Caribbean Nesties
CaptainSerious
member
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Ask me anything
I feel bad that I didn't get a chance to answer most of the questions in the post when I announced that we were trying to adopt again. And I haven't really done this before, and the board's slow. So go ahead, ask me anything, adoption related or otherwise.
Re: Ask me anything
I think I remember you saying you haven't ttc. Why did you decide to adopt? Why Peru?
Does it bother you that people think you are sthooo stherious?
Faves? Least faves? No dodging.
Are you in Northern Jersey? What county, if you don't mind me asking? Are you happy there? Commutability to the city? (Sorry - it's the house hunter in me!)
I didn't get to wish you tons of luck and give you vibes for the new adoption process, so I'll do it here.
What made you guys want to adopt specifically from Peru (Peru, right?)?
I think I remember you saying you haven't ttc. Why did you decide to adopt?
I always thought about it since I had a grade school friend who was adopted, but I also imagined having a mixed family of biological and adopted kids. As I grew up, I second guessed this with a lot of the typical questions of whether I could love them equally, etc. When I met my husband, he told me he would adopt at least one child; so before deciding to marry, I had to be on board. We discussed it a lot, and I decided my fears were just that, unfounded fears. We still planned to have both bio and adopted kids. When we were ready to start a family, it was in the middle of the financial crisis, and he's in capital markets. I wasn't ready to have a kid in the next 9 months (if everything went perfectly) with him working all the time, but I figured that since adoption would take longer, we could start with that. Now, it just feels right to us that our second child be like M, so he's not the only person of color or adopted child in our family.
Why Peru?
We chose Peru because we love the idea of adopting from South America. At that point, we hadn't yet been to Peru, but we had been to Argentina and Chile, and fell in love. Neither of those countries really have international adoption programs to speak of, so we started investigating other South American countries that do.
Peru is a very poor nation in which many families simply cannot support their children. There are many older children for adoption there, many of whom have lived with their families for some time, because their parents cannot take care of them any longer. It's heartbreaking; often the children are relinquished after one parent dies and the surviving parent can no longer manage to support the entire family alone. There are also many "street children" in Peru who do their best to work and scavenge to get by on their own.
Add to it that the orphanages in Peru are very child-developmentally centered, and we were drawn to it.
Does it bother you that people think you are sthooo stherious?
It used to. But I understand that I'm not a person who can belt out the humor. I'm spontaneous and loads of fun to hang out with, but I'm just not that funny verbally. I hang out here because I think most of you are smart, funny women, and I dig that.
Faves?
Fallin, Noisy, Mod, Mashed, Winged
Least faves?
I go through phases, but right now the only name that pops out is Salimoo
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I'm in Middlesex. 14 miles as the crow flies to NYC. It takes my husband an hour by train or 1.25 by boat.
No, I'm not happy because I'm a country girl. But I love that we can make enough to have the place in VT, save to retire well, and get M all the services he needs. So here we are.
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For less then ten cents a day, you can feed a hungry child.
Have you ever encountered any negative feedback to your adoption choices?
Some. Mostly from people whose opinions I don't care about too much, though. I've had a lot of people ask me why we didn't adopt an infant. Or from the US for that matter. Or why we'd adopt at all.
My brother couldn't understand why we would consider a non-healthy child.
Perhaps the one that still infuriates me the most was when the Peruvian authorities asked us to have our psychologist elaborate on our "phobias" of biological children because we hadn't ttc before they would approve us to adopt (even though we already discussed it in our homestudy, psychological report, and letter of intent).
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Oh my god, I've muscled my way out of the mucky bottom!
How did you get into that really cool skiing thing you do that I don't know the proper name for?
The nerve!
House | Blog
Thanks! I'm in Essex currently, and commutability to the city is essential (I can't have more than an hour - 1:15 commute and still be a sane person). We're currently looking at a few towns in Essex, a few towns in Union, and a few in Morris.
Both of these would really piss me off. I would have had a hard time not telling my brother where he could stick his opinion.
The nerve!
House | Blog
Oh my god, I've muscled my way out of the mucky bottom!
