Free Online Course on Lifebooks

Adoption Learning Partners is offering their online course on lifebooks for FREE in May! Starting June 1, it will cost $30.

I haven't taken this course, but I have taken others by them and they've been first rate. If you need documented training hours for an adoption, their courses often qualify.

My China Workbook

We've already done part of our Christmas -- opening presents with my parents and my brother's family on Saturday. One of the gifts I got for Zoe and Maya was each a copy of Beth O'Malley's My China Workbook: A Lifebook Tool for Kids Adopted From China. It was an instant hit, and they wanted to work on them this morning. (I'm such a mean mom that I hadn't let them bring any of their newly-acquired gifts into the house until they picked up the family room, and wanting to work on the workbooks was finally the motivation they needed to clean up!) I cannot recommend this workbook enough -- the girls LOVED working in it!

I'm especially thrilled that it was something Maya wanted to do. She hasn't been as verbal as Zoe in working through what she knows and what she wants to know about her adoption, but this book was great for her level (age 5) as well as Zoe's level (age 8). Zoe read Maya the text, and Maya did some of the writing with me spelling the words for her, and I did some of the writing, taking dictation from her.

Th book starts with "The Workbook Promise," including a promise not to eat messy pizza while reading the book, which tickled the girls. In the first box after that we put a current picture, and then the next page is an "All About Me" page asking for favorite colors, food, friends, etc. I especially like Zoe's answer to the "what I want to be when I grow up" question -- a lawyer ballerina. Oh, yes, I know tons of lawyer ballerinas! The next box is to draw their baby pictures -- interestingly, neither drew themselves as wee babes, but instead drew gotcha-day pictures that included me and Mimi.

Next, the book introduces birth parents:

Before you were born, you grew in a special place inside a Chinese woman's
tummy. That person is your birthmother.

She was pregnant with you for 9 months before you came into the world. That means you ate the same food she ate. You could even hear the same sounds.

It could be that some of your favorite foods started before you were even born. What are your favorite foods?

There are blanks for listing favorite foods, and a box to draw "your favorite birthday cake." I think that be girls loaded the list with Chinese foods on purpose, though their actual favorites are mostly Chinese!

The book says that no one adopted from China has photos of their birth mother -- "It's not fair but that's the way it is" -- and gives a couple of suggestions for figuring out what she looks like:

1. Since you were born in China and are Chinese, we know that your birth mother didn't have red or blonde curly hair, right?

2. Bet she didn't have blue eyes either.

O.K., so we can figure out some parts of her looks such as brown eyes and black/brown straight hair. You got those from your biological family.

Look in the mirror.

[Yes, there's some variation not accounted for here, but the book goes with the odds -- while some Chinese have green or even blue eyes, or red or curly hair, the vast majority do not.]

So here's Maya drawing a picture of what she thinks her birth mother looks like. The girls quite solemnly looked at themselves in a mirror before drawing.

Zoe decided her birth mother probably has glasses since she does. And Zoe added some interesting details -- her birth mother's shirt reads, "I miss my baby." And there's a legend above her that reads, "Love gives life." Where does she get this stuff? I've never said anything like that! [The influence of Catholic school, perhaps!?]

In Zoe's picture of her birth father (he has glasses too!), he's crying blue tears, and the legend above his head says, "Missing your baby doesn't take you apart." I don't know, the tears suggest that it does. . . .

Oh, the book also has a page for coming up with names to call your birth mother, suggesting that you can pick a Chinese name or an English name you'd like to use. You'll love this, Mei-Ling -- Maya put "Mei-Ling" on the list of things to possibly call her birth mom! And I really don't know where she got that, where she's heard that name!

Anyway, there's lots more in the book to work through, but it looks like it will be a VERY positive experience for both girls. I can't say it fervently enough -- YOU MUST GET THIS BOOK FOR YOUR CHILD!

Lifebook: Birth Parent Pages

I've mentioned before that I'm a huge fan of lifebooks -- essentially a scrapbook that covers the time before your child joined your family, including birth and birth parents, reasons for leaving the birth family, caretakers, and joining the new family. I thought I'd share some of the pages from Zoe's lifebook (I'm a terrible mother -- Maya doesn't have one yet!).

