adoption

Photo by Donnie Ray Jones from Flickr creative commons. A recent study published in Microbiome from researchers at the University of Alberta shows that babies from families with pets had nearly two-fold increases in the amount of two specific microbes in their guts, Ruminococcus and Oscillospira. These particular microbes are associated with reduced risks of developing childhood allergies as well as obesity. According to study author Dr. Anita Kozyrskyj, “There’s definitely a critical window of time when gut immunity and microbes co-develop, and when disruptions to the process result in…

More soon, but I can finally show you pictures of my whole family. We celebrated the adoption of Deniece, Rimonah, Judah, Malkiah and Hezekiah yesterday, to our incredible joy! I have professional pictures coming, and will do good ones of each individual child, but here's the best one of the whole family so far. Thanks to my mother, who bought the color-coordinated purple clothes for all 10 kids months ahead - when we still didn't know when there would be an adoption. From left - Eli (16 in a few days), Me (43), Rimonah (6), Deniece (13), Malkiah (4), Eric (45), Kai (3), Judah (6),…

Since Zion's arrival as a newborn in 2013, this blog has been quite quiet. First I wanted to give Zion the same time and resources that my other babies had. Then just as we started to get back on our feet, the flood of adding four kids to our home, including three under three (plus Zion who was 10 months at the time) took up most of our lives. As soon as things settled down, we had a difficult spring last year, and then got my foursome's youngest brother, and then spent our fall dealing with legal matters as the children were finally freed for adoption. The update is that my sibling…

Raising ten children—some biological, others adopted or in foster care—is far from a burden for Sharon Astyk. On the contrary, she says it mandates an artfulness to living, allowing her and her husband to help create something new and greater from the sum of many parts. Sharon writes that the result is "more fascinating, more fun, more engaging [...] a job worth building a life around." While some parenting hurdles multiply with more kids, others stay the same—or even vanish. And beyond the concerns of day-to-day living, Sharon knows she is maintaining and building new family ties for foster…

I should have known, but did not, that being read aloud to was a learned skill. It never occurred to me to think about it from my privileged place in the world of literacy. I was, for a time, though a teacher of writing, a fish who swam in words without thinking of the water. Like a lot of book-valuing, over-educated parents, I read to my sons from the moment they were born. Tiny babies snuggled on my lap as I read _Charlie Parker Played Be-Bop_, _Jamberry_ and Eli's favorite cliff-hanger _Who Says Quack?_. We graduated on to picture books, and then Winnie the Pooh, Little House and other…

We adopted him on Wednesday, with 30+ family and friends in attendance. It was fabulous. The judge did a wonderful job of including ALL my children in what was a special day for our family, and then we partied. The funniest moment was that the lawyer had spelled his middle name incorrectly (Raphael/Rafael) and the judge was clearly prepared to delay things to change the paperwork when I announced "Nope, we're good, we'll take your spelling!" I wasn't doing ANYTHING to make this take one minute longer. It takes a little while to sink in, since he's always been my baby, but now he's my…

Exactly a year ago at the end of a crazy, long week (Eric's final grades due Tues, thought we were getting three kids Wed., annual "hey, let us look under your beds and in your closets" foster care recertification, which annually gives me PTSD because my limited cleaning skills get close scrutiny on Thursday, heavy garden push on Friday... we promised the kids a completely relaxing, laid back, nothing-going on Memorial Day Weekend.  These would be famous last words. At 3:30 on Friday afternoon as I was shaking off the compost from planting almost all my tender plants (a rare efficiency that…

The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption has done more to get kids in care adopted than just about anyone else - their facebook page and websites have done a lot to draw attention to the needs of kids for families.  The biggest new face of foster adoption comes from an adoptive family that put up an image that has their adorable little girl holding up a sign saying "I was in Foster Care for 751 Days But Today I got Adopted!"  The image has been liked almost a million times, and the site's FB page crashed because it was viewed so often.  11,000 people requested information on foster care…

...on a sticky, sweaty afternoon in July, I received a call from the head of homefinding from my local county social services agency.  These are the folks whose job it is to find homes for kids who come into foster care.  A two-day old newborn boy was being removed from the hospital, because of mental health issues in his mother.  "I know you didn't even want a baby, but it is only for two weeks.  Can you pick him up by 4pm?" (It was 2pm already) Earlier that day I had emailed another worker to say that we were ready to take another placement.  Two boys, K. (8) and C. (7) had been with us for…

My family looks pretty different, and it gets a lot of attention.  The vast majority is positive, and most of the rest is just curious or wondering - but every now and then someone says something REALLY stupid, unkind or offensive.  A lot of the time, if the kids don't hear it, I let it go.  If they say it in front of the kids, I sometimes take them to task. And sometimes, I give free rein to my sarcastic side. (Note, some of these questions are not, in and of themselves, that offensive, and so don't worry if you've asked them.  It is HOW people ask them - in front of the kids, loudly,…

