I was standing in line at the grocery store yesterday wondering why it was so crowded for a Tuesday evening. Ella was home with her brother, and after I explained her absence to the disappointed cashiers I questioned the chaos in the store. That is when I discovered that Thanksgiving is next week.

Next week? Where has time gone this month? It is already the middle of Adoption Awareness Month and I have not succeeded in getting anything written in our local newspaper about adoption. Not one to give up easily, I will send another email off tonight after I finish this... more

Dear Elizabeth,

I’ve just finished reading and rereading your article,"Did I Steal My Daughter?” I highlighted several of your statements and readied myself to begin a systematic and hopefully forceful rebuttal to your article. But then I think “I got it.”

This is not really an article about international adoption or concern about the legitimacy of your daughter’s adoption from Guatemala; this is an article about fear and insecurity - your personal fears and insecurities.

Being Jewish, I can’t help but make the analogy between you and self-hating Jews. Self-hating... more

Every time I take a vacation, I get new perspective on some aspect of my life. Something about getting away from the daily grind for a few days clears my mind.

Well, after our Labour Day trip to visit our older sons, a long weekend with the usual dose of cancelled or delayed flights, I arrived home with renewed energy and a goal. I decided that I would like Ella to grow up in a racially and ethnically diverse area.

It is not that I have felt any prejudice towards her; on the contrary, people are constantly telling me how cute she is. However as she... more

With the exception of my Thursday blog about Ella, last week I was the voice of doom. Of course I was keeping my readers up to date on the situation in Guatemala, but I was also ignoring the fact that wonderful things are happening simultaneously. All I needed to do was go searching on several Guatemalan adoption blogs to find them.

For example, people continue to make successful visit trips to Guatemala without incident. Smiling faces and hugs... more

This morning my husband and I bundled up Miss Ella and headed down to our optometrist’s office for our annual checkups. Ordinarily, I would not subject Ella to this kind of boring torture, but her babysitter was unavailable.

We had a rough night with Ella, and all of us looked rather weary. My optometrist was in a very bad mood and unpleasant to say the least. When my poor tired eyes had been prodded, examined, and dilated, I mentioned to the doctor that the last time I’d been in his office, we didn't have Ella home yet.

To make a... more

It seems that defending the integrity of Guatemalan adoptions is going to be a challenging aspect of being the parent of a Guatemalan born child. My mother was the first person to question me about the adoption process while I was waiting for Ella to come home. She opened her newspaper one morning to a scathing article about the corruption surrounding Guatemalan adoptions, and wanted to know if I knew about this.

I took a deep breath and told her that yes, there were unethical agencies and lawyers, but that was not the... more