in and of itself?  With the “your kids are so lucky” crap that always makes us squirm and the “thank God you adopted them” comments want to hide our kids from?  Aren’t we already glorified as if we’ve done something other than selfishly want a child to love and raise, just like any other parent?  I do not feel slighted in the LEAST that the show focuses on a need that’s central to many adoptees quest for identity: the search for birth family. 

What does concern me is the potential impact of a far reaching show that makes entertainment out of deeply personal experiences and could cause viewers from the general public to project stuff onto my kids.  But I guess that’s just the nature of reality TV.  I just don’t want my kids to ever think they’re “supposed to” feel ANY particular way about adoption.  They aren’t supposed to be pro-adoption just because they’re adopted.  And I don’t want them to think they’re supposed to feel a certain way about their birth families.  I don’t want them to feel weird if they do or don’t want to search out their birth families.  I will support them either way, I just don’t want their experiences shaped by an external source like ABC or other people who watched ABC’s show and think they now know what all adoptees must go through without their first families in their lives.  There is already a serious lack of sensitivity towards adoptees by ignorant people who make offensive comments or ask very intrusive questions to our kids, or to us about our kids right in front of them regarding personal issues. 

Creating an adoption-based reality TV series, on the one hand, might increase awareness about adoption, first families, and the serious disservice that is done to children when a closed adoption occurs.  That could be a really positive thing.  So maybe it’ll actually decrease adoption ignorance??  I don’t know.  It kind of touches on a different side of adoption that isn’t often recognized – the loss (for birth families and adoptees).  BUT, the show really just uses that loss as an emotional backdrop to its happy ending, which comes by way of reunion of birth family and adoptee, which isn’t in the cards for a lot of our kids who may never find their birth families again.  In the end, it does provide a glimpse into a side of adoption we don’t normally hear about, but ultimately is a warm, fuzzy portrayal that is probably unrealistic for most families.  Personally, I wish there was less “Extreme Makeover” dramatization and a little more real life adoption issues addressed, if it’s going to bother trying to be “reality TV” and all. 

Reality TV is complicated; it does give the general public a glimpse into lives or circumstances they otherwise might not understand at all.  But then again, maybe it just allows generalizations to be made based on a few very intimate portrayals.  And maybe those portrayals are so over-dramatized that they’re not even accurate in the first place.  Thoughts?

That said, I’ll probably watch the show if I can catch it while it’s on; I am curious and I am interested in whatever adoption stories are told, especially because the typical adoption shows are usually on TLC and focus exclusively on the adoptive families perspective.  At least it’s a change from that.

First, I have 2 giveaways going on: a winner’s choice craft kit from Creativity for Kids and 4 tickets to Disney on Ice in Denver!  Drop a comment on those posts before November 22 for a chance to win those cool prizes.

Tara and Christina both asked excellent questions about adopting from Vietnam if the program reopens, as is expected at some point in the relatively near future.  My friend, Jena, offered to guest post on this topic and I quickly accepted her offer because I knew she’d be able to write on this better than I could have.  And she did.

There may be things flying around about VN renewing, but in your honest opinion, is it wise to adopt from VN when/if it is possible? Is it ethical? Do you think it will ever happen?

-Guest post by my friend Jena

Laurie and I "met" through blogging about 3 years ago, Jack had been home for about 4 months and our son Khai had been home for about 2 months.  Laurie and I are pretty different, demographically speaking, but found that we often ended up at the same place when it came to things adoption related especially Vietnam adoption (and actually quite a lot of other stuff too).

About 2 years ago I started blogging over at VVAI (which a lot of you probably have read), and have since learned and had conversations with many many people within the Vietnam adoption community.  A lot of what I know now, I wish I didn’t.  And I wish even more that it wasn’t true.

I started out this process of adoption believing with all my heart that I was doing a good thing by adopting a child.  I assumed that if an agency was licensed in a country, it was there to help children.  I am not sure when the reality began to sink in that something wasn’t right.  I think it was when I joined APV (a yahoo group for parents of children from Vietnam).  There were a few voices on APV (old timers) that kept questioning the vast amount of agencies being licensed in Vietnam, questioning the ability to choose gender, questioning the YOUNG ages of the children, questioning that people were being asked to bring cash with them.  They kept saying how much the current situation looked a lot like the old one.

