I have many beautiful thoughts and ideas that have been mulling around in my head to share with you, but today, I'm going to write a very different post. I have tried to write this blog envisioning that each post could stand as its own story or chapter in a book, but today I'm going to write some catch-up and descriptions of some changes, so the readers who have been keeping up with me can follow some things.
First of all, names and pictures. When I started writing I used the names of our family members, and the day I went to the orphanage I knew I needed to protect the identity of the children, so I used what were obvious pseudonyms, as flower names. However, as I continue to write, it seems odd that I am calling one of my children by his given name and the other children by a flower name. I kind of like the image of my children as my garden of flowers, so I am switching all to flower names, and they also like the idea of having their own flower names. So from here on out, I'm calling Emerson "Sunflower."
When the girls were partly or officially wards of the Ugandan state, sharing their pictures was prohibited. Now that they are our daughters, I am not so worried about privacy and I do share pictures in some places on the internet. However, I think that mostly stories in words fits the intended purpose of this blog, which is sharing ideas, stories and experiences of parenting, especially as it applies to adoption. So there may be the occasional picture, but this will not turn into a picture-based blog.
There have been some significant logistical events this summer. The biggest one: our paperwork has gone through the American courts, and my husband and I have officially adopted Hibiscus and Buttercup, granting us all the privileges of parenthood and the girls all the privileges of American citizenship. This is both exciting and anti-climactic; we just got a letter in the mail with some judicial stamps on it. After all the drama for every single little bit of official-ness we had to fight for in Uganda, it is either refreshing or astoundingly disappointing that it's so easy in this country!
The paperwork also confirms Buttercup's birthday: August 10th, 2010. Her original Ugandan paperwork, which was filled out when we began the adoption process, had put a random birthday, and since clearly the parents had just filled out Hibiscus's paperwork, they just repeated the same date a few years later. We felt strongly that she was older than that date, and after observing her progress and her development for a while, we asked for her birthday to be changed about six months earlier. I feel this is the absolute youngest that she could be, and based on how several of her developmental categories are still above this age, it's quite likely that she is actually several months older. However, we didn't want her to be bumped up a grade in school, so we aimed for summer. We chose August 10th because that is the first day that the girls started to live with us. I figured that if Buttercup would one day have to face the sad reality that no one had cared enough about her to even remember when she was born, and thus her "birth" day was in some ways meaningless, at least the memory could be paired with the date being a special and meaningful one, and a time when people did care about every aspect of her being.
So, Buttercup just turned four years old. She will have three years of mixed-age kindergarten, and enter first grade right after she turns seven. We are in the middle of switching stair steps in my two-years-apart stair-step children: Sunflower will be six in December, and is in his final and "real" kindergarten year, and Hibiscus is still solidly seven, with her birthday in the middle of winter, and starting second grade. They are each two years apart in school, and a little less than two years apart in birthdays.
In related news, do you want to know how big they are? I don't know exactly how big they were when we got them, but Hibiscus was slightly taller and definitely lighter than Sunflower when we first met, which would have put her around 35 pounds. Just over a year later, she weighs 58 pounds! Buttercup gained a pound a month for a while, but just when I worried that at this rate she was going to be bigger than I was, she started eating like a toddler and is hanging out around 32 pounds.... almost double what I imagine was around 17 when we got her. But that was a total guess; the local scales started at 10 kilos (22 pounds), so the doctors just wrote that on her cards, because it was the closest number to the barely-moving little red line. I guess there are a lot of 10-kilo toddlers in Uganda!
Sadly, this spring the girls' biological mother passed away. This was not unexpected, and she was so ill she was probably relieved to go. She also had not been active or present in the girls' lives for several years, and I didn't see either of them choosing to interact with her during the times that we saw her. I am very sad for the girls, insofar that one day when they might want to understand what happened that led to their adoption, or understand the complexities of their birth family, they will not be able to reconnect with their birth mother and learn her story.
Everything that I write about the girls, I did it with the consciousness of what they would be willing to share or have known about them. One of the parts of their story that I carefully omitted is that they have an older sister, whom the parents did not place for adoption. Her name is Patricia, she is only a little bit older than Hibiscus, and the father wanted to keep one child near him, although we believe that she lives most of the time with an auntie. I chose to not write about her in the blog, because I knew this was precious information to Hibiscus (and Buttercup, although she was not so cognizant about it), and I wanted to follow her lead. Well, by this point she has made very clear that she wants to talk about Patricia. So I am choosing to put her name here, so that all of you can remember Patricia and pray for her if it moves your heart.
And I hope this also clarifies the tragedy that is adoption, which is part of which I want to help people understand. It is so easy to see that our girls have gained so much when gaining a family by adoption, but we never forget they have also lost a family by adoption. And the birth parents' difficult decision to send two of their children to "a better life," and keep one of them close, in the misery and squalor of their current existence, also highlights some of the pain and difficult decisions that the entire family suffered through.
On a practical note, we are still in touch with people in Kampala who are in touch with the birth family, but that's as far as it goes. The birth family is too poor (and too sick) to have the links of communication that we take for granted, such as being able to receive a cell phone call or access email. So at this point I have confidence that if anything major happens to the birth family, we will hear about it. And we can send pictures or news bits through the people that we know. But sadly, there is no practical way for Patricia to have any kind of back-and-forth with her sisters at this point.
And now, on to some interesting stories!
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