Orphan Summitt

We met with our homestudy coordinator on Wednesday and he was wonderful. He and his wife adopted a three year old boy from Korea 30 years ago. He went over some orientation items, our safety check list for our home, and gave us more paperwork to fill out (he said he didn't send it all at once because then it's really overwhelming). We meet with him again on June 8th for our home safety study, he said we weren't being graded on how clean our house was, darn :).

On Friday I went to the Orphans Summitt VII at Southeast Christian. I went to two sessions on having a multi-racial family. It was wonderful! In the second session there were three adults who were adopted by white parents, 2 South Koreans and 1 biracial from Detriot. They gave great insight and I realized Mike and I are "very white" (a term they used) and we are going to have to help our little guy understand and embrace his race and ethnicity. They did an exercise with beads, each color representing a race, with each question you were to put a bead in your cup (your race, your husbands, kids, doctor, pediatrician, neighbor, boss at work, hairdresser, etc)... then you put your adopted childs race in the cup. I got a little choked up when I put the little guys in because he was the only non-white bead. We have got to do better and I'm going to need some advice on how to do this better. The picture of my cup is below, can you see his black bead in the center...

After the seminar I went to Mimi's Cafe to meet with other America World families and people that work at America World. The creator of the agency was there, it was neat to meet him, you see him in the intro video but meeting him and thanking him for what he's done means much more. About 40 were there including families and employees, it renews your paperchasing spirit to talk with others that are doing the same or have already been there.

On a non-adoption note Samuel ran his first 5K this Saturday and I ran with him. He did great and never walked once. We finished at 29:55, he finished two seconds before me because that is what moms do, he said all week he was going to beat me and he did.