Search Results for: blog path to a prognosispart one

My Last Blog

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This is going to be my last blog as the Adoption Blogger for Families.com. I’m looking forward to spending the summer with my kids, possibly working at their school, and taking on new writing projects. I may well guest blog occasionally for this or other Families blogs. It seems the Adoption Blog will continue, so I hope this blog, along with Families’ forums, can be a source of information and community for adoptive parents, adoptees, and birth parents. Yesterday I could think of a million things to say in my last few blogs and wondered how I would fit it … Continue reading →

A Perilous Path to a Prognosis

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There are some weird twists and turns to the following story. (This is the fourth blog in the most personal series I’ve ever written—the agony of learning our daughter’s birth sister had suffered significant prenatal alcohol exposure , then our subsequent confusion, then our search for a diagnosis. ) I need to begin by stating that 1) this was several years ago, research on fetal alcohol exposure was fairly new and is changing all the time and 2) I was talking with several specialists and reading a lot of information and it is possible I misunderstood some things or mixed … Continue reading →

Has Your Ten Year Old Tasted Alcohol?

A study from the University of Pittsburgh found that two out of five American children between the ages of eight and ten — that’s forty percent — have tasted alcohol. That means just a few sips… nothing dangerous, right? What might be more worrisome is that of the children who had tasted alcohol, one third of parents had no idea that it had happened. Before the University of Pittsburgh study, research on alcohol use in children focused on older children and larger quantities of alcohol. Most of the prior research only asked about a child taking “more than a few … Continue reading →

Two Months of Hell

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Obviously my stress levels were through the roof at this point. We waited and waited for new photographs of our daughter’s biological sister, hoping they would shed light on the prognosis of damage from prenatal alcohol exposure. My reading about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Alcohol Related Neurodevelopmental Disorder stressed that children with this disorder needed highly structured lives and predictable routines. I had to admit that we are just not that kind of family. We do a lot of really interesting things together, but organization and routine are not our strong points, to put it mildly. Still, I had been … Continue reading →