As far as attachment goes, Maggie was a baby ready for a mom. She laid comfortably in my arms for the first few hours without a whole lot of emotion either way. At one point I set her on the hotel bed so I could fix her a bottle, and she made the most pathetic squawk of a cry. I hurried over and picked her up and offered her a bottle, and she gave me this look like, "Holy cow, that worked??" I could tell that orphanage life had taught her that there was little use to crying, because it was not going to get her picked up or get her the meal she was looking for any faster.

I set out to teach her otherwise.

She experimented with her squawky cry quite a bit and quickly realized... more

After writing about some of the challenges that can occur during your first meeting with your new child and offering tips on dealing with all of the emotions that are common during that time and the time that you are first home with your child, I thought I would share some of our experiences with meeting our children and our early days together.

We have had all sorts of experiences with meeting our children for the first time.

With our first adoption, I had to make two trips to Vietnam. On the... more

As I have written about this past week, there is a wide range of emotions that adoptive parents often feel when they are going through the adoption process, and these emotions (and their intensity and rapid rate of change) often take parents by surprise. In my last posts I wrote about some of the challenges that can occur when your child is first placed with you, and offered some tips on how to... more

In my last post, I went into detail about some of the reasons that your first meeting with your new child and your first days together can turn out to be less than perfect. Here are some tips on how to best prepare yourself emotionally for the unpredictable but yet miraculous event of meeting your child.

- Prepare yourself for the possibility that your first few moments, hours and days with your new child could be wonderful and magical, but could also be challenging and not as... more

In my last few posts I wrote about some of the many emotions that adoptive parents often feel while going through the adoption process. Today I am going to discuss some of the emotions that are common for adoptive parents to experience when their child is first placed with them.

Being united with a new child is a joyful event. It is also a very emotionally charged event. Sometimes, along with being joyful, it is stressful, sad, challenging, scary and many other things.

I write a lot about how to handle (and survive) all of the... more

As I wrap up writing about adoptive parents and the range of emotions they often feel while going through the adoption process, I thought I would share some of our highs and lows.

For me, some of the most joyful moments of my entire life were when we were united with our adopted children. They were moments that were happy and amazing and blessed beyond measure. Tiny Maggie being handed to me by a nanny in a Vietnamese orphanage, a sweaty, overwhelmed yet cheerful Amanda arriving at our local airport and coming to me willingly from the arms of her escort, being in the room and witnessing... more

For the past few days I have been writing about all of the many emotions that adoptive parents often go through. Going through the adoption process brings some of the happiest of joyful moments, some of the most heartbreakingly sad moments, moment full of stress... more

Happiness and joy, grief and sadness, and stress and frustration are only a few of the emotions that have been known to strike unexpecting adoptive parents with great force, and then disappear as quickly as they came, only to be replaced with another, equally powerful emotion.

Some of the less pleasant emotions... more

Becoming a parent is an emotional journey, no matter what path may lead to you to your new child. When a pregnant woman is emotional it is often chalked up to "hormones", but expectant adoptive parents are often no less emotional. I know that I for sure, tend to be super emotional during an adoption (insert the sound of my husband laughing obnoxiously at the gross understatement I just made).

I have already written about the happiness and joy that adoptive parents feel, and the sadness... more

I have been writing about the wide range of emotions that many adoptive parents feel at some point during the adoption process, and the rapid rate at which those feelings can change. In my last post I wrote about some of the happier emotions, and touched on the happiness, joy and excitement that adoption brings to adoptive parents in overwhelming quantities.

And yet while adoptive parents can be feeling... more