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-Have extra room in your luggage for the way home. Traveling to the place your child was born is a great opportunity to buy cultural items for your home and gifts for your child as he or she grows. On our trips we’ve purchased clothing, music, books, toys, jewelry, carvings, decorations and other great items. I recommend rolling up a large duffel bag and fitting it into one of your suitcases OR bringing a suitcase full of donations (if appropriate) to where you are going. Then you can leave the donations, and... more

No matter where you are adopting from, whether it is a domestic adoption or an international adoption, chances are that travel will be involved. There are some programs that allow the child to be escorted to you, but this seems to happen less and less frequently.

Here is a post I wrote last year about adoption related travel.

Traveling to get your child can be a wonderful experience, and yet it can also be a very challenging one as well. Here... more

Tolerance.org is an awesome website with a plethora of information. I don’t know how I have missed this resource up until now, but as a transracial adoptive family, this is a fantastic website and one that I plan to visit often. Tolerance.org states that it is a project of the southern poverty law center, to “Fight Hate and Promote Tolerance.”

Just to give you a sampling of what you can find on Tolerance.org, here are a few links, article names and quotes.

Do’s and Don’t of Teaching Black History

From the “Do” list…

Incorporate black... more

Until All Have Homes is an organization that I don’t think I have mentioned lately. Until All Have Homes was started by Anne Grabeman, and is run by parents of special needs kids (most of them adoptive parents).

They advocate for special needs children all over the world, and work to find homes for special needs orphans. They are not an adoption agency, but network with agencies that have good reputations to help find homes for the hardest to place kids.

One of the things I love most about them is that they also support children with special needs and help them stay with their birth families when possible. There is a GORGEOUS... more

Can you believe it’s March??? The days are just whirring by around here! (and it certainly does not feel like March, on account of the fact that we have gotten about six inches of snow this week).

Let’s see…adoption news….

I am sure you have heard this, but Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (well, technically just Angelina since they are not married) are adopting another child…this time from Vietnam.

There are stories all over the web…

This one on VietNamNet Bridge has a nice picture (sans Maddox).

Some articles state that Angelina and Brad want a child in the three to four year age range.... more

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I think about Toby Dawson and think how difficult this must all be for him…to know that he wasn’t purposefully placed for adoption, but actually had a father searching for him in Korea…to think about what his life would have been like had he stayed with his family in Korea versus being adopted and growing up in America. He talks openly about feeling stuck in between two countries and cultures. I hope that finding his birth father and reconnecting to Korea and his first family will help him feel like he belongs in both places.

I think about the adoptive parents (who from what I have seen have remained silent this week) and how they must be feeling. I know it would... more

I have been meaning to blog about this for a few days now, but have been having a couple of “those days” in a row where I just can’t seem to get a break.

Surely by now you have heard about Toby Dawson, or “Awesome Dawson” as he is known…Olympic Bronze Medalist in freestyle skiing at the Turino Winter Olympics…adopted at a young age from Korea by a couple in Colorado (who were ski instructors)…recently reunited with his birth father and brother in South Korea at the age of 28.

You can read a good article about the reunion here courtesy of USA Today, complete with pictures (father... more

This wonderful article was posted to one of my email groups this morning. It is titled "The Lifelong Impact of Transracial Adoption: Learning From Adoptees and Their Non-Adopted Siblings" and was written by Dr. John Raible, Asst. Professor, Diversity & Curriculum Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and was originally presented as a keynote address at the 4th Biennial Adoption Conference at St. John's University in New York in October of 2006.

The link can be found here, and although it is long, this is really worth the read. It is really good stuff, and looks at learning about transracial adoption... more

As adoptive parents, I think one of the best things that we can do (and one of our obligations to our children) is to educate ourselves the best we can on the issues involved in transracial adoption, and the things that our children may experience and feel as they are growing up.

One of the best ways to do this is to listen to the voices of adult adoptees…hearing what was positive in their lives growing up and what was negative, and hearing about their challenges and blessings offers us priceless insight. Things have changed a lot since the first transracial adoptions in the U.S. over 20 years ago, and they have changed for the better, but there is still plenty of progress to be made... more

I realize that I am a bit behind the curve on this one, and I bet that most of you have already read this, but I wanted to mention this article from last week that claims a study showed that adoptive parents are more “invested” in their children than biological moms and dads.

The study, published in the new issue of the American Sociological Review, found that couples who adopt spend more money on their children and invest more time on such activities as reading to them, eating together and talking with them about their problems.

“One of the reasons adoptive parents invest more is that they really want children,... more