And then we got an email from our agency that they had been asked by one of the orphanages they were working in to provide incentives for hospital workers to funnel children to that orphanage.  Our agency would not do it.  And I watched person after person working with other agencies whose children were in the same orphanage that our agency was working in announce their referrals on APV…. person after person…baby after baby….

And it began to dawn on me that things were not ok. 

And we all know what happened after that.  Kind of.

Somewhere along the way I realized that I didn’t save my son.  And while we have many reasons to believe that his adoption was ethical, (agency we used, health situations, relinquishment vs abandonment) we don’t know.  And at the very least, I live with the belief that our very participation in such a corrupt system contributed to the problem. 

So here we are.  Many of us have beautiful wonderful children from Vietnam.  Many of us have been left with at the least, questions, or at the worst certainty, that our children’s adoptions were either outright corrupt or tainted by a very corrupt system.  But many of us have a love for Vietnam, and the children of Vietnam… and we want a Vietnamese sibling for our child/ren. 

And the question asked is, is it wise to adopt from Vietnam if/when it reopens.  The short answer is no.

The long answer asks more questions.

What is your measure of wisdom?  By wisdom do you mean that you will be able to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that your adoption was not tainted by corruption?  Do you mean, will the same thing happen again?  By wise, do you mean is it the best way to look at becoming parents?  What level of doubt are you willing to live with? 

Is it ethical?

The answer to that is still up in the air.  I do believe that there were ethical adoptions happening in Vietnam at the time of my son’s adoption.  I believe that those adoptions were the rarity, and that there were many measures taken to ensure that they were ethical.  Measures that most of us did not have as options (because of the agencies that we chose to use).

I think adoptions will reopen in Vietnam.  I think that ethical adoptions will happen in Vietnam.  I think that they will be few and far between, because here is what I think potential adoptive parents need to do in order for ethical adoptions to take place (I am not even touching on the systemic/governmental changes that I think need to take place):

• You need to use an agency that processed adoptions during the last opening, do not use an agency that has Vietnam as a program for the first time. 
• Use an agency who has a long tack record in Vietnam, not only of adoptions but of humanitarian work, and by long I mean 30 years or more of CONTINUED work in Vietnam.
• Use an agency who is commited to finding ways to keep Vietnamese families together and believes that adoption should be a last option for children.(and has a track record of such work).
• Ask for a child who has been in an orphanage/foster care for a long time, whose parental rights were terminated a long time ago.

I think that if you follow all of those recommendations you will find that there are less than a handful of agencies that could have accommodated those qualifications.  Less than a handful.  Out of over 40 licensed to do adoptions in Vietnam the last time.

Do I think that people shouldn’t adopt from Vietnam if it reopens?  I think there is a LOT that still needs to be determined.  I think if you want to provide a home for a child who you can be sure needs one, there are MANY other options that would leave you with less doubt and questions.  Having said ALL that, I am still waiting for Vietnam to reopen.

- guest post by Jena

For those of you who read my previous post and its comments, I just wanted to take a minute to reply.  Btw, I know blog traffic slows a little over the weekend, but check back for a giveaway!

ATL - please don’t apologize. Your comment did not offend me at all and I deeply appreciate your honesty. Your perspective is unique from mine and most of my readers, and I am glad you shared it.

Tahna also presented some really valid points.  Unfortunately, I wonder if the anger in her tone might prevent her message from being heard as clearly.  I politely disagree with her statement that we all have a Pollyanna view of Vietnam over here, nor do I think most of us are as naive as she’s assuming.  If I learned anything through adopting my boys from Vietnam’s corrupt system, it’s that there are people at the bottom willing to lie, cheat, steal, and exploit to make it higher up.  It’s survival, and much of that holds true anywhere there is suffering and poverty.  There are plenty of people willing to lie, cheat, steal, and take advantage of anyone who’ll let them right here in the USA too.  It’s not unique to Vietnam or anywhere else, unfortunately, but I do think it might be more overt there because there is such an underdeveloped legal system.  There are many other developing countries like that.  I certainly never said all Vietnamese were good and honest, but I would also never say that about any group of people. 

Also, it was not long ago that THIS country was murdering natives, stealing their land, hanging Black men, putting Japanese in camps, or telling women their voices didn’t matter and they couldn’t vote.  It was also quite recent that Germany was exterminating Jews, the disabled, the weak.  I think it is common for people to form very broad, negative, generalizing opinions of countries or peoples when they lived through (and at the other end of) atrocities like those, or wars like in Vietnam.  I am not trying to discount Tahna’s perspective, or the perspective of the veteran I wrote about yesterday, I am just trying to say that it is different from my more limited experience with the Vietnam of the last 10-15 years.

