Photo: Jackson, 16 months, just prior to adoption



I realized earlier in the week that today marks the six-month anniversary of our Haitian kids coming into our family. Whenever I reflect on our adoptions, I always feel in many ways like it’s been such a short time since the new child/ren joined our family, but in other ways it seems like they’ve always been with us.

Since we had visited our children in Haiti twice during the wait (once in October 2005 and again in April/May 2006), so we elected to have them escorted home to us when the adoption was complete. It just so happened that our close friends were traveling to Haiti at the time to volunteer in the orphanage (and with the side plan of identifying children to adopt) and they agreed to bring the children home for us. It turned out to be incredibly complicated, with trip plans changed multiple times at great expense and at great inconvenience to our friends. (And then there was the whole issue of an American Airlines flight attendant deciding that because Cora was crying she was too sick to fly, and he unceremoniously booted our friends and our children off the plane and banned them from flying until Cora had medical clearance to fly. It cost us $2000 for an emergency room visit, $800 for an emergency flight down to Texas for me, $400 or so for an extra hotel night for all of us, rental car and meals, plus the untold costs of our friends missing another day of work – all for the doctors to tell us Cora had an ear infection and that the flight attendant had drastically overstepped his bounds. I’m still bitter about this.) In hindsight, we probably wouldn’t have elected to have the kids escorted had we known what we’d be facing, but they all eventually made it home to us on October 5th.

The first couple of months were hard, hard, hard. Just getting used to the changes in routines when a new baby arrives is one thing, but having to do that x3 plus deal with language barriers, grief and fear, shut-down babies, ringworm and major diarrhea – well, like I said, it was hard. Nearly every morning started with stripping Jackson’s sheets and blankets and hosing him down in the tub because there is no diaper in existence that could have controlled what came out of that kid’s body. (Sorry – TMI, I know). Jackson and Cora wanted to be held nonstop, but at the same time both rarely cracked a smile or showed any indication that they were living in the same space-time continuum with the rest of us. They avoided eye contact and only interacted with us (after a fashion) when there was food around. Cora rocked on all fours for long periods at a time, banged her head when she was angry or sad or just when she felt like it. She could pull herself to stand, but couldn’t crawl well, let alone walk, at 18 months. Jackson could walk well, but if he showed any emotion, it was a scowl or utter sadness. We knew he missed his birthmom. Both babies were just completely disconnected from us.

Photo: Jackson at home



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