I originally posted this back in November of 2006. I’ve come a long way with my writing, and I cringed as I read some of it. Not because what I said was wrong, but because I’ve learned a lot about sentence structure and how to tighten my writing. The original post can be found here, if you want to read through the comments — and I believe the comments are as important as the post.

I’m repeating the post here, edited for grammar but not content, so we can get fresh comments — old posts have comments automatically turned off after a certain number of days, because the spammers often try to hit them.

I’m using female pronouns here for simplicity’s sake, but of course the advice also applies to darling boys.

——

I’ve read blogs of people who are home and who are miserable.

I’ve read about recent disruptions.

And I’ve read posts from people on various groups and blogs, where the people are sure their new family member hates them, and some of them sound like they’re starting to hate their child.

So I feel I need to talk a little about what happens when this screaming little baby is finally placed in your arms.

This is not a newborn, but a child who already has a personality — one you get to try to figure out. She’s been ripped from all she knows: the people who’ve cared for her and kept her alive, the language she’s been around since birth, the food she’s accustomed to, the other kids, her schedule, her crib, her cribmate.

It’s all gone, and she’s with these people she’s never seen before, and she can’t understand what’s being said, and the food is different. Scared and grieving doesn’t begin to describe her emotional state.

Some babies completely shut down and appear to be autistic, but after three or four days they start coming around and you begin to see the real child. It can take weeks (or months) for the grieving to stop, but after several days you should begin to see little pieces of their personality. Other children have different survival mechanisms and you’ll immediately see a little bubbly charming temperament, but this doesn’t mean there’s no grief — it could be their survival instincts are telling them to be cute and lovable.

We all know this transition to a family is for the best in the long run, but the child only knows how they feel right now, and they’re scared and mad and grieving. Some move through it faster than others. Many seem to work through it in China and then backtrack once you get them home

When you’re in China they still hear Chinese in the restaurants and out on the street, they still get some Chinese food, they still have the unique smells of China around them. However, once you’re home, everything familiar is gone. By then you’ve probably switched them to American formula, they likely aren’t getting congee every morning now that it’s not on a buffet, you probably can’t make steamed eggs exactly like they were in China, the smells are different, and no one is speaking Chinese around them anymore.

They might be able to keep their minds off all of this during the day, when they’re active and have much to keep them occupied, but when their mind starts quieting down to go to sleep it all comes back, and the grief can be all-encompassing. Some babies can’t quiet down without grieving, and sleep becomes next to impossible. Combine this with jet lag and it’s a waking nightmare for everyone in the house.

There will also be control and manipulation issues. Even a 9 or 10 month old baby will try to gain control of something, anything, so they don’t feel so helpless. Maybe you can let them have it in some instances, but in others you’ll need to make sure you remain in control. Follow your instincts on this one — they need boundaries in order to feel safe, but letting them have little pieces of control may also help them. How do you know when it’s best to give in and when it’s best to be firm? You fly by the seat of your pants and hope you get it right.

You’ve been waiting for this child for a really long time, but she knows nothing about you. She’s scared and will act in ways you cannot currently imagine a little 15 or 20 pound baby could possibly manage.

I remember getting so upset with my big girl when she was a toddler and into everything. I’d carry her outside and put her in her swing, and push her. Before long we were both laughing and having fun. It worked for us. If you’ve read about sensory issues you know there are dozens of reasons why this worked, if you haven’t, you need to.

Sometimes, when she was into everything, I’d load her up and take her to the park with a few toys, put a blanket on the ground, and let her play that way. She only had the handful of toys I brought, and I only had to make sure she didn’t put rocks or bugs in her mouth (with her sensory issues, she wouldn’t touch such things with her hands, but had no problems picking them up in her mouth). She never wandered far from me in public, so this worked out well since I didn’t have to worry about her running off.

So many times, I realized we were into a pattern of her doing something and me correcting, and I needed to break the pattern.

I also put her in her highchair with fingerfoods, and rolled the highchair into the bathroom to take a shower. We put a clear shower curtain up so she could see me, and I could keep an eye on her.

My big girl was terrified of being alone. Even today, she’s rarely in a room by herself unless she’s asleep. When we were first home with her, before I went back to work, this meant she and I were together 24 hours a day, every single day (she slept in our room, too, back then). Once my husband was home in the evenings she expected us to all stay in the same room together, and for those first months, she ran the show when it came to things like that.

