To Taiwan With Love

We are getting ready to send Ryan another package this week (as pictured), including clothes, bibs, toys, and a “Who Loves Baby?” photo album with pictures of us and his future grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. He will probably enjoy teething on the photo album more than looking at the pictures, but since babies start to recognize faces around this age, maybe we will look slightly familiar to him when he meets us for the first time.


I keep thinking about how, in the first year of his life, Ryan will have had to transition between three different moms -– his birth mother, his foster mother, and soon, me (his “forever” mom!) -– and how that might affect a child, even at such a young age. We need to keep in mind that, while we have been waiting for Ryan all this time, he has not been waiting for us. He has probably become quite attached to his foster mother and feels secure in her care, so, although we will be loving parents who will take care of all his needs, we have to be aware that the adoption will be a disruption in his life. When we travel to Taiwan to bring him home, we will get to meet his his foster mother (who he has lived with since December), so we will take the opportunity to learn as much as we can from her about Ryan's daily routine while she cared for him -- things like his nap schedule, the type of formula and baby food he has been fed, what she does to soothe him when he cries. We hope that we will be able to ease this last transition for him by continuing as much as possible of what he has become familiar with.