Last weekend, we spent ten hours in a mandatory adoption training seminar. This training is required for our adoption by Colombia and the U.S. There were about 12 couples and a few singles there, and we covered topics such as:
- coping with loss in adoption
- child development
- medical issues
- the orphanage experience
- attachment and bonding
- preserving cultural heritage
- adjustment and parenting
Overall, we thought the training was really excellent; we learned a lot, and we now have a lot of resources available to us when the time comes. A few things we learned specifically are:
- How important it is to preserve your child’s cultural heritage as much as possible; to celebrate who they are and where they came from; otherwise, the child usually ends up feeling like they don’t actually belong to either culture, and have no heritage or cultural identity. We intend to figure out some specific ways to do this and will continue to learn about this for years to come, but we are already working on learning Spanish!
- Kiddos who have spent their early years in an orphanage are going to be developmentally delayed in some ways; it’s almost a given, because they simply haven’t gotten the attention they needed to develop “on time.” They might even need to regress for a little bit once they come home to you, and that’s OK. They almost always catch up within 6 months to a year.
- Our child, when he/she comes home to us, will have left everything they know and love behind – every caregiver, every friend, every “belonging”, their environment, culture, routine – everything. There will be grieving. And that’s OK, too. We must let him/her grieve and not take it personally but trust that in time, the grief will heal.
Those were some of the biggest things we learned, though there was much more. We’ll continue to read and learn and grow in order to be best prepared for this adventure!
Dossier
We are still working on our dossier assembly (the huge stack of paperwork that is needed by both the Colombian and US governments). We’re still waiting for our clearance from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, but we know they’ve received our paperwork. :)
Tomorrow we are headed to the police station to have fingerprints made that we then send in to the FBI for official FBI clearance. That should take 8-12 weeks, so while we’re waiting we will try to finish up everything else so that our dossier will be complete at that point… except that when we send in our dossier, we need to send in a big chunk of change, too!
We are currently working to raise $7000 towards these expenses. Please check out our Valentines for sale. They are available to you immediately as a PDF download and they are very high quality – you will love them! :)
We’ve also partnered with an organization called Just Love Coffee Roasters that sells Fair Trade and organic coffee. If you buy coffee through us they’ll give $5 per bag to our adoption. Pretty cool, and I know a lot of coffee drinkers. :)