Lilypie Waiting to Adopt tickers

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Ugly Vegetables

There are lots of things I think about while we are waiting to bring our baby home. We have attended lots of Waiting Families seminars at our adoption agency. These seminars are on all kinds or great topics like travel, medical concerns, and culture. Since we have been waiting a while, we have even attended some of these more than once ; )

It has been a concern of mine that the area we live in isn't particularly diverse. I know it will be important for our future children to be around other people who share their Asian heritage. I want them to be proud of where they come from as well as where they grow up. When we first applied to our agency, we also joined a REACH Asia, a support group in our area for families with Asian children. It is a great group of families and I am so grateful to know them. I think it will be important to our children to have friends who look like them and share their racially blended lives. I have bought a few racially diverse books for our children. I was questioned once if I thought I was over doing it, and if this would just draw attention that our child is different. My thoughts are that our child will be different and we need to make sure he knows he is different in a very wonderful way. All people are different in lots of ways, but they are also the same in lots of ways. If you haven't visited Grace Lin's website or read any of her books, please do. She speaks to children about differences in a warm and wonderful way. Her book Ugly Vegetables is a wonderful illustration of differences.

Our last Waiting Families seminar was on culture. To start out each person was given a cup of pony beads in different colors and a piece of string. Each color was assigned a race. We were asked to add one bead that represented us... our babies grandparents... we added beads that represented the different cultures of art in out home... our friends... the babies future playmates... and on and on. Although, our sting was heavily weighted to our race, I was pleasantly surprised to see it was more colorful than many in the group. This was a good lesson about the environment our child will grow up in. I want to especially thank the little peanuts in the REACH Asia group for adding lots of beauty to our string.

While I don't plan on turning my home into a shrine to all things Asian, I am going to continue to make sure our child's culture is represented and respected in our lives. D and I bought 3 beautiful prints by Cedric Hustace last year. I have yet to get them framed. I'm going to work on that. If anyone is looking for Christmas ideas for me, a framing gift certificate would be wonderful: ) A

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We did that exercise with the colored beads when we were adopting Tank Boy. Interesting tidbit: I shared this with a friend of mine who was adopted by white parents from Guat. as an infant. She was appalled by the bead idea, and felt it would make parents focus too much on race as an issue in their lives. She feels that it isn't, and shouldn't be. She is a very interesting person to talk to.