I love my life! It's rich in everything that matters and provides more that I ever expected in love and comfort and security and communication and many other things I am now so used to having that I forget that I lived without them.

My husband is my best friend and the person I would always choose first to spend time with. Sam and Cj are gifts beyond belief, smart and loving, sweet and healthy, and there are times when I almost have to pinch myself to grasp the fact that I am, indeed, their mom.

I have wonderful, interesting,... more

What activity is it that has most women wistfully wishing they were instead flat out in a dental chair experiencing the joys of rinse and spit? Is there something that would set you to thinking that a play date with 65 vomiting toddlers with the runs sounds like more fun that what you're doing at that moment?

Yep. That would be the Pap smear.

As one of the groovier aspects of aging, hit 70 and you can say bye-bye to the speculum and slide show ... assuming your Paps up until then have been normal ... how's that for making 70... more

Although I have four kids, only half of them came to me as newborns. Sam and Cj were both over three-months-old before we were allowed to meet them, touch them, smell them, and bring them home, and although that is young for international adopted children, as anyone who's been around babies knows, a three-month-old is most certainly not a newborn.

I still begrudge every minute of those three months these kids were out of my grasp, and am often reminded just how much I missed in having them pass those early days... more

As I mentioned briefly, the 29th of May brought the debut of my assistant, Catherina''s baby. (I'd give the link for my short announcement, but apparently it was so short that there's no way I can call the story up to get a link. Strange ... )

Holly, for one, has been patiently awaiting details, so here are some:

The little... more

As older adoptive parents, many of us find the age gap between ourselves and our children to be much wider than that between ourselves and our parents. As an example, I am 53 years older than Cj, but only nineteen years younger than my mother. My age puts me easily in grandma territory ... and, in fact, I am a one ... , and my mom great-grandmotherly, or even great-great if the reproductive timing had gone just a bit differently.

At... more

Over on the Hoping to Adopt Blog, Faith wrote about adopting a sibling, and how kids can react to the idea of bringing another child into the family.

Sam was all of two-and-a-half when we brought Cj home, too young to form opinions on issues as big and life-altering as becoming a big brother some might think, but he was thrilled to bits and had been all through our waiting process. With every... more

Catherina had her baby today!

It's a boy, as expected, after a very easy labor and delivery ... although she's not into looking at it that way yet ... and mother and baby are doing very, very well. Father has survived the experience.

More details to follow!

We haven't had much in the way of science here for a while, so today is the day we do some catching up. Starting off with some encouraging news for moms and dads of the older persuasion, this report letting us know that pre- and post-menopausal women are equally responsive to most sexual desire cues ... something to take into account when you're thinking of adopting as an older parent, since you're certainly not over it and a little one does make... more

Even though this blog is about older adoptive parents, there's no way I can let the story of the 60-year-old woman who gave birth to twins pass without a glance. (Just for the record, Frieda Birnbaum is not the oldest woman to have twins. That title goes to Maria del Carmen Bousada Lara, a Spanish woman who was seven days away from her 67th birthday when she gave birth to two boys in 2006.)

Talk on... more

Sam and Cj have a life so different from that my first lot of kids lived as children. Of course, having a teen mom gives a whole different flavor to childhood from the one a kid gets when mother is closer to a grandmotherly age ... or even great-grandmotherly -- ack! ... and though both can be tasty, there's no denying they're not the same. (I tended to burn the cookies more often when I was younger, for one thing, and relied way too much on... more