The Adventures of Adoption and Parenthood

This is a post I've been thinking about for weeks and it will be haphazard and scattered, but I need to get it out there for me. If you read to the end, thank you. Food, I have discovered, is an emotionally charged topic. Until I was in my early 30's, I always found it easy to maintain my "ideal" weight. I could eat what I wanted, eschew exercise and look great doing it. In my 30's, I started gaining weight, but it was a slow process. I also started going to the gym. I still felt pretty okay and looked pretty okay. When we adopted Prima, I felt great and had a wonderful trip to China. When we adopted Segunda, I hurt everywhere and the trip to China was very very hard for me. In my mid-40's I have begun to deteriorate and I'm fat. Paradoxically, I'm also not into body shaming. There is nothing I want more than to give my children the idea that I have a healthy outlook on my body and I hope I'm faking it well enough to convince them. But my body ma

The CCAI Adoption Reunion is coming up in June, and it got me thinking about our guides for our two adoption trips. Three of them will be at the reunion. They aren't going to remember us because they have helped over 11,000 children meet their forever families. But I'm so excited to see them again. This is a biased opinion because I haven't used any other agency but CCAI has the best guides in the adoption process. They shepherd worried parents through every step; they hand feed babies; they change diapers; they carry bags; they argue with the Chinese equivalent of TSA. In a word, they are AWESOME. And I mean that in the true definition of the word. Our first trip started in Hong Kong. We had Joann and Matthew. Joann picked us up from the airport with several other families, handed out water bottles, loaded us onto a bus, counted heads, made sure our bags were stowed on the bus, counted heads again, double checked water and we were off. She checked us all into our hotel r