I have to say that putting together Zoe's lifebook was one of the hardest writing projects/scrapbooks I've ever done -- the adoptive moms I scrapbooked with can attest to the fact that I was a grouchy witch the whole time I was working on it! It was hard because it really was my process of trying to explain as best I could in language Zoe as a child could understand all about her birth parents, the one child policy, her abandonment, orphanage care -- all the hard stuff!

Beth O'Malley's book and website were hugely helpful, as was Kids Like Me in China. The Beth O'Malley stuff has step-by-step advice for what to include in a lifebook, including sample language -- a great comfort! Kids Like Me in China, by Ying Ying Fry, a young adoptee, had great kid-appropriate language.

The page above starts out stating the obvious -- you were born. O'Malley advocates very direct language, and covering the basics. Don't leave it to chance that the child will figure out that her life began before she met her adoptive parents, tell her directly that she's just like other kids in that she was born! The page also talks a little about how babies are made -- but just the "it takes a man and a woman" part. I also say that Zoe grew in a special place inside her birth mother. And the birth father is introduced, too,

O'Malley cautions against using generic photos if you don't have any actual photos of the birth parents. Even life-like drawings of generic people can confuse kids -- the photos will get imprinted in their brains as "pictures of my birth parents" even if you say they're not. So that's why I used silhouettes.

Of course, you don't have to do any scrapbooky stuff in a lifebook, but I tried to put something graphic on each page just to keep Zoe's attention.

The next page reminds Zoe that we don't have any specific information about her birth parents, but that they gave Zoe her birthday, her looks and her talents. I embellished the page with little mirrors (that's what those six circles are), and Zoe likes to look into them when we get to this page and imagine what her birth parents might look like.

So there you go, the first installment of "Lifebooks: the Series!" If you have any specific questions or if there are particular parts you're interested in seeing, just let me know.

Birthdays and Birthparents

Zoe started making her own lifebook -- she picked out the pictures and wrote the captions -- this summer as we talked more about her birthparents. She says in her book: " On my birthday I think about my birthparents and how they are wondering how old, tall, and big I'm getting."
Birthdays have long caused Zoe to think about her birthparents. Just before she turned 3, she said to my mom, "On my birthday, my birthmom puts candles on a cake and sings me happy birthday." I had never said anything like that to her, so it was definitely her own idea. And she shared that with my mom completely out of the blue - -they weren't talking about BPs or adoption or China or even birthdays!

Birthdays are a pretty common time to think about birthparents, I imagine. I know I think about Zoe's and Maya's birthparents on their birthdays; like Zoe, i'd like to think they are remembering these girls. I find myself trying to send vibes to them to let them know how wonderful and happy their birthchildren are in their new family.

The adoption story

The adoption story we tell always starts like this: "You grew like a flower in your birthmother's tummy until it was time to be born. Your birthparents couldn't take care of you, so . . . . " (I can't take credit for the "you grew like a flower" line -- it comes from one of our favorite books,

Over the Moon, by Karen Katz. I love to use stories to discuss "issues" with my kids!).

Well, for the first time, in June, Zoe asked WHY -- "WHY couldn't my birth parents take care of me?"


Like most of these things, the question came out of the blue -- we had just come home from somewhere, and Zoe and Maya had immediately fallen to the floor of the family room to play "Warriors," a game involving a cadre of knights and Polly Pockets standing in for the princesses. I followed into the family room a bit more slowly, and Zoe looked up at me and asked the WHY question.

I admit, I was surprised. We talk about her birthparents fairly often, she is sad that we don't know who they are, but she's accepted the "couldn't take care of you" line for years without question. But I guess it was about time. From what I've read, age 7 is a pretty common age for that big question.

I answered, "Well, sweetie, since we can't ask your birthparents, we really can't know exactly why they weren't able to take care of you the way a parent would want to. We can only make some guesses based on what we know about China. Do you want to look at your lifebook, and talk about what some of the reasons might be?"

(I'm a HUGE proponent of lifebooks -- more about them later, but look at Beth O'Malley's site for the BEST info about lifebooks.)

Zoe said yes, so we pulled out her lifebook and talked about China's one child policy and the social preference for boys. Zoe didn't have much reaction, but I knew we were no where near finished talking about this!