Search Results for: blog i vowed id never look at those photos again

Helping the Children of Haiti

As happened after the 2008 earthquake in China, adoption agencies have had numerous phone calls from people offering to adopt earthquake orphans. As I mentioned in my earlier blogs, children orphaned in a natural disaster or war are usually not free for adoption for a period of anywhere from six months to a year. The infrastructure must be repaired enough to ensure that family members have had the opportunity to locate children. So what can be done to help the children? First of all, remember that there are many children, in our own country and abroad, who are eligible for … Continue reading →

Is It Okay to be Choosy? Part One

Many adoptive parents are partially motivated by a desire to help children. When considering adopting children with special needs, many of us struggle to balance this impulse with the very human dreams we have about raising children and with the reality of what we believe we have the energy, emotional fortitude and resources to handle. Sometimes our motives are questioned by others too. A friend of mine was challenged as to why she did not want to adopt a child with mental handicaps. If your desire is truly to help children, her interrogator said, you’ll adopt the child who needs … Continue reading →

The Story of the Orphan Trains

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My last blog introduced my review of the Orphan Train Children series of children’s books. Twenty pages of historical notes in the back of each book tell the story of the real “orphan trains”, which took more than 150,000 children in the care of the New York Children’s Aid Society to rural communities between 1856 and 1929. Another hundred thousand were sent to the West by the New York Foundling Home. The notes explain the conditions in the Lower East Side of New York, the diseases which took many lives, and the fact that many children were from immigrant families … Continue reading →

The One Thing I Said I’d Never Do

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When we were considering what special needs we might be able to handle in an adopted child, my husband and I had some very interesting discussions. There was one thing about which there was no discussion at all. We would not adopt a child who had been prenatally exposed to alcohol. I had grown up next to a group home for the mentally retarded. The people with Down’s syndrome and many other problems were lovely neighbors. A girl my age with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome gave me the creeps. (To be fair, this was probably because of past abuse and not … Continue reading →

I Vowed I’d Never Look at Those Photos Again…

I vowed I’d never look at those photos again. They interfere with my life. I can’t get them off my mind and I can’t get anything done. Another packet of them arrived in the mail yesterday. I left them in the car overnight so I wouldn’t look at them. But today I couldn’t resist. I’m referring to the “waiting child” photolistings, online or on paper. “Waiting children” basically means children for whom there is no waiting family. They may be from the U.S. foster care system and hard to place because of age or number of siblings. International agencies use … Continue reading →