Tahna is also right that we, AP’s, do our best to expose our kids to the culture / country they lost, however best we can, but no matter how hard we try, we fall short.  For some of us, those efforts mean cooking the limited Vietnamese recipes we are able to master.  For others, it means returning to Vietnam as often as possible, living there for a period of time with our kids, or hiring a Vietnamese tutor, sending our kids to Heritage Camp, attending a Vietnamese church, celebrating Tet, etc. We do our best, but you are right - since we are not Vietnamese, our kids’ exposure to their birth culture is limited.  Travis and I will never be more than travelers through or temporary residents of Vietnam, volunteers, parents to Vietnamese-American children, and perhaps doctors who work in Vietnam (if we ever get out of medical school debt).  But our goal is to provide our kids with enough of their own experiences in Vietnam that they can grow up and draw their own conclusions, having seen it through their own eyes.  Obviously, it might look very different to them had they been raised there, but it’s the best we, as their parents, can do.

My posts are always up for respectful discussion and I enjoy learning from the peoples’ comments, so thank you for the courteous dialogue.  Feel free to comment, just try to refrain from personal attacks and remember we’re all people doing the best we can. 

I love the VA.  Lots of people hate working there…actually, I think most people do.  But each week I look forward to my time at the VASpa, where I listen to war stories, talk to service people, and help them heal (more by just listening to them recount memories and have someone to share those with than by anything else I’m ever able to do for them). 

Today I spent time with a vet who served in Vietnam as a special ops assassin.  Without violating HIPAA, I’ll just say he’s written books based on his experiences and he shared fascinating stories with me.  I can’t even believe half the stuff my ears were hearing, but I know this guy was not confabulating.  As I carefully examined the skin on his scalp, he was telling me about leaders he had to hunt during a particular operation when Vietnam soldiers crossed the Cambodian border.  My hands made their way across his cheeks, looking for any change in the texture of his skin, as he told me about soldiers crawling through the tunnels, getting bitten by cobras on the nape of the neck because the Viet Cong hung them from the ceilings of the tunnels.  It reminded me of our trip to the Tunnels of Cu Chi the 1st time we traveled to SE Asia (2002).  My Lord were we young.

[Tunnels of Cu Chi, 2002]

That was when Travis and I had our eyes opened to the atrocities of war, on both ends.  We visited the “American War Crimes Museum,” the name of which has been changed to be less offensive to tourists, and I remember sobbing on a park bench while Travis held me for HOURS after we left that museum, where we saw the effects of Agent Orange – fetuses in jars and pictures of the most horrifically malformed babies.

As I examined the skin on my patient’s chest, he explained away several entrance / exit wounds made by shrapnel and bullets.  He then told me about small minority groups, hated by the Northern Vietnamese, that he trained, fought with, loved, and tried to airlift, but many were killed after the US troops were evacuated. 

Most of all, we talked about my boys when I told him they were from Vietnam, which led him back to some memories of an orphanage he and his men looked after.  His special ops team was able to get some of the children out (to Western Cambodia and Eastern Thailand through rice paddies and over land BY FOOT), but when the US started pulling out and it was clear the war was over, the remaining children were killed by the Northern Vietnamese.  Hearing that reminded me of Hoi An Orphanage, where Travis and I volunteered in 2002 and were first inspired to adopt, and where we volunteered again while waiting for Shanie’s adoption to be approved.  It’s an orphanage with a large number of special needs kids.  I imagine many of the kids my patient’s team was no able to save were kids with special needs, or infants, because they could not make the rigorous overland trip.

