Blog History

For a few years this blog address belonged to someone else. This blog was written by a troll who wanted to stop international adoption, or at least put an end to certain adoption charities and agencies. The person wrote post after post about certain adoptive families he or she would find online, criticizing those families for adopting these children from other countries and about their practices. The person sometimesposted personal information about these families.

To this day I do not know who this individual is. I have an idea that it must be a person who was adopted internationally and is bitter about their experience as an adoptee. It could also be an adoptive parent who is angry at their experience of adopting. Maybe they were matched with a child and were not able to adopt that child after all. They could have also brought a child home and the adoption did not work out. Whatever that person's situation is, that individual had a lot of bitter feelings. He or she thought that by putting other families down and working to shut down adoption charities and agencies, the person's frustrations could go away. None of that worked. The adoption charity that person criticized so much is still running all these years later. Those agencies are nearly all still working. With Russian adoption closing at the end of 2012, some agencies did close as a result, because much of their income came from Russian adoptions.

Some things that the troll and some other trolls complain about online:
1. Criticizing adoptive families for bringing home 2 or more unrelated children home at the same time.
There are many adoptive families who have taken 2 or more children home at once, often from the same orphanage, and they have successfully raised those children.
2. Criticizing adoptive families for using more than one charity to raise funds for their adoption.
That is the business of those charities to decide how they feel about that. It is also not cheap to bring childre home from overseas.
3. Criticizing adoptive families who disrupted their adoptions.
Nobody adopts a child to decide later on that they cannot raise that child after all. Sometimes things do happen that makes a family need to dissolve the adoption. That could be when the adopted child is abusive to other children in the home. Some children have RAD (Reactive Attachment Disorder) which makes bonding difficult. Whatever the reasons are, it is the business of the adoptive family and not anyone else.
4. Showing anger at families adopting children they hosted from Ukraine.
Ukraine does not allow holds on orphans before the adoptions go through court. That means that a family cannot choose a child to adopt before going to Ukraine to adopt the child and expect that the child will definitely be theirs. However, that does not mean that a family cannot have a child in mind before going to Ukraine. They just have to remember that the child could be adopted by another family first, or else go into foster care first. There have been many families who hosted Ukrainian children and later traveled to Eastern Europe to bring them home. There is nothing wrong with that at all.
5. Blaming families when their adopted child with special needs later died from their medical problems.
This former blog owner shamed families who had children die. There is nothing worse than having to bury a child. These families do send their kids to doctors and have had surgeries and treatments done on them. Sometimes the child's medical needs are too great and their body can no longer keep going. Unfortunately, the institutions where these children came from were places of abuse and neglect. Even though they get better treatment in their new countries, the neglect and malnutrition they dealt with before cannot be fully reversed.
6. Saying that some families have too many children at home.
That is for the family and social services to decide.
The truth is, that is none of that troll's business. That person obviously has a miserable existence. When all people can do is criticize other people, then they have low self-esteem. When we are hurt by other people and circumstances, we have to heal and move on. We can't keep trying to hurt other people in revenge. Often, it does not work anyway and we can hurt ourselves even more in the process.
I do hope this person has moved on, hopefully gotten some help, and is doing well now.

Latvia Adoption Closes

Unfortunately, Latvian adoption to the United States has closed. Latvia made it a rule to only approve international adoption to countries who have signed the Hague convention on international adoption and also the United Nations' Convention of the Rights of the Child. The United States is part of the Hague agreement, but has not signed the UN's convention. The United States should sign the agreement, as it is about children's rights. So far, the United States is the only UN countries that have not signed the agreement. I do hope the USA will sign that soon. For more information: https://www.unicef.org/child-rights-convention https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-child

Two Girls With Deafblindness

Here are two girls who are deafblind. They live in the same country. That means they have significant hearing and sight impairment. There are many resources for children who are deafblind today. Some schools for the deaf or schools for the blind have deafblind programs. There is even some school programs specifically for deafblind children, such as the program at the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts. Kendall and Penelope both have vision impairment as well as hearing issues. Both girls need families. Kendall and Penelope are older girls who are living in China.

https://reecesrainbow.org/childgrant/kendall

https://reecesrainbow.org/childgrant/penelope