My son Sam will be five-years-old on Saturday, and along with that reality hitting me upside the head like a sack full of nickels ... OMG! It's all going too fast! He's only minutes away from driving and shaving! ... the constant and utter amazement at the person he is becoming and fall-on-my-knees gratitude for his good health and our great fortune comes the realization that he rapidly approaches the age of contemplation of the big picture and the questions that come with.

Being prepared giving multiple options for handling (Forewarned is forearmed -- FOURarmed?... more

Families traveling avec kids, singular or plural, for adoption or vacation ... Mary, for example... might want to take a gander at this column on kids on planes.

Seems the writer mentioned previously that she prefers the company of children over that of adults during air travel, and that earned her more than 1,600 responses, many disagreeing with her take.

Here's... more

Continued from the previous posts.

G6PD (Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase deficiency) is, apparently, the most common enzyme deficiency in humans, with an estimated 400 million people worldwide affected. It is most common in Blacks and inhabitants of the Mediterranean region, although Asians are also impacted.

It is sometime also called Favism, as many people who have this condition are also allergic to fava beans.

Like ... more

Continued from the previous post.

By the time I arrived home in the evening, word was starting to come in from doctor friends to whom I'd passed all the info I had and asked for opinions, strategies, and so on.

Being that medical care available on this island is limited, it is often necessary for patients to seek treatment abroad ... my cardiologist is in Singapore, for example ... so figuring out how soon T could be well enough to travel had to be a consideration.

A look at his chart had told me that his ... more

Continued from the previous post.

Although I thought I'd prepared myself, I was shocked when I finally did see T. Looking small and frail in the hospital bed, he was yellow and very weak ... and scared to death.

Because his mother didn't understand what was happening, no one had been able to explain anything to him. Well accustomed to my 'take charge' personality, he looked to me to give him a picture of what was happening. Unfortunately, I knew nothing.

Preparing to hang a second unit of blood for him, there was a problem with his IV ... a minor blockage... more

For anyone who happened to notice that I've not posted a darn thing in a while, my apologies. I've been in the middle of a situation here that required my full attention and most of my energy.

Being that I've been dealing with circumstances that could potentially happen in a number of international adoptive families, I'm taking the time today to share the experience and what I've learned so far.

As long-time readers know, Mark and I were foster parents before we adopted. Our foster son, T, went back to his mother, then to Thailand, but eventually returned to Seychelles a couple of years... more

Things have been running so hot and heavy on this blog for a while that I figure it's time for a bit of a breather, a little levity, a jigger of jocularity ... and a darned fine example of the humor some adoptive parents manage to create out of the dense ether of an Internet group dedicated to support, communication and fair interchange. Background:

A while back, in one of my more snitty moods, partially brought on by the aforementioned hot and heaviness, I responded to a post on the ... more

Adding a second child often prompts a debate, or at least some deep and careful thought, in all families, and adoptive families are no exception. In fact, the discussion may be much wider ranging when issues of domestic vs. international, infant vs. older child, boy vs. girl, Ethiopia vs. Ukraine, special needs vs. none,... more

As adoptive parents, we spend a lot of time contemplating the impact adoption may have on our children. We worry about everything from attachment to post-traumatic stress to developing good birth parent relationships to positive representations of birth country cultures, and on and on and on.

With so much filling our anxiety plate, we might be forgiven for occasionally forgetting that our kids have not only adoption-related issues to face, but also those plain old regular ones that all children have to deal with over the course of their lives. ... more

Today is a special day in our house. February 8th marks the 4th anniversary of our family including Sam.

On this day in 2003, we arrived in Cambodia and made our way to AOA, the orphanage that cared for Rath Sen Chey until we were allowed to make the trip and claim him as our Samuel Eric Benoiton. We named him Sam, but the way, for a reason ... Mark and I could not combine our chromosomes, but we could put our initials together, so Sandra And Mark make Sam.

I can conjure images from the day perfectly, reliving the... more