[Hoi An Orphanage, 2002]

It’s SO hard to hear these stories, and the comments that often follow (he made several comments thanking God I got my boys out of there), but I can’t even imagine living through what this man survived.  It hurts me to hear anyone say things like “thank God you saved those children from the hell of a country they came from.”  Those who know me are aware that we adopted our children after falling in love with their birth country, and that adoption (of infants!) to us is not about saving children; it’s about building a family.  But hearing that from a veteran like this man is not quite the same as hearing it from an ignorant moron off the street.  The Vietnam he knows is VERY different from the Vietnam we have been fortunate to know.  It still cuts me, and I’m always floored to meet people who still don’t see the Vietnam War as “our country’s mistake,” with the awful tragedy on both ends that resulted.  I can’t articulate why it was different or less offensive to hear what I’d consider fighting words if they’d come out of anyone else’s mouth, but I didn’t resent him at all after he said it.  I just felt really really bad for him.  I thanked him, sincerely, for his service, he thanked me for mine, and we shook hands long and hard.  It was another encounter that challenged my emotions, my mind, and left me thinking, long after we’d parted ways.  And that is yet another reason I love medicine: the intimate, but challenging human encounters only a doctor-patient relationship can provide.

I’m talking about birth order again, btw!  **As an aside, we are NOT planning to add children to our family at this juncture, I’m only answering this as a hypothetical adoption question!**  Christina asked if I would ever adopt a child out of birth order.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with adoption talk, an example would be if we adopted a child older than Jack, Shane, or Finley so that all of the sudden their relative “order” in the family was disrupted.

I wanted to write about this since I just posted about how important I think birth order, temperament, and sibling relationships are in the development of our self-esteems, identities, roles, and personalities.  My answer is that I would most definitely NOT consider adopting out of birth order.  I can’t imagine anything more confusing for a child being deposed of his “place” in the family, whether it’s going from being an only child to a 2nd child, or a 3rd to a 4th.  It’s not that I think it would be impossible for healthy, well-adjusted, normal kids to come out of a situation like that, I just think it creates a LOT of additional challenges. 

Adding more children to a family can be really stressful for kids in a “traditional” family, and the mom guilt can be horrendous.  Compound that with the likelihood that if you’re adopting out of order, that pretty much implies you’re adopting an “older child.”  [I guess the only exception would be if you have an infant and you are adopting a child only slightly older in age.  I’d consider that more of “virtual twinning,” which would have been our case if Shane’s adoption had been delayed and we’d delivered Finley before bringing him home.  Still a challenge, but not the same as having a child out of the infant range and then adopting an older sibling for him/her.]  So by adopting out of birth order, you would 1) be throwing off the relationships and identities built based on age/birth order, and 2) have the added hurdles of helping an older adopted child adjust, which is H-A-R-D on its own. 

As a hypothetical example, if we had adopted an older sibling for Jack, he would have still gone through the stress of no longer being our only child, and I would experience all the mom guilt that goes with that, but instead of having a smaller, less capable baby for him to help with and from whom he could perhaps derive a modicum of positive self-esteem, there’d be an older child in the home who would bring with him (assume it’d be a brother for simplicity) all the exposures he had in the orphanage.  The good, bad, ugly.  And orphanages are often pretty tough places for a little kid to spend his early years – lots of bullying, sometimes abuse, and survival strategies.  At a very minimum, that child has not been raised with our values or teachings.  We have done our best to protect Jack from bullying so that he can have a fresh start at a strong, healthy, developed, positive self-image.  So on the one hand, I’d be fretting about my newest child who has experienced extra time living in an institution and trying to figure out how to ease his adjustment, and on the other, I’d be worrying like hell about my baby boy who might end up suffering from 2nd hand abuse AND the normal neglect that happens when you add another child of any age into your family. 

Phew, I got tense and stressed out just thinking about that hypothetical!

That’s just my 2 cents.  Take it for what it’s worth.  I’ve seen some pretty effed up situations result from jacking up the birth order, but there are some families that turn out fine too.  It’s not right for my family, but a lot of people would say the same thing about adding 2 kids, almost simultaneously, 12-14 months after adopting your first child…which is what we did.  To each his own, but to answer Christina’s question with regards to our family, that would be a no.  Thoughts and comments are welcome here.  If your family was built “out of order,” please don’t be afraid to share your experience.  I always come off as far more opinionated than I actually am…or maybe sometimes I am really that opinionated, but lately I’m finding myself feeling less and less like I know enough to be strongly opinionated about anything.  Motherhood is humbling like that;)

First, I want to tell you what an honor it is to work with Ana, the owner of The Pretty Peacock.  I first saw her stunning artisan jewelry a few months ago and fell in with this piece:

Then she showed me this piece made of eco-friendly fine silver (99.9% pure silver composition as opposed to 92.5% in sterling silver) she is offering to the winner of THIS giveaway, and I fell in love a second time:

