A few updates

Ché Updates:



We took Ché to the annual FTIA picnic this year (We missed last year due to a wedding), and he had a great time. Still thought nothing of all the kids looking like him. The only thing he cared about was riding the carousel. Of course, we forgot the camera, and the bag with the snacks, and extra clothes. Oh well. He also had a great time playing on the different playgrounds, and looking at the train that kept passing by. We stayed a few hours, then headed home, where Che after a lot of comments like, "I'm not tired," and "I don't need a rest," feel asleep for most of the ride home.



We are also in the mode of getting Ché ready to move upstairs to his big boy room. We have a 1 and a 1/2 story house, and there is only 1 bedroom on the 2nd floor. It's very large, and he'll have plenty of room for sleeping and playing. At this point he's really excited about it, and wants to paint the room yellow and pink. Last night we took down my bedroom set from home, and sent it back to my mom's house. Underneath the bed was a bunch of stuff left over from teaching, mostly bulletin board things, so Ché spent some time picking out the things he wants on his walls. On of which is a giraffe growth chart that goes floor to ceiling. He's pretty excited about it.



Babies Update:


We're now in the last week of the first trimester. It's pretty exciting, and I'm amazed at how fast this is all going. I've transitioned to some maternity clothes and some regular clothes and getting dressed is more and more of a challenge every day. Sunday, as I'm sure Mike will attest to was not a great day for dressing, and I changed outfits several times before finally just giving up.



This is the last week of your first trimester, and your risk of miscarriage is now much lower than earlier in pregnancy. Next week marks the beginning of your second trimester, a time of relative comfort for many women who see early pregnancy symptoms such as morning sickness and fatigue subside. More good news: Many couples also notice a distinct libido lift around this time. Birth is still months away, but your breasts may have already started making colostrum, the nutrient-rich fluid that feeds your baby for the first few days after birth, before your milk starts to flow.

Your baby has reached the size of a medium shrimp and weighs nearly an ounce. (Length: almost 3 inches, head to bottom.)

The name debate has cooled, it's just a subject we don't talk about at this point. I think that we've found a changing table solution, and we have two cribs ready to go. We're going to talk with Ché about whether or not he wants his siblings to have the fishies in his current room, or if they should get something new. We're really trying hard not to make it seem as though we're "Pushing" him out of his room, and making him give up all his things for the babies. In fact I was thinking of letting him decide which blankets out of the thousands he has to keep and which to give up for the babies. He's also very protective of the babies, and their things. He spent 7 minutes going through a grocery bag of baby clothes my SIL had sent over, "sorting" them out and making sure everything was alright for "his babies."

Other than that, life around our house is pretty normal, same stuff, different day, and I couldn't be happier with it that way.

2 years ago

Our lives were drastically changed.

On Sunday, December 18, 2006 after 6 hours on a plane to Guatemala, hand picking our baggage off the broken baggage claim, and going around and around the airport deciding whether or not to actually go out, we got a call saying that in 30 minutes our son would be at the hotel.


It was an unnerving moment. I didn't know what to do first, or how we were ever going to be ready to meet this child, let alone be the sole caregivers for him. I believe I took a shower, not knowing what else to do.



These are my two favorite pictures from the trip. The first time Mike ever held Ché. He was definitely holding back tears. The woman in the picture is Ché's foster mother. She was wonderful, and we still credit her with Ché's good behavior.

(Can you tell how scared and confused Ché is? He cried for about 30 minutes after the foster mom left, but then was very quiet for most of the rest of the trip)


And, Ché and I, in front of the enormous Christmas tree in the lobby of the hotel we stayed at. This picture was taken the day we left, and we were waiting for the taxi to take us to the airport.

One thing I've been thinking a lot about, especially now that Ché has been home for more time than he spent in Guatemala, is nature vs. nurture. I think this picture sums it all up.

Can you see it? The facial expressions?

While today is a special day, we've decided to celebrate his adoption on the 21st, which is the day we arrived back in South Bend, and the day our whole families got to meet Ché for the first time.

Celebrate Adoption!

November is National Adoption Awareness. National Adoption Day is Nov. 15th this year. Coincidentally, Nov. 18th was National Adoption day last year and was Ché's 2nd birthday, but his first birthday with us.
Here's a calendar of ways to celebrate adoption every day this month.


http://www.adoption.com/national-adoption-awareness-month/

Check it out, and see if there is a way you can support and promote adoption!

Looking Back

Last night Ché was playing in the basement playroom, and I took advantage and decided to look at some e-mails, and catch up on some blogs.

