You will find that Chinese baby bottles are simple, “straight” bottles, usually with very large holes cut in the nipples, so that the babies simply swallow rather than actually sucking.  Plan to pack small sewing or first aid scissors with your checked luggage in order to enlarge the nipple holes.  We first cut large holes in our American, sized four nipples.  Then we transitioned to nipples cut with an X, then a single slit and then, finally, American sized four nipples with no alterations.  It’s a pain to keep purchasing new baby nipples, but our daughter did finally learn to suck.

Most American parents bring one container of American formula with them to China.  They also purchase Chinese formula once they discover the brand of formula the SWI uses.  The new parents gradually transition to American formula by slowly altering percentages — some more leisurely than others, depending upon the level of objections from the child.  Most babies transition to American formula within one or two weeks, but some, like our Tongginator, take several weeks longer.  If you pack American formula, do not repackage the container as it can lead to bacteria growth.  It is tempting because the package consumes so much space in the already crammed luggage, but it is not wise.  If you opt to avoid purchasing Chinese formula, as some do, you could instead add one teaspoon of table sugar for every six ounces of formula for the first few days and then gradually reduce this amount: most babies are off added-sugar within a week or two.  As an aside, many parents choose to bring soy-based formulas such as Prosobee or Isomil because an estimated 11% of Chinese infants are lactose intolerant.

Since most older babies drink the “thickened” formula with rice flakes, you might also need to purchase Chinese rice flakes once you arrive in China.  As with the sugar, simply gradually reduce the amount of rice flakes added to each bottle until the bottle is straight formula.  Most babies transition easily if the change is gradual over one or two weeks.  If your child struggles, as our daughter did, with oral defensiveness, oral-motor low muscle tone, dysphagia (an ability to or difficulty in swallowing) and/or orofacial myofunctional disorder (including tongue thrust and tongue chewing), consider contacting your state’s early intervention program.  They can connect you with a speech therapist or occupational therapist trained in oral therapy.

Older babies in foster care probably received table food appropriate to their developmental stage.  They will expect to eat from your plate rather than from baby food jars and baby cereal.  Most of the older babies and toddlers, whether in foster care or an orphanage, love steamed tofu (called bean curd by the Chinese), congee, steamed eggs/ egg custard, noodles and various broths.  Many also love softer fruits such as watermelon and mashed bananas.  As for baby food and snacks: Chinese grocery stores have many options — just bring a translator or prepare to “read” the pictures.  You may wish to pack a few bags of pitted, soft prunes – which can be a tad difficult to find – because some of the children become mildly constipated due to travel, diet change and grief.  Every hotel room we stayed in contained one electric kettle, so you can mash up the prunes after softening them with hot water if your baby is younger.

Speaking of grief and the transition … most newly adopted babies do not eat well the first 24 to 72 hours.  Babies and toddlers, no matter how young, attach to people and routines.  When those primary care-givers or scheduled routines change, the children express their grief, anger and confusion not only through sobbing or shell-shocked reactions, but also through refusing to eat and sleep disturbances.  Your child may also experience difficulties feeding because she isn’t used to close contact (touch and eye contact) during mealtimes. If you find your child has difficulty during the first few days of the transition, be patient and remember that your new daughter will eat when she grows hungry enough, usually within the first two days.

The other day I heard a news blurb about the life-long debate of which came first between the chicken and the egg.  The big outcome was that they both came at the same time.  Admittedly, I didn’t hear the whole story – or at least not without interruption – so I may have missed a bit of the ‘point’…but I know that they never actually gave an answer.  Isn’t that how life usually works?  My kids have attachment disorder and I suffered from post adoption depression…which came first?  Who knows?

As I mentioned before, we got custody of the kids on Thanksgiving Day 2005.  My husband, the calm, level headed member of this family continues to tell me that was the day that I became lost.  The old me was gone.  I think that old self was more fun and easier going.  Not to be misleading…I was never a hang by the seat of my pants kind of gal.  I will say that I’m a very anal gal – maybe even OCD.