What can I say, you've grown on me. I still don't see things your way, but you're okay. ;-)
How did you get into that really cool skiing thing you do that I don't know the proper name for?
I started seeing a lot of blind skiers on the slopes. I thought it was really cool. I know the rush I get from skiing, so I could only imagine how they felt. So I started googling it, and found that my favorite mountain had this volunteer organization that taught blind and disabled people how to ski. You could volunteer as much or little as you liked, and they would train you. I signed up for the next season, and have been with them ever since. Over the years (6!) I became certified as an adaptive ski instructor, and now can teach most disciplines.
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I don't know about M's father. His mother is still alive and most likely does not know that he was adopted. I don't know if you recall, but I mentioned before we adopted him that he was abused; as far as we can tell, it was at the hands of his mother and (much) older brother. If M wants to find them someday, we'll share the little bit of information we have, but if they try to contact him, we will not tell him until he's old enough to understand and make a decision he can live with his entire life.
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I came to the sad realization that my brother and I do not see the world the same way a long time ago, so even though it bothers me that no matter how much I try to explain he just won't understand, I can kind of just shrug it off and know that he will just never understand. I just pray that any children he has are born healthy.
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Obviously, I don't know your brother or how he expresses it, but I think there is a big difference in not choosing to be open to adopting a sick child that you don't know at that point and having a problem with happening to have a sick child that is yours and that you have already developed a connection to. I mean, you guys have said that you had to be sure adoptees had illnesses you felt you could handle. Some people couldn't/wouldn't handle any illness.
I don't have any questions and I hope this doesn't come out wrong but here goes.
I think it's great that you're choosing to adopt. Not adopting because in order to have children you have to. (I hope that makes sense and doesn't piss people off) I think that if people have the resources and ability to adopt want want to have children that they should. I've always wanted to adopt and hope to someday add to our family that way as well.
I also think it is great that you adopted M despite his medical condition and age. It shows that you have an amazing heart and M is lucky to have you and Mr Serious.
I agree wholeheartedly, Fallin. Basically, my brother was trying (from a good place) to convince me that by setting our parameters and saying we were open to x, y, and z if we were matched, we were essentially guaranteeing that we wouldn't be matched with a child who didn't have x, y, or z, because the healthy children would all go to the families that said they were only open to healthy children. So he was trying to persuade me to reconsider all the things we said we were open to.
The reason for his concern is that unlike asking to parent a waiting child (as we did with M or hope to with J), if you wait to be matched with a child, you can only turn down the match if he/she is drastically outside the parameters you said you were open to. And you could only do that once. So, if they matched us with a child who had a heart condition, learning disability, cleft palate, and ADD, all of which we were open to singularly, but in combination seemed overwhelming, for example, we'd be hard pressed to turn down the match.
So, I do understand where he was coming from. I just couldn't make him understand that we trusted the authorities to be reasonable based on the information we provided, and the reason we said we were open to those things is because we actually were open to them.
ETA: All that being said, some of what he said made me wonder what he would do if they found out while pregnant that their child might have Downs, or something similar. Some of the conversations were very heated.
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Thank you. I appreciate the sentiment. One of the reasons we did that I didn't mention above is that we feel we've been incredibly blessed in this life, and since we wanted a family, we wanted to use the opportunity to share all our blessings with someone who could really use it.
That being said, I used to think of it like you, but since I've been exposed to the real world of adoption, I can now say that not everyone with the resources should adopt. Most people want to adopt infants, with good reason. The problem is that there are actually more people wanting to adopt infants domestically than there are infants available, which is why you often here of long waits. The older a child is, the more likely they will have suffered trauma and might be at risk for attachment difficulties. I'm not talking about the bs stuff the APers are all worried about, either; this stuff can be really scary. We do a lot of things as M's parents that we'd never even consider with another child, things that seem completely out of whack, to help his attachment. It's a long process; we are 6 months in and are just now encountering new bumps in the road. Who knows when we'll be fully there; we hope within the next year, although we will be dealing with the affects of his past throughout his life. It takes a certain kind of person, with a lot of patience (or who can grow in patience, as seems to be my case), to know all that and take it on. I just pray we handle it all well. Every day I pray we don't mess this up.