I see people talking about how happy their child will be to finally get a family, but that just isn’t the way it works. I worry families are setting themselves up for problems by having expectations that aren’t likely to happen.

Please, take this time to read about attachment. Not just attachment issues, but attachment in general – how attachment happens, red flags that attachment may not be happening, and ideas for how to foster attachment.

Also, read about sensory issues and other things that may pop up in post-institutionalized babies and children.

If you have the “What to expect the first year” book, understand your 10 month old baby may not be doing what the authors say four month old baby should be capable of. This is completely normal, and most children catch up at an amazing speed. The rule of thumb I’ve always heard is babies develop one month for every three they’re institutionalized – so a nine month old child will have the developmental skills of a three month old, an 18 month old may only have the developmental skills of a 6 month old. If they’re in foster care or a HTS orphanage then they’ll likely be further along.

Your child may have been strapped into a potty chair for hours a day, and laid in the crib for most of the rest of the day. Of course they won’t have the developmental skills appropriate for their age.

Your baby may have been gravity fed, and never learned how to suck. She may not be capable of drinking from a normal bottle. You may spend months getting her to the point that she can pull liquid from a normal nipple, and those sucking muscles are important before she can learn to talk, it’s all related.

This is why Half the Sky is one of my favorite charities. If your child is from a HTS orphanage, the odds are they’ll be very close to being on target developmentally, and won’t have major sensory issues. There are still a lot of other things that can pop up, but these two things should be on target.

I’m not saying the first couple of months are going to be all bad – there will be wonderful moments, too. I’m hoping to get the point across that you need to be prepared for some difficult times. No matter how frustrated you are, at least you know what’s going on. It’s your job to comfort this child when she’s scared and grieving and screaming her little head off from 11:00 at night until 4:00 in the morning almost nonstop. It’s your job to make her feel safe and loved, and that’s not always an easy thing to do.

Recommended Reading:

• Toddler Adoption: The Weaver’s Craft
• Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today’s Parents
• Parenting Your Internationally Adopted Child: From Your First Hours Together Through the Teen Years
• Adoption Parenting: Creating a Toolbox, Building Connections
• The Out-of-Sync Child: Recognizing and Coping with Sensory Processing Disorder, Revised Edition
• Raising a Sensory Smart Child: The Definitive Handbook for Helping Your Child with Sensory Processing Issues
• Parenting a Child with Sensory Processing Disorder: A Family Guide to Understanding and Supporting Your Sensory-Sensitive Child

The school year is almost over, the birds are singing, the flowers are blooming.

Time crawled while we were waiting, but now it’s flying. GlitterGirl has a semi-formal dance this weekend. We’ve bought the dress and shoes, have how we’ll do her hair all planned out, and I’m allowing a little makeup.

RK and I will chaperone, of course, while TT spends the night with grandparents.

But this little tiny baby, placed into my arms in a hotel in China, is so grown up, and I’m so incredibly proud of her. She carries herself with confidence, she’s kind, she has lots of good friends, she does well in school, she excels in her sport, and she’s as beautiful on the inside as she is the outside.

TwinkleToes is going through some growing pains, and hasn’t been her normal sweet self. That’s okay, we’re working through it, and life’s not always roses and butterflies. She’s still a perfect angel at school, apparently, and her teacher gets all misty eyed when she talks about only having TT in her class another couple of weeks. One of the teachers she’ll have next year tracked me down at an event over the weekend, to tell me how excited he is to have my baby next year.

End of the year activities are in full swing, and TwinkleToes has almost as much going on as GlitterGirl this year, which is presenting a challenge with our family calendar.

And then there are the big decisions – GlitterGirl will be recognized during a professional sporting evening on the same night of TT’s opening night for a play at our local community theater. I can’t be in two places at once, what do I do? Since TT’s play will run for a month, I’ll be going to GG’s event with my dad, while my mom handles the play.

I’m not sure how single parents with more than one child manage, as there are many days I carry one child to a rehearsal while RK has the other at a different place for practice. RK has a lengthy work trip planned soon, and I’ve had to enlist my parents to help out a few days. That’s why you don’t see RK in the equation above – he’s going to miss both.