One blog had a post of a 13/14 month old Guatemalan adoptee trying to figure out the shaking head and nodding business that we know as Yes/No. Ché heard and of course wanted to see the video.

He watched it with amazement and then asked to see video's of Ché. I obliged.

Ché and I ended up watching some videos of himself from when he was little, some from Guatemala, and others from home.


I have to say, I don't remember some of those things happening, and what amazes me even more is that they seem so long ago, when in fact they weren't.



Ché was amazed too. He knew it was him that he was looking at and then was laughing at himself the entire time. He would point out when Daddy was talking, or if my hand was in the picture, etc.

It was really cute. If I get a chance, I'll post the two movies that made him laugh the hardest.

Adoption

An article in our local paper will have people up in arms again about Guatemalan adoptions. Sigh. It is such an awful thing to think about fraudulent adoptions, however if someone really started looking into the American adoption system, I'm sure the same things would come up:

Corruption

Greed

False Documents

Forged Signatures

What the article goes into is the recent raid on Casa Quivira, an adoption agency in Guatemala run through a man in Florida. I'm not sure how you can run an agency from another country, although I'm pretty sure that much like our agency, the man in Florida has people who report to him regularly. In any case, the raid that occurred in August, left 46 babies in limbo. There are still 36 babies left in limbo, whose birth parents may have falsified documents, or perhaps the attorneys or notaries associated with the agency falsified documents. In any case, 36 children will be left without care. Someone will care for them while they are young, but as soon as they are old enough, will be left to their own devices. This means, that out of the 36, a good estimate is that 30-34 of the children will live in poverty and be homeless. The ten other children, have bee adopted and are home in the United States. However, that does not mean that they are cleared. If something were to surface that would be suspect in their case, the Guatemalan agency has a duty to invalidate the adoption and try to recover the child. I can't imagine that bringing home your child isn't the end. I would live in constant fear of someone knocking on my door to take away my child.

It is interesting to me that the agency that is being targeted is also a "baby house." An orphanage.

One of the reasons that Mike and I chose Guatemala is the private foster care system. The majority of children in Guatemala that are placed for adoption are placed in private foster care. This has proven to be a better situation, due to the fact that children are given more one on one care. So, the agency that is being investigated isn't one with private foster care.

Just like the Dateline: To Catch a Baby Broker, the article only covers one aspect of International Adoption, and so you don't get to see the other side. Of course things go wrong, of course people are greedy and if they can make money, they will, but the majority of Guatemalan adoptions are legal.

What's really sad is that this paints adoptions in general in a bad light. People start to question adoptive parents about how their children came to be. (Did you pay someone off? How do you know that the child you have isn't stolen?) All of the hype of adoptions has been seen on MSNBC, The Today Show, Associated Press articles, and more. It really brings a sense of dread to adoptions, and I fear that people are thinking that all adoptions from foreign countries are corrupt, and illegal.

Luckily, Mike and I have never been asked any awful questions. I'm not sure how I'd respond if someone did ask

Mike and I will never really know if Ché's birthmom really is who she says she is. We have a picture of her holding Ché that we will share with him at an appropriate time, and we know that through DNA testing, she really was his biological mother. At least we don't have to worry about her selling Ché, or that he was kidnapped. However, we don't know if she accepted money to put him up for adoption, or if she really was young, single, and couldn't make it with him. She kept him for three months, and that fact alone makes it easier for me to believe that she did what she thought was best for him.

I don't really have a good way to end this post, other than to say that these articles and news casts are only showing one side, and so try to remember that there are two sides to every story.

Dateline: To catch a Baby Broker

On Sunday, Dateline NBC had a show on showing the adoptions in Guatemala. It was "appropriately" titled as shown above. ahem.

This is the same show that does "To catch a Predator" shows, which I find a bit awful.
Anyway, they stuck with the same theme: undercover cameras, fake agency, and direct questioning when the farce was up.
It was interesting. And by interesting I mean, neat to see some of the buildings we saw when we visited Guatemala. There were shots from the hotel where we stayed, and of the American Embassy, as well as the airport.

Funny though, they didn't actually show all of those places. At the airport, a slight pan to the left would have revealed the massive amounts of people waiting behind cattle fences for their relatives. Stepping off of a plane in a foreign country is intimidating enough, but to see hundreds of people smashed against cattle fencing just makes it that much more shocking. And the embassy! Oh my, again, another pan to the left would have shown the hundreds of indigenous people lined up under corrugated metal waiting to get into the embassy. It had to have been so frustrating when all the white people carrying Ladino, or Mayan children got into the embassy before them, even though they'd been waiting hours and sometimes overnight.

