Last meeting with Margaret

We are really excited as we finished our last home study meeting with Margaret today. We went to Fredericton again to meet wth her in her home. We took some pictures so that we can put them in our children's life books so that they will remember that she played a big part in helping us bring them home.

In this last meeting, we discussed how we would help the children learn about their Ethiopian culture. We are learning and researching about the different food, clothes and traditions that exist in Ethiopia so taht we can share these with our children as they grow up. We are also currently learning the basics of the Ethiopian language, which is Amharic so that we may be able to communicate a little better when we travel to Ethiopia. We would also love for our children to know a little Amharic as well. We have also done a lot of research on how to be and raise a multi cultural family. There are so many intersting facts about that and well I really feel that Pierre and I are ready to be these parents who love unconditionally and that we will be able to teach our children that being proud of their birth culture is important. We know it will be a challenge sometimes to bring up black children in a white community, however we feel that we are ready to deal with the ups and downs of this type of adoption.

We also discussed with Marg different issues about parenting adopted children which the biggest onces are always understanding the loss, grieve and trauma that our children will have experienced in their small lives. We have been doing a lot of reading on these issues in order to better prepare ourselves to deal with the possible adjustement that could occur while growing up. These books help us understand how our children will feel and how to deal with those feelings. Adopted children usually feel a loss of not knowing their birth parents and families and in our case, they will most likely no longer have birth parents so it will help us in order to better help them through the hard times and to have a feel of what they are feeling even if could never really understand. We will always let our children know that their birth parents were special people that loved them very much and that they must always hold a special place in all of our hearts as they played a very important role in our lives and of how we became a family.

We feel that we will be able to raise them to be proud of who they are, where they came from and to be comfortable being themselves in our family. And with the friends and family that we have, we know that our children are already loved in so many ways, which is such a great feeling :)