I suppose I’m rambling, but my point is that our life is moving so fast. The baby I was waiting for when I started this blog is going into second grade! And she’s got the poise and grace on stage of a professional. She’s tiny, but she’s also growing up in ways that surprise me almost every day.

I remember a Family Circus cartoon from decades ago, where he has to practice piano for thirty minutes and it’s forever — but when they’re at an amusement park and are given a thirty minute warning before they leave, it’s not much time at all. Time poked along while we were waiting, and then went into overdrive once our family was complete.

I love our hectic, chaotic, crazy life — and I hope for the same thing for everyone waiting.

For those with a LID past my projections, the best way to get a general time frame is to use average LID Days referred per month. As you get closer and closer, you can begin using the polling data, but it’s not practical if you’re still months and months away.

In the past three months the CCCWA has averaged 7 days per month, in the past six month’s they’ve averaged five and a half days, and in the past year they’ve averaged six days.

I’ve put together a chart showing the wait at four, five, six, and seven days. You decide which you think the CCAA will manage.

As a point of reference, if you look at the projections, the least positive column is for September 11, 13, 19, 22, and 28th. You’ll note those projections go back and forth around the five day column below, with one ending on the 28th and the other on the 29th. Unless the CCCWA makes a drastic change in communication, no chart is going to tell you exactly when you’ll get your referral, but this should (hopefully) help give a rough idea. Assuming they don’t slow down even more, which is a pretty big assumption.

I’ve stopped each column in April ’07. I considered stopping it earlier, as things are bound to slow down when we reach the huge days when people pushed to get in before the deadline. Hopefully, once we get beyond the new regulations, things will speed up.

As China continues to move forward, to gain ground economically as well as in various social issues… there are growing pains. Women’s rights have come a long way, but the old still clashes with the new.

If you’ve been to China you’ll likely have the right perspective to read this foreignpolicy.com story, but if you haven’t, it’s probably going to be a bit hard to fathom.

We have social norms and taboos in the U.S., but most of them seem to be in place so they can be broken. Going against society isn’t exactly accepted, but in most cases won’t make you a social outcast as long as your actions don’t hurt anyone. A grown man dating a teenage girl will make him an outcast; but a big age difference where society considers both old enough that neither is being taken advantage of, is more of a conversation oddity than a reason to spurn either of them.

In China, social norms run deeper. Some of them are changing, others… not so much.

The first chart shows the size (in poll numbers) of the previous batches and this batch. Please remember each poll has to stand by itself, you can’t compare numbers from different polls. We can still get an idea of how the sizes of the batches have gone, but you can’t do a direct comparison.

The numbers are pretty depressing, aren’t they? Two years ago people thought the numbers were as low as they could go, and we’re at a third of those numbers, now.

Next, we’ll take a look at how reality has looked in hindsight with the projections. The graph below shows where past referral batches have fallen on my projections, the X shows where the actual referrals fell. In those cases where I’ve added a new column and things would have looked different had that column been in place at the time, I’ve used a ~ to show where they would have fallen had we had the new column.

Here’s another way to look at the numbers, showing days between referrals, days of LID’s referred, and the weighted average poll numbers.

As you can tell in this one, the numbers this month aren’t all that unusual. The weighted averages hit on 18 in four of the past nine batches.

And finally, here are my projections. I played around with the formula a little, still trying to tweak the newest poll into it.

You can always find your way back to the Projections and When posts by clicking on the Analysis category in the lower right hand column.

I’ll end this with my standard disclaimer: As always, projections are based on the CCCWA continuing to do what they have been doing. There is nothing to say they will follow their recent behavior. They could choose to do a lot less, or a lot more.

.

The last 12 referral batches arrived at 31, 31, 27, 33, 31, 25, 35, 21, 31, 34, 35 and 26 day intervals. During the past 12 referral cycles they’ve arrived at 31 days four times and 35 days two times.

The shortest time frame is 21 days, the longest is 35.

The average over the last year is 30, median is 31. If we throw out the two highest and two lowest the average is 31 and median is 31. If we look at the last six months… 30 and 33. The past three months is 32 and 34.

Looking at the numbers, the soonest we’d expect to see them this month would be Monday, May 14, the latest would be Monday, May 28. The most likely date of arrival is Thursday, May 24.