The show was just odd. They interviewed 4 families, whose adoptions were rough to say the least. I feel for these families. I really do. 2 of the families weren't able to finish the process, one found out that the child they were going to adopt was kidnapped from her family. That's awful, we all know it's a problem. The other family was referred twins, that were already promised to another family, again, awful! However, the common thread between the 4 families? One lawyer, who was coincidentally banned from working with the US embassy. So of course, what does Dateline do?
They set up a fake adoption agency, and meet with him as though they are interested in working with him. They bait him with questions to see what he would say, and throughout several days of talking he does say some pretty unethical things. No one should be working with this man.

So, the question? How did these 4 families start working with this man? Answer: The agencies in the United States that these families were working with, were working with the lawyer. That to me is atrocious. I don't understand how an agency in "good standing" could working with someone like that. Someone willing to doctor documents to get rid of child molestation charges, someone willing to pay women off for their children.

Of course this episode started millions of little conversations in our house, and there are a lot of questions that came up, and a lot of unanswered things.

1.) How did these people choose their agency in the United States? Mike and I bet that it has something to do with the promise of quick time lines. We had a long process, one step that was supposed to be 2 weeks, ended up being 12 for us. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. You just can't do a process like this(for the first time) in much time under a year. It just can't happen.

2.) Why would these agencies work with this lawyer? I don't know. I just don't know the answer, to this, but again, I think it's because he promises things quickly, and is willing to do anything to bring a match to families. "you want twins?" and he responds, "I can have you twins tomorrow, boy or girl" Really? There are that many twins just floating around, come one. Seriously.

3.) Why would a couple work with this agency again? Um, yea. One of the couples whose adoption fell through (The little girl who was kidnapped) there still working with the same agency. Why? The agency has all their paperwork and money and they don't want to rock the boat so to speak! Excuse me?! Rock the damn boat, get your money back, and your paperwork if you didn't keep a copy for yourself, and get to an agency that is ethical! I can't even begin to fathom the line of thinking here.

Aside from this show showing the absolute worst side of Guatemalan adoptions, it also didn't do a good job in saying that the percentage of adoptions that fail or go wrong is so slim compared to the thousands of ethical adoptions.

Another thing to consider about this whole spectacle? The American Adoption System. It just isn't that different. Corruption, greed, and lack of ethics can be found in our system too.

For another interesting view and more information visit Guatadopt. It's a very informative site that we visit often for news and updates.

Something Else

I truly thought I would be posting more. But what can I say.

There isn't much on the Dad front. He's feeling o.k. which I guess in the world of liver cancer is good, but still it's hard to see him so run down and tired all the time.

On another note, I thought I could branch out and start talking about some other things; my whole life doesn't revolved around cancer (amazing I know)


So I guess, this is my first non-cancer blog post.


As it says in my "About Me" section, I'm 25, married to M, and have a wonderful son C.

My husband and I married in Oct. 2003, and will celebrate our 4th anniversary this year. He works at Notre Dame and I work with the Juvenile Justice Center.

I really enjoy just spending time at home with my family, especially now with the addition of C., to our lives. It's amazing how a 3 ft. being can change your life...

Here's a picture of C:



This was the first time he ever had corn on the cob. You would have thought he ate it every day.

So my son is almost 2, (Nov.) and I can't believe he's already that old. Granted he's only been in our home for 9 months, but that's an entirely new post.

Someone recently asked me if I was going to post about our troubles with fertility, or our adoption, but I don't know yet. I can't say. I've been reading infertility blogs for awhile, and I can conclude a few things:

1. They can be really depressing
2. They can be really crass and hold TMI
3. They can make you question every feeling you have in your body

... and I just don't know if I want to add to those feelings. On the other hand infertility blogs can do the following:

1. They can be really uplifting
2. They can be sources of information
3. They can be sources of inspiration
4. They can be places to feel a common bond.

... and so you can see why I'm torn. As far as an adoption blog, wow. there's another place I'm not quite sure I want to go yet. You see, I don't want to fall in the trap of making adoptions appear all hearts and roses and singing angels. It isn't, and even though our adoption is final, it was difficult and that is something that I will always remember. (However, looking at my son's face often makes me have a momentary lapse in memory).

So I'll see and if I'm feeling brave, perhaps I start blogging about one of those things.

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