Jon and I started our online educational seminars tonight. One of the requirements from Gift of Love is that we complete five courses from a site called adoptionlearningpartners.org. We completed two of them tonight - "Conspicuous families" and "Let's talk adoption." They raise some interesting issues about talking to children in a way that is appropriate to their developmental stage and listening to the feelings behind children's questions. It also gave advice about ways to make the adoption story an open-ended part of everyday life. The courses are tough mental work, but much of it seems like common sense.
I'm through the terrible/terrific twos in Dr. Spock now.
The last two groups of adoptive parents have been matched with girls who are just over a year old, so I'm starting to worry more about separation anxiety, which Spock says tends to start around one year of age. It seems a bit strange to me that the Chinese officials wouldn't work harder to pair up children before they hit that stage. Is separation anxiety something that doesn't apply to foundlings? I know attachment is a big issue, but how does it relate to separation anxiety in our case?Time for more research.
I've also been paying attention to the media reports this past week about the small number of parents who are toilet training their infants and talking about "elimination communication." It makes a lot of sense to me, and it's fairly common in other countries. I've heard that in many parts of China children don't wear diapers - they wear special pants that let them just pee wherever they are. Now, knowing that Molly could be about a year old when we get her, I wonder if she might already be partially toilet trained.
There are so many unknowns with this process. It's hard to know how best to prepare ourselves. Fortunately we're flexible, somewhat resourceful and frequently manage to recover gracefully when we're caught back on our heels a bit. Hopefully Molly will be patient and tolerant of us as we try to quickly get up to speed on her needs and capabilities!
Relatedly, I've been trying to register for the free newsletters/diapers/formula samples that are available to new moms and it's not possible because of our circumstances. They all require either a due date or a baby's birth date. We can't even guess and by the time we know for certain we already will have chosen diaper and formula brands, pretty much. Won't we? It's a little frustrating that I can't take part in that sort of fun aspect of becoming a mother. The really ironic thing is that the registration forms have an option for adoptive parents, but they force you to also include the baby's birth date. That seems sort of insensitive to me.
In other news, we've ordered a crib and found an adorable mobile to hang over it. Hopefully we'll have a room ready by Dec. 1 when they deliver the crib.
Our kitchen cabinets are supposed to be delivered Monday and the trim carpenters are supposedly going to get started this coming week. It's coming along but we're really starting to cross our fingers it's done before we leave for China. I'm also getting a little tired of "Lean Cuisine" meals in little black plastic trays.
C
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