I have bi-polar and back when I was untreated – I am sure I was a barrel of monkeys (check out An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison if you are living with bi-polar-incredibly powerful).  However, the mature (ha), adult version of me was, in fact, more fun prior to Thanksgiving 2005.  So, the dilemma is:  was my PAD caused by dealing with kids who were rejecting me from the first moment OR did my inability to quickly bond force them to shelter themselves from me in a more strong sense?

Post adoption depression is much like post partum depression in the logical sense.  You wait so long for something to happen and when it does, it doesn’t seem to measure up to your dreams.  Seems simple, but when you are talking about adopting older children – it can become more complicated.  These are humans with stories and feelings and crazy emotions all their own.  So, if you don’t bond with them quickly, they know it.

I kept thinking that it couldn’t be worse than what they came from.  How could my inability to totally give up my heart to them be worse than begging for money barefoot in the winter in Siberia?  How could my chilly demeanor or sadness be worse than your father being murdered in your home?  How?  To this day, I don’t have all these answers.  My kids can’t process emotions the way we all do.  Here again the line becomes blurred.  DS1 was able to tell me how sad he was to see me be sad.  How upset he felt when I cried – even though I thought I was alone in my room…he knew, he connected, and he felt empathy.  DS2 and DD can’t connect in that way.  Attachment for them is painful and really feeling emotions and sharing them is – in purest form – what attachment is.  Do you walk into the grocery store and share the story of your argument with hubby with the stranger checking you out?  Can you open your window at a stoplight and tell the driver next door that you are feeling like you didn’t fulfill your destiny in life?  Well, my kids can’t tell me those things either, because in many ways I am that stranger checking them out.

So, there we all were – me wallowing in the fact that my dream wasn’t what it should have been and the kids deciding that I didn’t feel like a safe place to them.  None of us were fulfilling the part that the other wanted them to.  I know that people will judge me.  I know that saying I didn’t connect with my children (heck, some days I still don’t) will sound unloving and distant.  I can’t change the truth.  Once I started speaking out about this, I found that I was NOT alone.  I remember going to adoption.com and searching through the database of articles and finding this an article on depression.

It was the first time I felt normal in a long while.  I found forums there for people in my position and every time I would post my truth, people would email me to say thank you.  So many adoptive parents struggle with PAD.  Many more struggle in raising children with AD/RAD.  In some of those people there is overlap.  Why are we embarrassed to admit that we aren’t perfect?  I think it’s because people like to say “well, you signed up for this” and we’re too scared to admit that we did.  In some weird way…

I went on a blind date one day in Russia.  I was set up with a girl and a boy of 6 and 7 years old and while we were on the blind date – we had to get married…forever…for the rest of our lives.  We didn’t get to know each other – we didn’t know about what foods we liked or what things made us laugh.  It took months for us to speak to each other in the same language.  It took years for me to share a real hug (that awkwardness came from both sides).  I can honestly say today that I love these kids.  I care for them and I will care for them until they can do so themselves.  I want to guide them to be adults who are proud of themselves and of where they came from.  However, I am not the mom you’ll see on a billboard or in a greeting card.  I wouldn’t have been that mom no matter how my kids came to me.  I’m real…and this is our real life!

On the days that she’s not busy trying to find her misplaced brain, Voni shares her life, trials, tribulations and victories at http://www.kretzklan.blogspot.com

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]]> http://www.growninmyheart.com/which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-bigger-chicken/feed 4 http://www.growninmyheart.com/nothing-like-the-first-time http://www.growninmyheart.com/nothing-like-the-first-time#comments Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:00:14 +0000 Voni http://www.growninmyheart.com/?p=3182 Republished by Blog Post Promoter

I am parenting three kids and two puppies, as well as keeping everyone’s schedules running correctly, the house clean and food on the table.  Wow, what a June Cleaver I sound like!  Now for the 2009 spin.  I have a husband who helps me as often and as much as he is able.  I hate to cook, so although there are meals on the table every night, I wouldn’t pretend they were home-cooked.  Two of my children came home from Russia in 2005 at the ages of 6 and 7 and they have attachment disorder.  Therefore, our lives are a little more like the Osbourne Family than the Cleaver’s.