When Ana found out my boys were adopted, she mentioned her interest in creating a few pieces of jewelry to celebrate adoption.  So, in a post a few weeks ago, I asked for some input on a piece of adoption jewelry Ana could design to honor adoption, first parents, and our children.  We got a lot of awesome feedback and Ana has created an INCREDIBLE collection of jewelry called “celebrate adoption,” with pieces just as unique as our families.  For my family, I really wanted something that incorporated Nature and Nurture, which speaks to me and also makes room for all my kiddos (adopted & bio)  Those 3 words, “Nature & Nurture,” on this piece Ana created is just perfection in my eyes.  I had goosebumps when I saw it; just look at the detail:

The other side of the heart says “Nature & Nurture,” and each ornate silver tag has a birthstone on the front and the child’s name hand-stamped, oxidized, and polished on the back:

But my absolute FAVORITE piece of jewelry, EVER, is a “Nature & Nurture” piece Ana created to go with a poem I wrote.  My poem is based on an analogy I came up with that uses the sun, moon, and sea to represent the birth parent, adoptive parent, and child.  I wanted to make sure I was not making any assumptions or speaking for a birth parent in the analogy or poem, so yesterday I wrote this:

Nature and Nurture, by Laurie Good

I the moon,
And you the sun,
We, together, shape the one

The one that will grow,
The one that will be,
Vibrant and strong, he is the sea

The sun gives him life,
The moon helps him glow,
One presence he’ll feel the other he’ll know

The sun gives him warmth,
The moon guides his tide,
Nature creates what nurture will guide

I the moon,
And you the sun,
We, together, shape the one

Ana thought out every detail when she created this jewelry to match the poem.  She used citrine for the sun, sapphire for the moon, and aquamarine for the sea.  The necklace has a subtle, but eye-catching toggle closure and you’ll notice all the circles Ana used in this piece – fitting with the Circle of Life, interconnectedness theme.  Tasteful, elegant, unique.  How gorgeous is this piece:

The sun, moon, sea piece of adoption jewelry will be packaged with the poem insert – I think this would make an amazing gift for anyone who is adopting or has adopted a child.  Here it is altogether:

We also LOVED Jme’s explanation of “Forever Family,” which was also the theme for HeatherM.’s and Jena’s great ideas for an adoption jewelry piece.  Jme said:

We use Forever Family, but in 3 ways.
1. Our son’s birthmother is his family forever through birth. They are forever connected.
2. Our family is a forever family connected through love.
3. We (birthmother, bio sibs, me, hubs, son, etc.) are a forever family through an incredible journey of love and sacrifice.

Ana incorporated those 2 words, “Forever Family,” in this meaningful bracelet I think a lot of families touched by adoption will appreciate.  The back of the tag will be personalized for your family and Ana used 3 bracelet circles to symbolize the 3 parts of the adoption triad.  Simple, elegant, and fittingly symbolic:

Understand that with Ana’s artisan work, if you can dream it, she can make it…and chances are, what she’ll create with your idea will be more unique and beautiful than anything you could have imagined.  So whether it’s “Hers. Mine. Ours.” “Three-way-tied,” “Born in Our Hearts,” “Ohana,” or any of the other thoughtful suggestions many of you made, Ana can customize it for you to honor your special family.  We appreciated all your ideas, btw, and would LOVE any more people would like to share!

GIVEAWAY DETAILS

What’s Up for Grabs:

A personalized Sparklette Tag from The Pretty Peacock’s Eco-Friendly Good Karma Collection, with a hand-stamped initial and birthstone:

The Pretty Peacock is offering a 10% discount to all Pho for Five readers.  Just enter PHO as promo code!  Discount applies from now until 6/19/09, so get your orders in soon!

Who Can Win:

Anyone with a US or Canadian shipping address

How to Win:

Visit The Pretty Peacock and leave a comment here telling us your favorite piece from her collection by 6/12 at midnight!  Winner will be randomly drawn and announced 6/13.