In my last post, more than four months ago (oy, that's bad!), we had just acquired four new children, 11, 3, 3, and 16 months, and were settling in and getting adjusted.  And then I didn't blog all summer.  Or for most of the first month of autumn.  A few people wondered whether I was eaten by a Yeti or had gone entirely feral.  Neither is true (that I know of - I'd probably have noticed the Yeti thing.)  It just turned out that going to nine kids, four of them 3 and under, several with major disabilities, pushed my limits a little.  Or a lot.  We pulled it off.  We settled in, we did it, but…

I'm going to guess that not many of my readers would have imagined that your blogiste would be planning to be out at the stores at 5am on Friday. She never has done anything of the sort before. While not really much of an advocate of "Buy Nothing Day" (I'm more for "buy little year"), generally speaking I'd rather rip my own eyeballs out than go shopping anyway, and the idea doing it among the crowds on black Friday would be even less appealing. And yet, that's precisely what I'm planning on doing. Let's back up to last Wednesday, however. Last Wednesday Eric and I accepted an emergency…

A superb article by Benjamin Dueholm in Washington Monthly about Foster Parenting and its connection to politics and a whole host of other things. Well worth a read: In a way that we never really anticipated, welcoming Sophia into our home led us into the wilderness of red tape and frustration navigated every day by low-income parents who struggle to raise children with the critical help of government programs. That same week, the office of the bone specialist who had treated Sophia's broken leg at the hospital tried to get out of scheduling her for an urgent follow-up appointment. Like many…

Lots of stuff to update you all on. First, the family expansion project - still nothing new. After three months of waiting, we've decided to expand our looking in a few different ways - our county just doesn't have a placement, and after all the work of getting ready, we're anxious to get one. Meanwhile, I'm powering through the Adapting-In-Place Manual, and it will be out next spring. Here's a preview of the Cover: Making Home Cover.pdf I'm also getting ready for the ASPO-USA conference - where I'm going to be sharing a hotel room with Nicole Foss. We're going to have a late night…

There are ten children in my house, but six of them are phantoms. No, we haven't gotten a foster placement or heard anything new since the two weeks in August when we were asked to take two separate groups of five kids each. Both of those placements fell through, and there has been nothing since, which is sort of the problem. I have little patience with being expectant, whether pregnant or waiting for a foster placement, and the six (this is a totally arbitrary number that I'm using only because it represents the number of van seats, and thus the maximum placement we could take) "ghost…

Just to keep you all updated, we learned yesterday that the children's social worker has decided to separate the children, and place them in three homes. Two will stay with the current foster mother, one with one home, and they are seeking a home for one child and the newborn. Since we will take larger groups than two and there are very few homes that take three or four, we are not candidates to take any of the kids. I admit, I'm relieved not to have to make a decision about taking these kids - it isn't the numbers, so much as the ages - I realized about myself that while I would happily…

First, check out my guest post at Scientific American Blogs as part of their "Passions of Food Day" Blog Fest. Also, just keeping you all updated (as much as I can within the confidentiality guidelines), we got our first call about a foster placement, in this case a group of five children. It isn't clear that we would be asked to take all five - we might be asked to take 3, 4, or 5, depending on different possible scenarios. It isn't at all clear whether we would take all five children (which is more than we hand planned to accept, although we do feel strongly about keeping siblings…

What, you ask, has Sharon been duing, besides getting mud and manure on her? (I feel like there's been a theme to some of my recent posts, no?) I'm sure you have nothing but this on your mind - the doins a'transpirin at my house being the focus of whole tens of people (well, maybe one ten on a good day ;-). Still, I'm going to tell you. Well, what we've mostly been doing is getting ready for the fall garden season, and getting ready for the family expansion project. As of this week, our house is open as a foster home, but of course, in our usual "doing at the last minute something we…

Friday was a fabulous day, after a very, very long week. For a week, we frantically prepared for our final home visit. Some of it was pretty normal stuff - minor repairs, etc... Some of it, I think was pretty weird - who knew that freshly washed window screens were a requirement to be a good foster parent (yes, they did explicitly require that). They gave us hoops, and we jumped through like trained tigers ;-). But we passed - in what is still the first biggest news here in our particular tiny household in New York, Eric and I will be (as soon as the paperwork is processed) New York State…

I have one more crazy week involving travel and lots of other responsibilities, culminating in our final home visit in our foster care certification (as some of you will recall, we had a tough visit our second time with a social worker who was totally appalled by the farm - our social worker's supervisor kindly agreed to come out so that we won't have to deal with shifting standards (our own social worker is totally cool with it) and can be clear what we need to do and what is ok), so there will be little content this week. So I'm asking y'all to provide content - tell me what you are doing…