Search Results for: blog understanding the language of birth

Tips for Buying Nursing Bras

Your belly isn’t the only thing that expands during pregnancy. You’ll find that your bras will fit a little more snugly, too, if they fit at all. After your baby is born, when your milk comes in, is when the real changes happen. For example, you might start off as a 34B, grow to a 36C during your pregnancy, expand to a 36DD when your milk comes in, and return to a 36D cup once your milk supply is regulated. These constant changes in bust size make bra shopping tricky! Bras you buy during your last trimester may fit again … Continue reading →

Issues Illuminated in The Waiting Child

Last week I wrote about Cindy’s Champnella’s book The Waiting Child: How the Faith and Love of One Orphan Saved the Life of Another, which tells the incredible story of her four-year-old daughter’s campaign to find a family for a toddler she had been assigned to take care of at her orphanage. In addition to the central story of trying to bring their daughter’s ill-nourished “baby” to the U.S., the book also deals with many aspects of adoption: the “voluntary donation” fees paid to orphanages, the deprivation some children have experienced in the orphanages, fears and insecurities in older children, … Continue reading →

Adoption Books with Great Art: You Are Special, You Were Chosen

You Are Special; You Were Chosen is a sweet little book which grew out of the bedtime story that the author’s father read to her each night. Its soft, detailed colored pencil/pastel illustrations definitely qualify it for my Adoption Books with Great Art series. The lovely pictures show diverse children and families, including siblings of different races, which I really appreciate, as that is something I have a hard time finding. Books featuring a multiracial classroom are becoming common, as are books featuring families of color—but multiracial families are still difficult to find. I almost bought a book the other … Continue reading →

Book Review: Adoption is a Family Affair–What Family and Friends Must Know

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Prolific adoption writer Patricia Irwin Johnston is herself an adoptive parent of three. Her husband and sister-in-law were also adopted. Pat has been a writer, speaker, educator and advocate on adoption topics for nearly 20 years. While moderating an internet support group for waiting parents, she found many prospective adoptive parents reporting insensitive comments and myths about adoption that they were hearing from family members. Many waiting parents also noted that people didn’t seem to know what to say when they announced that they were adopting, and that before and after the baby arrived they didn’t have the traditional supportive … Continue reading →

Can You Breastfeed While You’re Pregnant?

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As I discovered yesterday on a thread in the forums, there is a lot of misinformation regarding whether or not you can breastfeed while you’re pregnant. Many doctors in fact tell their patients that you cannot breastfeed while you’re pregnant as it causes miscarriage. Some other misinformation also includes that breastfeeding during pregnancy can cause low birth weight babies. Finally, there’s always the idea that you won’t be able to make enough milk for the new baby and supply enough nutrients to the growing fetus. Since someone asked, I thought I’d take a closer look at each of these arguments … Continue reading →

Nurture by Nature – Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger

I don’t know about your children, but I know that what works for one of mine doesn’t necessarily work the others. And I rarely recognize my own children when I read parenting books. Nurture by Nature: Understand Your Child’s Personality Type—And Become a Better Parent is one parenting book where I not only caught glimmers of my own children, but found some helpful advice on raising their particular personality type. Personality Type was first devised by psychologist Carl Jung. The mother-daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers expanded on his ideas. According to Myers-Briggs, there are sixteen basic … Continue reading →

Book Review: Throwaway Daughter

I read this book with a mixture of fascination and horror. The author of Throwaway Daughter, Ting-Xing Le, lived through the Cultural Revolution in China and worked as a translator before defecting to the West. (Her life story is told in her memoir A Leaf in the Bitter Wind.) Throwaway Daughter, however, is a novel about a Chinese girl adopted to Canada who goes back to look for her Chinese family. The American Library Association listed it on its Best Books for Young Adults, but I would warn parents against giving this volume to children. Parents should read it first … Continue reading →

Sending Countries Reach Out to International Adoptees

Lately I’ve been thinking some thoughts which would be considered quite un-politically correct in the adoption world. They refer to efforts by sending countries to reach out to international adoptees. In the past, adoption has sometimes been a shameful thing. Unwed mothers are discriminated against in employment and socially; children are teased and discriminated against educationally. Yet women who relinquish children for adoption are condemned for “turning against their own flesh and blood”. I have met both immigrants and visitors who are surprised—shocked in fact–to learn that their home countries have fairly large and long-standing adoption programs sending children to … Continue reading →

Labor Day

I’ve observed that often every group of people imagines themselves to work harder than any other group. It might be husbands and wives, the so-called “mommy wars” between stay-at-home moms and working moms, kids who are jealous that their parents don’t have to study any more and parents who forget just how hard it is to be a kid sometimes. Sometimes it’s mothers who’ve adopted their children and mothers who’ve been pregnant and given birth to their children. I hear parents who’ve adopted their children bemoaning the paperwork, the many questions that sometimes feel intrusive, the lack of control, and … Continue reading →

Initiating Breastfeeding with the Breast Crawl

Did you know that if you place a newborn on his mother’s abdomen after birth, he is capable of finding her breast all on his own and initiating breastfeeding by himself? This act is known as the breast crawl and it is being heavily promoted during World Breastfeeding Week. All Babies Do This This phenomenon was first published in an organized study in 1998. Infants were dried off and then immediately placed on their mother’s abdomen with the baby’s head on mom’s chest. Every single infant was able to instinctively find his mother’s nipple and begin suckling. In subsequent studies, … Continue reading →