To Earn Extra Entries (up to 5 total entries per person):

• Blog about this giveaway and drop your link in a separate comment
• Twitter about this giveaway and drop a link with your twitter id
• Facebook this giveaway or chat about on a group elsewhere and drop a comment telling us where you spread the word
• Give yourself an extra entry if you commented with a suggestion for a piece of adoption jewelry on my previous post – leave a separate comment on this post telling us you contributed previously!
• Give Ana another idea or suggestion for an original jewelry design in a separate comment below (1 extra entry per person for this)
• Post The Pretty Peacock button on your blog sidebar:

DON’T FORGET TO LEAVE A SEPARATE COMMENT FOR EACH ENTRY!<–>

Are these not the cutest, funniest pictures of Shanie?!  Although he’s really challenging to capture in pictures, one thing definitely comes through and that’ how expressive his eyebrows are.  It’s the most hysterical, adorable thing.  Whether he’s pissed, grumpy, happy, coy, curious, or whatever, his eyebrows always say it all.

{As a funny eyebrow aside, we were at a Mexican restaurant yesterday having drinks and a 5pm dinner…it was us and the over 80 crowd…and Jack picked up his fish stick and held it up to his forehead and said “look, I have 1 eyebrow!”  I felt it was an appropriate time he learned the term “unibrow,” and now he’s all about pointing them out.  Oops!}

Anyway, tell me Shane doesn’t look like the cutest old man trapped in an almost 2 year old’s body.  While he has the power to push all my buttons (he knows I have to fight myself to ignore that whining sound he enjoys making), he is such a little cutie.  And even the old man grouchiness is sometimes just irresistibly cute.

Can’t you just imagine what he’ll look like as an 80 year old man?  I can TOTALLY see it!  Shanie cracks me up.

Shane is doing really well, though he still does not have any real words.  He seems to be making a much bigger effort during speech therapy though, which is really reassuring to see, and has been vocalizing more lately.  He does have enough signs to get his needs across most of the time, and he continues to take a lot of his cues from Finley, so she is a pretty good motivator for him.  This week he’s started saying “uh oh,” which is awesome, and he’s been really good about signing “help,” “please,” and other request type signs instead of just whining or throwing a tantrum.  I’m really proud of him for making these efforts!!  He continues to be a very inspired dancer, jumper, and climber, and is quite the shoe and hair bow aficionado!  He’s something of a Renaissance Man!

Fin, on the other hand, has gone from biting, to pinching, to slapping, back to biting, and now onto slapping again.  So I think we’re making progress…she has at least been giving kisses and hugs to her brothers intermittently.  I think they’ve realized her emotional lability, so Shane sees her coming with an open mouth and immediately goes into the Heisman pose to keep her back, even if her intentions were to smooch him!  Can’t blame the guy!

Finley has some funny new antics this week.  Our favorite is hearing her say “hi guys.” Or “bye guys.”  It’s just really funny how it comes out.  Everything she says ends in an “s,” even just her “buh-byes.”  She also likes to tell people to hush by putting her finger to her mouth and saying “shhh!”  And in true toddler fashion, she’s also been wagging her finger at people when they do something she doesn’t want them to, an imitation of me saying “no, no.”  She has a crap ton of new signs and words and is picking up language at warped speed right now.  I think she has over 45 signs and probably 25+ words.  She’s also learned to go down steps…and no, I don’t mean backwards.  She’s WAY too big for that of course.  It’s scary as HELL!  Hence, the baby gates EVERYWHERE.

Jack is just awesome.  I have been meaning to write about this for MONTHS, but haven’t.  Somewhere along the way, he went from being this wild, assertive, dominant big brother to my ridiculously sweet, loving, inclusive oldest child.  He is ALWAYS making sure Shane and Fin are taken care of and is constantly telling me “Shane’s awake, let’s go get him.”  Or, “I think Finley is fussing because she’s hungry, maybe she needs your milk.”  He’s always sharing (food and toys!), and he NEVER retaliates physically, even when Finley wrecks his towers or has hit / bitten him.  He’ll just tell her “you just made me really sad because I worked really hard on that.”  Or “that really hurt me Finley and I DIDN’T LIKE IT!!!”  I am just in awe of what a sweetheart Jack is turning into.

He still struggles socially, and lately we’ve had some growing pains with some of his friends.  Their moms are really close friends of mine, so we are trying to come up with thoughtful ways to make sure his self-esteem isn’t damaged when he’s left out or kids decide they don’t want to be his friend and they tell him that.  He’s been really good about sharing his feelings with me, and it totally breaks my heart to see him emotionally wounded by his peers.  He’ll use his cars to play out scenarios that happened to him at the park or at a friend’s house, and then I’ll talk to him about it. His self-esteem is something I feel hugely protective over, and thank God I have incredible friends who are really sensitive to that.  It’s one of those things that would be an issue no matter what, but to me, any form of social rejection just really worries me during these early years as he’s developing his sense of self.  While I try not to make everything about adoption or have that aspect of him be overrepresented, I do think adoption warrants a higher level of parental sensitivity to some things.  It’s not shocking that studies have shown self-esteem is often lower in adopted children, and I just want to make sure I do everything I can to help him develop a healthy self-image at this age.