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I agree with this. I also know that there are a lot of people who don't possess the qualities necessary to help a child in a situation like M's. That is why you are lucky to have him and he is especially lucky to have you guys.
The hair grows in thick where the horn used to be.
Fozzy, I think what Captain is trying to say as nicely as possible is people that scream, "you are my problem" at their pregnant wife probably should not consider adopting.
Captain, I think what you did for M is wonderful. You are well aware of the challenges that will come up and embrace them. He is lucky to have you as parents.
Do you have a pretty good grasp on how old M might be now? IIRC, there was quite the range. Do you worry about him starting adolescence before you've gotten really settled (I almost said congealed) as a family?
Holding Bug at bedtime is so bittersweet for me now b/c at 11, I probably won't get to do that all that much longer. It made me wonder what it would be like if I hadn't gotten those first 7 years. It also made me realize that although we're our kids' parents for the rest of our lives, actually living together as a family is a pretty small fraction of that.
You're still just as much his mom, and always will be, but the time you'll get that living together is even briefer. Well, unless he becomes a 30 yo basement dweller and you have to tell him you're going to stop doing his laundry so he'll finally move out.
"The meek shall inherit the earth" isn't about children. It's about deer. We're all going to get messed the fuckup by a bunch of cloned super-deer.- samfish2bcrab
Sometimes I wonder if scientists have never seen a sci-fi movie before. "Oh yes, let's create a super species of deer. NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG." I wonder if State Farm offers a Zombie Deer Attack policy. -CaliopeSpidrman
totally interrupting, but this fvckingshit infuriates me! you have posted about that once before when i was asking all sorts of questions about adoption that one day on ml.
i didnt adopt. i have two biological children and one of them has a lifelong genetic blood disorder that hopefully won't kill him, though its already tried to.
your brother can go eat a d!ck.
Thanks so much for taking my compliment to Captain and using them as an opportunity to throw my marital problems in my face. I hope that makes you feel better as it was completely unnecessary. Note I said someday. Not now. Not in the immediate future. I've vocalized that I am actively looking to find someone that will be a good match for our situation to get some help. I believe people can change and with work, my marriage will be fine. Thanks so much for your concern.
We totally had to fall in love. It was one of the most scary things about adopting an older child, especially once we met him, and he wasn't a mix of the two of us, but a completely different individual, with his own personality and tastes. But all of adoption is a huge leap of faith, and we just had to believe that God wouldn't lead us to this child for it not to work out. So, we got to know him for who he is, and we couldn't help but fall in love.
Going in, this was one of my biggest fears. But I think once you get that far, you are committed to doing all you can to make it work. So I think, in a way, you are predisposed to falling for the child, if that makes sense.
M has so many things that aren't like us at all. He couldn't give a hoot about the out doors, loves music and acrobatics, and is a riot. I say all the time I'm thrilled he got his sense of humor from his biological family, because lets face it, he wasn't going to get it from me.
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That's funny!
I'm glad there are people like you and your husband in the world.
My response to Fozzy really wasn't in reference to her situation at all. I truly used to think that more people should "just adopt." I didn't understand why so many people were adamantly against it for their families, and was judgemental of people who went through extraordinary lengths to have biological children instead. My experience has opened my eyes, and while I still think it's a good, viable option for many people and wish more people seriously considered it, I now understand that it comes with a lot of difficulties and issues that biological children do not.
Since the state of a adoptee's marriage has been brought up, though, I will say this. Adoption can tax a marriage greatly. I'm not sure if it's more trying than just adding a biological child, but the process can be hellish at times (much like IF, I imagine), and once you bring the kid home it can definitely make the small annoyances seem so much bigger. If you're not strong going in, I imagine it can really be difficult.
Thank you. We really are the ones that are so, so lucky. Sure, he got a family and a better working heart and all, but I got the funniest, most sensitive, biggest ham in the wold as my son, and I'm not sure I could top that.
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