The only word I can think of to describe our PRIDE training yesterday would be 'heavy'. It was a long day of some difficult topics that left both of us a little drained and in some ways discouraged. We know that adopting a child comes with many challenges but we came out of the class yesterday feeling like all of the knowledge we have gained over the past two years while raising our daughter will be useless. Of course we know that this is not true but it doesn't change how we were feeling at the end of the day.
The three main topics that were covered yesterday were human development, attachment, and loss. A guest speaker arrived in the morning to talk more about child development, specifically speech. She is a Speech Language Pathologist and she talked about the services that are available to any child with delays in development. We know that our little boy will have some degree of a cleft lip or palate and she touched on the process that we will likely need to go through in order for him to receive speech therapy.
After lunch we watched a video that made us both very emotional. It featured a young girl and her baby brother and their journey through the foster care system. I found it very difficult to watch a video portraying the horrible things that some children witness and experience in their lives when their parents aren't able to take care of them and when the foster care system fails them. I ended up leaving the room as I could not watch any more. Chris stayed to watch the end of the video so that once I returned he could tell me that the story ended well. It left both of us feeling scared, helpless, and very sad. No child should have to go through something like that and it made us realize that there are very real problems and complications that come with adoption no matter what process you go through. We have always been so focused on our international adoption that we sometimes fail to see the problems that are happening right here. It made us think about being foster parents in the future once our children are older (this is something we have talked about before) and it created some really good conversations between us on our drive home.
As I said in my last post, there is one other family in our training group who have a child already. They asked our leader that has one biological child and three internationally adopted children for recommendations on integrating siblings in the adoption process. This ended up being another topic that we talked about a lot on our drive home (good thing we have an hour and a half drive, gives us lots of time to talk). One thing she recommended is that one really good way to include your child is to bring them with you when you go and get your adopted child, especially if it is an international adoption. This is something that we have always struggled with as we weren't really sure what was the best thing to do. So as crazy as it may sound, we have decided that Maeve will travel with us to China so that she can meet her little brother at the same time we are meeting him. That way she will feel completely involved in the entire process and we can start to connect as a family immediately. So now comes the fun part of teaching a 2 year old that she has a younger brother that lives in another country. And that we will someday travel on a very long plane ride to pick him up so that he can be in our family forever. I think its time to hit the children's section of our local bookstore.....
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