Jack is all about the arts lately.  He LOVES to draw and is an amazing artist.  Just recently, he was drawing a picture of something that was sort of triangular in shape, then had a row of rectangles across the center, lines coming out of the bottom, and a few other intricate details.  When we asked him what it was, he told us “a rocket ship,” and sure as shit, he’d drawn almost an exact replica of the rocket ship that was on Shane’s Baby G@p pj’s from the night before!  Travis dug them out of the laundry to compare and it gave us shivers how closely his drawing resembled the graphic.  He’s also still really into writing his letters and can write most of his alphabet.  While he’s still really interested in reading and is able to sound out 3 letter words, math is his newest passion.  I posted that video a week or so ago, but he’s all about subtraction lately.  In a few weeks, his math skills will surpass mine…not that that’s much of an accomplishment, even for a not-yet-3-year-old!  He loves music and memorizes the words to songs after hearing them once or twice, and really enjoys acting out books while Travis or I narrate them.  His favorite game is to come up with outrageous rhymes while singing the song, “Down By the Bay.”  He’s always saying the cutest stuff, like whispering that he loves me first thing in the morning, or telling Travis “you’re my best friend in the whole world,” and things that just CRACK us up too.  The most recent thing that comes to mind was when our neighbor was outside fixing something on his house and Jack reminded him “right tighty, dude!”

As for Travis, I am so proud of how hard he’s been studying!  He is NOT a studier, and never really has been.  He tests well and things come very easily to him.  He’s also a master at knowing the system, and has ALWAYS charmed people to death so that he didn’t really even need to study for his grades if there was the slightest bit of subjectivity to them!  But right now, he’s working his butt off and truly studying for his boards.  I’ve been really impressed with his diligence and I’m really hoping it pays off for him.  {good thing he doesn’t read my blog…he’d kill me for posting this picture!}

As for me, I’m bracing myself and getting ready to start my research position the 2nd week of June.  I have no idea what that will be like, but I really hope I can perform and I also really hope I can stand leaving my kids to do it.  I think the nursing thing will be really hard, since I won’t be able to nurse Finley during my working hours, obviously, (though I do plan on continuing to breastfeed her…she’s only 13 months;) and I think it’ll be an adjustment for all of us to have Travis manning the home front this year.  I know he’ll be great, and it should be interesting!

First, if you haven’t already, please go enter the Tiny Tags giveaway before May 4th!

Secondly, I’m looking for some help with something.  I am working with an awesome woman who creates the most unique and beautiful custom jewelry.  She is interested in making a few pieces that celebrate adoption and already has the gorgeous design down, but is looking for a symbol, phrase, quote, or something to be part of it.  When she asked me for other adoptionisms similar to “born in our hearts,” I had to pause and reflect on my feelings about the quotes and adoption poems I’ve heard.  I’m not trying to offend anyone, just trying to open up a productive conversation and get some ideas for a special piece of jewelry that celebrates our children in our lives and honors their first mother at the same time. 

How do you all feel about the adoption cliches, poems, and sayings we always hear?  I’m talking about the things like “born in our hearts,” “blood is thicker than water,” the “labor of the heart” or “invisible red thread” concepts, and of course the longer poems that tend to rose-color adoption and, imo, diminish the contributions, significance, and often times pain of our kids’ first moms.  I know they are all well-intentioned and some are really beautiful concepts, but to me, most of those 1) downplay the role of the 1 and only woman who gave our kids the gift of life, 2) unnecessarily draw comparison between biology and adoption (blood versus water), or 3) attach feelings to the member of the adoption triad for whom we cannot speak nor presume to understand. 

