Special Needs

After my last post I started thinking about how sometimes children don’t always end up the way we’d like. I think most, if not all, parents dream that their children all grow up to be intelligent, financially stable people who marry a wonderful person and lives happily ever after. I’m fairly confident that Timothy McVeigh’s [...]

My blood seriously starts to boil when I find out about people being beyond stupid in regards to parenthood. Do I think I have all the answers? No. Do I make mistakes? A ton! But there are certain things that you would assume people would never do. Then you turn on the computer and read [...]

I am a licensed special education teacher and I loved every second of my job! I’m currently taking time off to raise our children, but one day I hope to return to the classroom. I was always told that I must be a “special type of person” to take care of the students that I [...]

As I wrote in part one, fear was the biggest obstacle to our feeling open to adopting a child with special needs, but we quickly learned that knowledge was power. The more knowledge we acquired, the less scary it seemed. Here are the steps we took to educate ourselves and to get up [...]

Before we adopted any children with special needs, I used to wonder what made families who did adopt them tick. I imagined they simply had bigger hearts than I did and were better people, or they were ignorant or even just gluttons for punishment. I’d read and hear people talk about the blessings [...]

In addition to this miraculous blessing, we began to see Cora blossom, even after spending just shy of a week with her. By the time we left, she could hold her bottle momentarily, could pick up and feed herself Cheerios, could copy some of our vocalizations, and was showing an interest in toys. [...]

Once we got to the hotel and spent some time with her, we began to see that she was a happy, delightful baby girl. But we also discovered that at 13 months, she was VERY delayed, not able to bear weight on her legs, hold her own bottle, eat solid foods, transfer objects from [...]

As I said in my earlier posts, I knew a little about albinism because of my involvement in a discussion group for adoptive parents of Chinese children with special needs (our Sofie had a congenital heart defect, hence my membership in the group). There were many adoptive families in the group with children with [...]

As I mentioned in my introductory posts about our family and adoption experiences, the idea of adopting from Haiti was something that just kind of fell into our laps. We’d been planning to adopt one or two children from Viet Nam, but through an interesting series of events, we found ourselves starting at our [...]

Over the coming year, I plan to do occasional entries on the various types of special needs that are most often seen in waiting children, particularly those in international settings. It is my hope that other families will open their minds and hearts to children who have such needs, and that hearing other families’ stories [...]