I like to think about attachment as the story of two babies.  Baby 1 comes home from the hospital and is held and rocked and fed.  Every time baby 1 cries, someone comes running to feed or change or simply give love!  What a nice and normal life.  Baby 2 lies in the crib and cries.  Yes, no one comes.  Baby 2 has to teach themselves that they aren’t hungry, aren’t dirty, aren’t in need of touch and affection.  All connection to those feelings is turned off for Baby 2.  Those are inherent for most of us, the feeling of needing and being satisfied.  Generally, it’s tied into our parents – the adults in our lives who cared for us and loved us.  For a child with attachment disorder, like Baby 2, those connections simply aren’t there anymore.  Therefore, they can’t trust an adult, not even one called Mother, to care for them.  They learned at an early age, that they must care for themselves and depend on themselves.  Now, I’m not an expert         on attachment.  Just a mom living with it every day and working hard to stop the effects it is having on my children’s lives.  A lot of what I know and have to share is due to a fabulous attachment therapist – “Doc Green” and a group of wonderful parents who have helped lead me to where I am today.

Introducing….the cast of characters otherwise known as my family!  For all intents and purposes here, I refer to my family as my dear ones.  Therefore hubby becomes DH.  He is the adoptive father of my oldest son (through step-parent adoption) and obviously, the adoptive father of our youngest two kiddos.  He is a hard working, quiet and kind man, who has had a roller coaster ride in learning to handle this car we got into.  Attachment is hard on marriages…it’s not a normal situation with increased stress and total triangulation.  We will survive and, as with all marriages, there are good times and bad.  Our oldest son is known as DS1 and is close to turning 13 with all the matching hormones and craziness.  He’s a very bright kid that does well in school and sports.  I worry about the effect this all has on him and how to keep him involved without all the drama!

DS2 is our almost 11 year old son who was adopted from Russia in November 2005.  He’s artistic, kind and social.  The rougher parts will come to light later…but I can see in that soul the things to come.  He was 7 at homecoming and had been in orphanage care for about 2 years prior.  DD is our almost 10 year old daughter who became part of our family on the same day.  She is a spitfire-drama queen, who can make you laugh until you roll.  She’s a very talented tumbler and highly competitive in all she does.  She and DS2 are not biologically related although they had met in Russia.  She was in the orphanage for 1 year prior to her adoption (a different orphanage than DS2…but same city).

For those that have adopted, you took classes.  You sat in those classes and took notes and hoped that some of the things WOULD happen and prayed that some of the things WOULD NOT happen.  We were just like you.  I remember the day(s) we drove to an office to hear about attachment.  To be honest, I don’t know if that is what the training was supposed to be on…but every adoptive parent should have that training.  We listened to the voices of grown adoptees talking about the fact they never felt a connection to their adoptive parents.  We listened to adoptive parent’s talk about raising a child who had no reaction to pain, no affinity towards them…would walk off with strangers and ask to live with them, would set fires and show nothing in response to that.  I can tell you that we left there and laughed at the notion that could happen to us.  Not for a second did we really consider that it could?  Those must be the stories from people who don’t know how to raise kids.  We were doing a good job with DS1…’those’ people were just not equipped to raise kids.  Since we knew we wanted to adopt older children, we assumed those people had really wanted babies and got ‘stuck’ with kids they couldn’t handle.

