Ladies and Gentlemen!

Look at nothing in my hat.

Now, I'm going to lay an egg.

Abadabba.

Ta da!

Thank you ... thank you very much.

Continued from here, where we've been talking about parental 'must haves' like music systems with faces and such ...

And how about this amazing innovation ... a thermometer!

This funky little egg is a colour-changing digital room thermometer. Designed to promote safer sleeping for babies, and peace of mind for... more

Okay. It's official. I have now been living outside the realm of the real world for long enough to be completely out of the loop when it comes to stuff. I've worried about this for years, dreading the day when I take a trip home to the US and find myself standing around shopping malls and private homes endlessly repeating some version of, "Golly, gee whiz ... willya looky that hoozit! What that heck does it DO?"

Well, I don't have to wait for the crunch of American soil under my flip-flops to feel like a totally clueless dork. I just... more

Guess what we did yesterday! While I should have been writing interesting blog posts on important topics, we were on a mission ... a mission to save baby sea turtles.

My friend, Julie, phoned in the early afternoon to say that the sea turtle nest in her garden was seeing some action. (She'd relocated the nest a couple of months ago, after realizing the mother had laid eggs too close to the waterline.) She found one baby in her kitchen the night before, obviously disoriented by the house lights and missing the ocean... more

Continued from here ...

Because I live on the other side of the world, I've missed far too much in the lives my of brother's children ... all my brothers' children, actually, since I have three of them -- brothers, that is ... but suddenly I find myself in a position to play catch-up, at least with one niece. We're now pen pals! Rebecca was eight in October, but reads, writes and thinks like kids much, much older.... more

I'm not the only older parent in my family.

Yes, I am the oldest older parent (not that we need to point that out all that often, thank you very much), and the only adoptive older parent, but geezers with kids are not rare buds on my family tree. Forty-ish with babies has happened often enough ... even my dad fit the category, being thirty-seven when my youngest brother was born ... and if we thought about it long enough to take a for-or-against stance, I'd say we're all pretty well in favor.

One of my brothers just turned fifty-four... more

Continued from here ...

The thought of protecting our children prompts adoptive parents to put our hands to the flames, to take the burn. When painful concepts are presented, we ingest them, we mull them, we take what we can from them and incorporate every valuable item into our parenting.

What we do not do is reject out of hand anything that isn't already there, all that grates, or what fits, but pinches ... the details that are uncomfortable and will take a good, long wearing before they're easy to live with.

(Again, and just this morning, another list... more

Continued from here ...

When adoptive parents sit down to write on the topic of birth parents, the result is more often than not compassionate and caring, with great attention paid to treading carefully where any eggshells may lie. Odes are written to birth mothers, and adoptive parents sing praises in public and private, and especially to our children as we understand that honoring first parents honors the child.

Absorbing from every angle is an adoptive parent's agenda. Listening to and learning from others in the triad is one of the ways we do this. We seek out various... more

I've been holding this post for a while, coming back to it often while it percolates through my brain, and I've finally decided to publish it with hopes that some dialog is generated. In my continuing efforts to understand, I feel input can only be a good thing.

This article, "Birthparents -- allies or enemies?", appeared in the Adoption.Com e-mag recently and has been at the root of some group buzz.

Due to the hoopla, I perused the piece and will admit to being annoyed right along with some of the adoptive parents reacting with confusion and exasperation... more

I love the age we live in.

Actually, I have to say it's MY time I love. Although it verges on past in the geologic sense, 1951 was a very good year to be born. Being a kid in the '50s was storybook stuff ... a hopeful, post-war world where the new suburban streets were safe and neighbors looked after each others' kids, TV shows were blandly entertaining and mildly educational, and vaccination had moved polio off the summer agenda.

(Yes, I do know that bad things happened in the '50s, but that's not where I'm going right... more