It is hard to believe ... well, for me, at least, because I am passing-of-time-challenged in unpredictable and confusing ways ... that October has rolled around already. This year is going even faster than 2007, and that one had the rolling down to the equivalent of a sixteen-pound bowling ball flicked from the fingers of a fullback with torque ... zero to 365 in about as much time as it takes my electric kettle to boil.

Reality will out, though, and I have accepted the Octoberness of this morning, so with little fanfare and much consternation over how ridiculously... more

Just last week, I wrote about the virtual impossibility of adopting internationally from South Africa in the context of one family who has been relentlessly pursuing the process for a little girl, now two-years-old, abandoned at birth and left head-first in a bucket under a tree.

Linking to the US State Department's intercountry adoption page that details... more

Continued from the previous post where we've started the process of wrangling some out-of-control scraps back into their doggy bag, hoping to come up with something digestible that won't make us all sick.

Some yahoos get a whiff that an orphanage in Cambodia has closed, then come across an offcut that hints at a dwindling orphan population, and VOILA!, it's an international adoption smorgasbord.

What had been a scintilla and a shred suddenly morph... more

It has been brought to my attention that some yahoos gnawing on an anti-adoption bone are taking a scrap and passing it off as a meal on groups around the adoption community.

Apparently, having heard that an 'orphanage' in Cambodia is closing down, said yahoos ... who we'll refer to as yahoos -- no caps -- for the duration of this post since I am so veddy-veddy polite, you see, and other more appropriate titles might offend ... have managed to mutate the information into something that nicely fits the narrow little agenda they have handy and would so like to fill with... more

If you haven't already seen Lisa's post of the NPR abomination I'm calling "A very few things hastily considered", please take a look.

Anyone wanting to tell National Public Radio what they think of this biased piece of dangerous bandwagon-jumping they're passing off as responsible broadcasting can write to them here.

Since many of our children come from marginalized indigenous populations... more

I've been following a story out of South Africa for a while now, about an African-American family who fell in love with a newborn who had been abandoned head-first in a bucket and the apparently insurmountable barriers placed in front of their attempts to adopt the child.

Well, the saga continues.

In the South Africa Legal Brief it has... more

Continued from the previous post.

It is more than a little likely that if your kids were born in China, Guatemala, Peru or Russia, for example, their birth families were speaking something other than Mandarin, Spanish or Russian at home, and perhaps wouldn't be able to understand a word of the language many would assume would strike a familiar note in their children.

Since our kids often are often born in the more marginalized populations of the countries they come... more

One hit I've heard international adoption take more than once involves the usually inevitable consequence of moving a child from one country to another that means a loss of access for the child to the language of his birth family, country and culture.

It's a common theme on adult adoptee boards, and there is no shortage of resentment over the fact that a visit to a birth country is complicated by an inability to communicate in the native language.

Language is one of the great treasures of culture and a tie that can bind people together even more strongly... more

UNICEF released figures last week showing that fewer of the world's children under the age of five-years died last year than usual ... less than 10 million of them ... a turn of events the organization is calling "solid progress on child survival".

"This is an historic moment," said UNICEF executive director Ann Veneman. "More children are surviving today than ever before. Now we must build on this public health success to push for the achievement of the Millennium... more

The 9th Global Consultation on Child Welfare Services will be held next week in the Philippines, hosting local and international adoption specialists and addressing concerns of Filipino children, adoptive families and foreign adoption agencies.

The conference will see the launch of a new book called "Adopting a Filipino Child the Intercountry Way" by Gwendolyn Pimentel-Gana, a work described as a "useful source of information ... in matters relating to the foreign adoption placement of Filipino children."

The author explained her belief that "intercountry... more