It's been a month since I last posted! I've been so utterly busy with life this past month! The boys are all in the same school this year...the same school Zack went to last year. It is a rigorous curriculum. Holy cow! But they are all doing great. They are learning SO MUCH. Much more than the 2 little boys learned in public school last year. Unbelievable! It is such good food for their brains! They never say they are bored at school anymore. The 8th grade year is notoriously hard at this school. My 8th grader is taking an AP World History class! This is usually an 11th grade class in high school! He got straight A's all last year at this school, and even he said this year is much harder than last year already. In addition, he is taking Algebra 2/Geometry, Economics, Mandarin, English, P.E., Biology, Chemistry & Physics. Can you imagine?! That in addition to his fall travel baseball team 2 nights a week and on the weekends and his church middle school youth group meetings on Monday evenings and his weekly batting lessons with his batting coach and his Saturday guitar lessons. I am tired just typing this out! (Plus I am usually the one driving him to all of these activities!)
My daughter turns 3 next month. I am happy and sad at the same time. Happy to see what new milestones are in store for her as a 3 year old, excited for her birthday party next month~ she requested a Frozen themed party, of course! I am sad that this amazing little girl is getting so big already. I loved the baby stage with her. She was the best baby and so sweet and always smiling. Now she has found her voice and her opinion, and is a typical 2 year old who likes to tell me no! lol!! She recently said to me, "Hold on!" And then she giggled and said to me, "I said hold on! Hee hee!" She is almost 3 going on 13! I've recently overheard her saying, "I want my mommy!" I love that she loves me, and I love that she wants me by her side. I love that she feels comfortable here and knows that I will meet all of her needs. There is an adoption book that the adoption haters like to bring up called The Primal Wound. I've read it. The book says that taking a newborn baby away from it's birth mother (for adoption purposes) causes this primal wound in them and that they know from that day on that they were separated from their birth mother and that is traumatic for them. From our own adoption experience, I do not believe this. I do not believe my daughter has suffered any kind of primal wound. I don't think she realizes that she has been separated from her birth mother, and I don't think she realizes I am not her "real mother" and did not give birth to her. I do think she knows I have been there for her taking care of her as long as she can remember (from 3 days old in her case), and that I love her unconditionally and she feels safe and secure in our house. Today she found her scrapbook from when she was a baby and was looking at baby pictures of herself. You should have seen her....she thoroughly enjoyed looking at these baby pictures of herself. And she looked at the pictures of each of my sons holding her as a baby, and she pointed out who was in each of the pictures with her. So cute! I have read countless adoption blogs and articles and watched countless TV shows with adoptees and I've seen how some of them have said that they always felt that they didn't fit in with their adoptive family, and felt this primal wound and sense of abandonment. I can honestly say that from watching my daughter and how she interacts with our family, she does not feel any different or like an outsider or like she doesn't fit in or belong here in our family. She seems so comfortable and secure here with our family. I do not feel like she is suffering from a primal wound due to her adoption. Will she as she gets older? Only time will tell. We shall see. I believe that when she is old enough to learn about her adoption in depth, she will realize we are not adopt-o-raptors (adoption haters like to call adoptive parents this name....like we swoop in and snatch the newborn out of their birth mom's arms! HA! As if.) And I believe she will realize she wasn't abandoned by her birth parents. Neither one of them wanted to place her for adoption, they were mature enough to know that they were not in a position at the time to raise her in the manner they wanted. And they both want to have some type of relationship with her when she is older.
One other point...and I may have talked about this in years past. Adoption haters hate when adoptive parents adopt newborns. They feel the newborns are better off with their birth parents, no matter what (which is a ridiculous stance.....babies are not better off with birth parents who are making bad choices in life and cannot support the children and cannot raise them in a safe environment.) But anyways, I've seen many of the adoption haters comment that adoptive parents should only adopt from foster care. Now, I think in some of these cases if the birth parents tried to parent for a while, they would not be able to do so in a safe manner and the children would be removed from their custody and placed in foster care. So some of these babies placed for adoption at 2-3 days old in the hospital would have ended up in foster care down the road anyways. A lot of those kids in foster care have endured so much hell that no child should ever be exposed to, and they have learned coping mechanisms and develop RAD and they subsequently have a hard time bonding with anyone. I think that would be avoided a majority of the time if they had gone home with the AP's from the hospital right from the beginning, and started the bonding process right away. Can you imagine being a child in foster care and being bounced from foster home to foster home? How scary. My kids cried when they went to preschool at 3 years old, and that was only for a few hours a few days a week! Can you imagine being 3 and living in different foster homes with different foster families? My heart breaks for these kids at the thought of this. However, I am not in favor of adoptive parents trying to adopt babies from birth parents who are able to parent and really want to parent. I am definitely in favor of biological parents raising their babies whenever they can.
We still haven't made it back east for a visit with her birth family yet. I thought we would have been back there by now! Maybe in the next couple of years.
Goodnight & hopefully I'll remember to blog in September! (After her 3rd birthday!)
