Happy New Year everybody! My wild and crazy celebration last night included a bunch of my favorite small people, my best friend, oodles of food and way too much Chex mix! Both of our husbands were in Denver for the football game (my Christmas present to Josh), so it was a wives and kids only party.

Truth be told, we cheated…we put the New York news channel on and had the kids watch the ball fall at 10 p.m. our time…they blew some horns, wore silly hats, cheered and kissed their moms, and then all were in bed by 10:30 p.m.

Anyway,... more

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So what does this have to do with transracial adoption? With more and more parents adopting from Ethiopia all of the time (and with malnutrition also being epidemic in many other countries that Americans are adopting from), it is important for adoptive parents to understand the affects of malnutrition and to be prepared for the possibility of stunted growth or learning disabilities in their child.

While many (if not most) children adopted internationally are small for their age at homecoming and tend to catch up fairly quickly, some remain small for their age,... more

The NY Times has an extremely sad article this morning on the devastating effects of malnutrition on children in Africa.

The article is titled “Malnutrition is Cheating it’s Survivors, and Africa’s Future”.

Most people know that thousands of children still die of malnutrition and starvation every year in Africa and in other impoverished parts of the world, but as the article points out, little attention is paid to the effects of malnutrition on those that survive.

The article states...

Yet almost half of... more

On Christmas Eve, the Washington Post had an interesting article on transracial adoption. The headline I am sure, grabbed the attention of many readers.

Why Doesn’t White Adopt Black?

The author, David Nicholson starts off the article by questioning,

“Whenever I see a white couple with an Asian or Hispanic child, I can't help wondering whether adoption -- like the personal ads -- is one of the last areas of American life where naked expressions of racial preference are acceptable.”

Nicholson comments on how many white adoptive parents from... more

A few days ago I wrote this post on “My Favorite Christmas Special”, and I talked about the CBS special “A Home for the Holidays”.

The show aired last night, and as in years past, I watched it with my family. The show was wonderful as always…it featured heart-warming stories of children who were languishing in foster care and have now been adopted and are thriving in their new homes and families. The artists sang songs, the kids were beautiful… I cried quite a few times. A plea was made for more parents to consider adoption, and... more

Yesterday, as the pharmacist was handing me this huge bag of medications and I started to walk away with it, I was really overwhelmed with emotions.

None of these thoughts were new, and I am usually not a very dramatic kind of gal, but for some reason, I got very emotional.

It was overwhelming to me that my little girl needed all of that to stay well, and that without those medications, she would eventually suffer, waste away and die. It was overwhelming that that bag of medications would now be a part of her daily routine for the... more

Yesterday we made a fast and frantic road trip to Utah and back, for another appointment for Belane.

It was an emotional day, and one that sort of took me by surprise.

We went in to see her doctors to get the results of her last round of blood tests, one of which was a phenotype test, which looked at her particular strain of HIV and determined which medications would be the most effective in treating Belane, and which medications if any she is resistant to. The other test looked at the amount of virus in her blood, or her “viral... more

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So what do you think? Personally, I really hate to see potential adoptive families “knocked out” by rules and regulations. There are SO MANY children…even in China…that I have a hard time agreeing with limiting potential families for those children. One of my biggest adoption pet peeves is that most (if not all ) of the states in our country would not even consider my family to adopt from foster care, despite the fact that my family is more qualified than most to handle the issues that would likely come with a child from foster care... more

One of the largest and steadiest adoption programs for transracial adoption over the past years has been the China program. China, a country struggling with a very large population, has thousands upon thousands of orphaned baby girls at any given time, due largely to the one child policy in China and the strong cultural desire for families to have a son.

Along with baby girls, China also has some baby boys, special needs children and older children available for adoption.

Over the past year or so, the wait for a referral from China has... more

Back in early September, I wrote this post about the new season of Survivor on CBS. Survivor producers decided that for its thirteenth season they would try something new, and start off the show with four “tribes” of castaways, divided by race. They had an Asian tribe, an African-American tribe, a Hispanic tribe and a Caucasian tribe.

After a lot of rambling in my earlier post, I concluded that I would have to “wait and see how it played out” before I made a judgment call.

Last night the season ended, and Yul Kwon, a 35-year old from California, was the first ever Asian-American to win the one... more