I understand why we do it, and I know it’s popular to do.  I’m just asking if it’s ever made any one else, as it has me, the slightest bit uncomfortable.  I am trying to come up with some way to commemorate my kids history and the woman who brought them into the world without pretending they were “carried on wings of an angel,” or delivered by a stork, or anything euphamistic like that.  Because the truth is, while I do not presume to know anything about the women who gave my boys life, I do know they aren’t in this world because I “labored in my tears,” or anything like that.  There was a woman who labored physically and emotionally, then experienced the undeniable pain of childbirth to deliver them into the world.  Jack and Shane’s stories began with that woman, that event, and I do not want to diminish her role or her life so that Jack & Shane’s presence in mine can feel less complicated.  It just doesn’t really seem fair and it makes me wonder if my kids will grow up, hear those things, and feel conflicted that their birth mothers got the shaft and are never truly remembered.  Or if hearing things like “blood is thicker than water” will make them feel like there’s a tug-of-war over them and that it’s some competition to see if their genetic makeup has made any contribution to their beings that we, the adoptive families, cannot “overcome.”  That is NOT how I see my kids’ genetic heritage.  I want them to know that I value and treasure who they are to their very core, and that I will always encourage them to remember, respect, and honor the woman who gave them life.  There is 1 poem I’ve read that I think honors both birth and adoptive parent contributions, and that’s called Legacy of an Adopted Child.  That’s obviously far too long for jewelry though!

My question is, how do you guys feel about these poems and are their any adoption sayings, quotes, or just words that you do like or that you do think are appropriately commemorative to first parents?  What words would you like to see on a piece of jewelry honoring adoption?

As a side note, I encourage you to contribute your ideas; they may earn you some extra entries into a giveaway, should one be held, and a really sweet discount if your idea is actually used in the creation of the piece of jewelry.  I’m just sayin’…

**Note: we shaved Jack’s hair today, so some pictures are pre-cut, and some are post-cut…just so you’re not totally confused!  Here he is with his new do:

Here is the adorable Caroline, who was Shanie’s buddy from Vietnam:

The last time Travis and I saw Caroline was January, 2008, when we said goodbye and left Que Son Orphanage with Shane after spending 6 weeks visiting the babies 5-6 times a week in the orphanage.  Below is a picture of some of Shane’s buddies from the orphanage (Travis is holding Shane up in green, Travis’ dad is holding Leah, the nanny in blue is holding Caroline, and the nanny in yellow is holding Spencer). 

While we were THRILLED to have our approval to leave with Shane after such a long wait, it was really hard to say goodbye to the babies that were not yet approved to be adopted.  Caroline was one of them. 

Thankfully, she was united with her awesome mommy, my friend Karin, just a few months (that seemed like years) later.  Here’s Caroline kissing her mommy at our house this weekend:

Here are Caroline and Shanie reunited and all grown up…or almost;)

As it turns out, Shane, Jack, and Caroline all had a great time together this weekend.  The boys LOVED having Caroline around; she’s the perfect bridge between their developmental ages, so she made a great buddy for both of them and the 3 did really well altogether.  Finley, on the other hand, was an adorable pain in the rear.  She enjoyed tormenting the “new kid” on the block by following Caroline around, stealing her blankie, pulling the passie and bottle out of her mouth, etc.  Fin would cackle this evil little laugh each time and Caroline would shake her finger at Finley and say “NO ma’am!”  Caroline was a good sport, but I doubt she’d ever be thrilled to become a big sister after the Finley Experience! 

Jack was VERY fond of Caroline and kept referring to her as “my friend,” even when speaking directly to her (example: “My friend, would you like a string cheese?”)!  It was pretty cute.

Finley (with her eye on Caroline’s “passie”):

Jackie karate kicking bubbles (pre-haircut):

Finley playing with a booger while Caroline watches in disgust!

My little gentleman, Shanie, putting Caroline’s passie back in her mouth (after Finley intentionally knocked it out):

“Caroline, look, an airplane!”

Snack time:

Shane leaning in for the kiss with Jack looking on (thinking about HIS next move):

Jack’s counter to Shane’s kiss…he takes Caroline for a wild ride on a (stationary) llama:

“Sometimes these boys REALLY bore me!”

Karin juggling 2 cuties:

Caroline, you’ve got these Good boys wrapped around your little finger! 

Btw, I survived my 1.5 days with 4 toddlers.  Actually, we had a great time in case you couldn’t tell from the pictures above.  If I didn’t have a million question marks surrounding my career, 4 wouldn’t seem so daunting an idea!  Ahh well, we’ll have to wait and reevaluate down the road I guess, but it was fun to have Caroline in the meantime.