Last Call

This is the last Vicksburg blog as a family of three.  I forgot some of my favorite quotes the other day:

My cousins little girl, Alissa Grace:  "I'm part Chinese.  I fixing to get a Chinese cousin so that makes me part Chinese."

My Mamaw when we told her we were adopting and that I had been nervous about telling her.  I mean she is 86 and this is not really the norm.  "I don't know you would be nervous.  I don't see anything wrong with adopting from Japan or China."  Sorry all you adoptive families outside of China.  I can't worry about you or your feelings.  What's important to me is that she loves Sam.  I have no idea where she got the notion that Japan had an international adoption program.

Kelsey Ann about 10 years ago when discussing the expense of buying a spider monkey, "I could get two Chinese babies for that!"  Um, no you could not.

One of the most common questions we get is what do you know about his parents.  The truth is that we know nothing of his biological parents.  What we do know is that they could not meet his needs and risked criminal prosecution to get him to the orphanage where he received much needed medial care.  We will always be grateful that they gave him life and protected it.  There isn't a legal means to give up a baby in China so it is often done in the dark of night with fear of criminal prosecution. Because of this, most children from China do not come with a family history. Therefore, we are not revealing anything sensational about Sam's past.   I get a lot of gasp when I tell people that we do not know about his family.  There is no need to gasp.  I knew exactly what we were in for in this respect.  This is a leap of faith and that little piece of the puzzle is insignificant to me.  Our family will always speak of his first family in a respectful, thankful, and loving way.

Some adoptive families may find some of the comments that I found funny to be offensive or be very protective of their child's family history.  I do ask that you not ever ask those type of questions in front of Sam. I think one reason that I can roll with some comments is because adoption does not come from a place of loss or pain for us.  I say that while recognizing that there much pain and loss for Sam: his first family and then his caregivers that he loves at the orphanage.  Sam's adoption was born out of my transformative love for John Hinton and God's constant reminder that every child deserves unconditional love and devotion through a forever family and that we could be that family.

Lets do this.

Bye, y'all.