Oh the glory of a back story!  And, here we are:  we don’t have fire setters, but we do have self-harm.  We don’t have anyone hurting our animals, but we do have hurting each other.  We have the fun stuff that a lot of parents deal with:  lying, cheating, stealing, tantrums…however, for most kids, those things end at some arbitrary age.  Our AD kiddos are just getting started.  Like a fine wine, they get better at these things with age.  The other fun stuff that came packaged with our kids is anger, rage, violence, false reporting, running away, threats, physical violence…the list could go on and I’ll share some of these instances with you.

To be honest, I ignored all the red flags for about 2 years…kept thinking that it would get ‘normal’ and I felt totally alone.  That is why I started blogging and writing about our lives.  I didn’t know that anyone else felt like me.  I didn’t know that raising children could make you crazy – and not in the fun cartoon crazy way – but truthfully, crying on the floor, having no where to turn, crazy.  I pretended we were ok while the kids got sicker…I was NOT who they needed for a long time.  Now that I am working hard on attachment parenting and being who they need – it’s even harder on me.

We’ve taken some steps towards healing.  DS2 has told me he loves me without being asked (first time was when he’d been home 30 months).  DD just last night told me she admires me…well, she told Doc Green – but I heard it…I was there…I have proof in my heart that she thought of me positively if only for a moment!

Voni also blogs at http://www.kretzklan.blogspot.com/

The discussion is turning into a very interesting one about how do we tell if the problem is culture shock, grieving or an attachment issue and what we as parents can do to figure that out.

I know that I suffered a bit of culture shock upon arriving in Korea such as I am not used to taking my shoes off only to put on slippers or the fact that since Korean’s sleep on the floor, beds are not queen or king size unless you are in a hotel (and even then you can choose to stay in a hotel that has traditional Korean beds).

I remember reading about an American mother who read in her referral information that her baby loved bath time but when she gave the baby a bath the baby screamed constantly. She could not figure it out until one day the baby slid into a laying position and all the sudden the baby was happy, while it went against everything she had learned in all the parenting books and from other parents she then started bathing the baby on it’s back and bath time was a great hit at that point.

The same holds true with stomach sleeping, Korean mothers rotate how they put the babies down so that they have a well shaped head (to give their babies good fortune) meaning that they lay their babies on their stomachs and many Korean babies prefer sleeping on their stomachs (I know that Little Princess almost ALWAYS sleeps on her stomach). In America we have been told that our babies should never sleep on their stomachs as it could cause SIDS.

One mother described the difference in Korean and American parenting styles as “an overriding attitude that influences all of our actions/reactions to our children.” American parents tend to measure “progress” in terms of independence and milestones reached, Korean mothers (as the father tends to be gone to work and out of the picture most of the day) tend to focus on fostering complete dependence for the first two years to form the strongest and deepest emotional bond with their child possible, then start teaching them how to do things for themselves and that independence is fostered quickly, usually in less than a few years.

Some Korean mothers yell at their children and swat their hands away when they try to pick up their own food and feed themselves or show other signs of independence. In Korea, it is considered rude to eat with your fingers as well so children are not encouraged to eat with their fingers. Don’t get me wrong, Korean mothers do have milestones they would like to see their children reach in the first two years but those milestones are very different than those here in the United States – one such milestone is potty training. When discussing this with other Korean mothers I was told that potty training starts well before a child is a year old in Korea, if the child is potty trained before their first birthday it is believed that they will be very smart and learn quickly.

I look back and see how LONG it took my son to adjust and I realize that much of that is because I had no clue how to do it the way he was used to and I was trying to force my ways on him. My son HATES change and likes things to stay the way they always were, can you imagine how hard things were in the beginning for him? I am just now starting to see. (Just so you know my daughter is happy all the time and so she had no MAJOR issues with the change — issues just nothing major like her brother.)

I know that should we ever adopt again and should it be from any other culture I will also be researching the parenting values of that culture as well as all of the required reading, it would have helped greatly in our transition especially since I also had two children with two completely different personalities as well!

What would have helped you?

You can read about Carissa’s adventures in parenting over at Faith, Hope and Love