Another Day

Based on the comments I received from my 'Sad' post yesterday, I want to clarify a couple pieces of information about the little boy in Guatemala who moved into the hogar yesterday.

If this little boy's foster family had the money or knew they would be receiving the money to continue caring for him, they most likely would have kept him. However, Guatemala is working on a pilot program that will hopefully be started soon. If the pilot program is successful, there will be about 200 children who will be adopted. It is my understanding that all of the 200 children being selected are older children, sibling groups, and/or children with special needs. This little boy would potentially qualify due to his developmental delays (which have been helped significantly with therapy), but he needs to be in a hogar to improve the chances of him being eligible for adoption. In addition to no working adoption system, Guatemala does not have a working foster care system in place. The fees paid by adoptive families was used to pay the foster mothers. Guatemala is a poor country with no social welfare system, thus no money to pay foster families to provide care for so many children.

The other point I should have made is that the family who legally became his parents went to visit him during the adoption process. They knew he had developmental delays early enough in the process that they could have backed out, but for whatever reason, allowed the adoption to continue to completion and then didn't go pick him up. I understand situations in which families discover during a pick up trip that their child has developmental delays and they don't feel they are able to adequately provide for the child. I will admit that for very personal reasons, I have a hard time understanding why someone wouldn't at least try to parent the child that legally became their child. I know I wasn't prepared at the age of 20 to discover that my biological child was not developmentally on track, but we don't know what we are capable of until we are put in a position of finding out just how strong we are as individuals. Of course that is probably a post for another time and one that would most certainly cause some people to quit reading my blog altogether :-)

Today, though, is another day. Maybe it will be the day we get word that we have a scheduled court date or maybe it won't. Maybe it will be the day that Guatemala announces more details about their pilot program, but probably not. One thing I know for sure is that today there are adoptive families receiving calls from their agencies announcing they have a child or children for them; there are families meeting their children for the first time; and there is at least one family who I'm sure is still dancing on cloud 9 from the news they received yesterday.

While I will continue to feel sadness about the little boy in Guatemala and about the children all over the world who long for and need a family, I will also feel great happiness for the families that are being formed today. Most of all I feel happy and blessed that Lili is now a Weeks, living under our roof and being loved more and more everyday. Today I will be happy that one day, Naomi will become a Weeks and will also be living under our roof and even while we wait is being loved more and more each day.