Out of the Mouths of Babes...

This morning Sara and Leah were playing "adoption". While Marc and I pretended not to eavesdrop, they carried their dolls around and talked of their baby's birth mothers who "couldn't take care of their babies anymore". They leaned over their doll stroller to adjust their babies' blankets and spoke of how sad it was for the birth mommies who were sick, but that they are happy to have the babies to take care of and they love them very much. It was a lovely moment, a treasured moment for Marc and I, who have been trying to help them to understand this long, stressful process and are never really sure how much they comprehend.

It amazes me how Sara and Leah are handling the journey of adoption. They speak of "our baby" daily. We'll be talking about eye colours. Daddy and Leah have brown eyes and Sara and Mommy have blue eyes, and Leah will ask "What colour will the baby's eyes be?" Or we'll be sitting at the table for supper. Everyone has their spot. And Sara will ask, "where will the baby sit?". Today when Leah and I were painting at the kitchen table, she decided to make a picture for everyone in her family. Daddy, Mommy, Sara, Leah, and Eowyn (our cat). Then she grinned and said "...and this one is for our little baby!" She let out a beautiful giggle.

Last week the girls and I went on an adventure. We took the city bus, a first for the girls, and went to the Stones and Bones museum downtown. We had a great time; there was so much there to see. Afterwards we decided to get a family membership. When they asked us the number of people in our family...I said five! Likely for most of the year, we WILL have five people in our family. Sara realized what I had done and we had a moment of excitement together.

Leah is happy because she will no longer be the littlest in the family. She walks carefully up to the dresser and puts her sippy cup up as high as she can. Then she looks at me very wisely and says, "so that my baby brother can't get it".

Once in Walmart, Leah told a stranger very solemnly that she was going to have a baby brother soon. The woman looked at my belly and raised her eyebrows questioningly at me and said, "are you sure?"...Leah said. "Yep, he's in Africa. Mommy and Daddy are going to get him and bring him home." The woman smiled and told Leah she'd make a great big sister. I agreed.

Sara has a friend who was adopted from Haiti a few years ago. This concrete introduction to adoption has definitely helped with her understanding. In fact, when Sara kept bugging us to "grow a baby brother in Mommy's tummy", we replied, well remember, that's not the only way to have a baby. Remember Samuel. Sara's eyes lit up and she said "yes let's do that!" I'll never forget how wonderful it was to hear our dream of adoption affirmed so emphatically by our child.

We hear from Sara's teacher that Sara talks about her baby brother at school sometimes. Especially whenever anything international comes up. And when we watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, we cheered for Canada, Holland and South Africa when they entered the arena. Sara loves our children's CD of South African music, Gift of the Tortoise and just this week was singing the Zulu confidently (Why do kids pick up languages so much easier than adults?)

The only struggle with adoption that Sara has shown came after her interview with our social worker. During our homestudy, our social worker wanted to talk with Sara about being a trans-racial family. How would it feel to have a brother who had brown skin instead of white. Sara had several friends with brown skin in her class at school and I don't think she'd ever really noticed. She definitely had not thought of it as an obstacle. Our social worker asked her how she would draw her family if one of them had brown skin. What colour crayon would she use? She asked Sara to draw a picture of our family with our baby for their next meeting. Sara freaked out. We had a week before the next meeting and Sara refused to draw the picture. She was worried that she'd do it wrong, that it wouldn't be good enough. In the end, I drew the picture instead while Sara watched and she coloured the background. She talked about the picture with our social worker and all was well.

It took a long time for Sara to feel comfortable again with colouring pictures. I coloured with her quite often and we chose all sorts of colours for people, green, purple, peach, brown, red, indigo just to take the pressure off a little. Then, when she started SK she began bringing pictures home with kids with all different skin tones again (no longer greens, purples). She seemed comfortable again. This past Christmas she made a beautiful card for us. A nativity scene with Joseph, Mary and baby Jesus coloured midnight black. It's absolutely beautiful!

Sara has also shown some hesitation to the adoption because she knows that Marc and I will be gone for a whole month to pick up our baby. She is excited by all the sleepovers she will have, but she has a better understanding than Leah does about time and she knows a month is a long time to not see her Mommy and Daddy. I must admit, I share Sara's feelings. My heart aches just thinking about it. We are both reassured, however, by things like postcards and Skype.

With our children, we wait for our third child. Leah hopes that he'll come soon, before we run out of our chocolate chip cookies. "Can we save one for him?" she asks. Denying all of our explanations that babies can't have cookies, she says, "Well I'll feed one to him!" It's so great to see our kids already falling in love with their little brother. They already look out for him, already protect him, already include him in their play.

But as Leah said at two in the morning the other night. "Mommy is our baby still in Africa?" "Yes", I replied. "It takes a long time Mommy."

Yes it does.